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afreakforjc
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Name: anDrew
Gender: Male
Interests: Currently I'm interested in not becoming jaded, embittered and generally dissatisfied with my life as an surgical resident. Many times I fail. Once in awhile, I appear marginally compassionate. Oh, the heights I've fallen.
Expertise: Discharge summaries, electrolyte replacement.
Occupation: Scut-recipient
Industry: Medical
Message: message me
AIM:  jcfreakout
Member Since:
7/16/2006
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| The toilet in my house is similar to a Western toilet. It's plastic,
not porcelain, but it's got the water tank, the toilet bowl, and a
flimsy toilet seat. The tank and bowl are completely separate,
connected by a 4-inch curved pipe through which the water flows when
the toilet handle is pressed down.
I have no huge complaints about my toilet -- I mean, better a flushing
toilet than a non-flushing one. I'm really rather lucky. The nationals
who live on station dont' have flush toilets. They go to the bathroom
in small concrete latrines, which consist of nothing more than a door,
a hole, and a pit.
There is one thing that does occasionally irk me: the toilet's
flushing power isn't too strong. I'm not sure why it isn't, but when I
press the handle down, not everything in the toilet bowl goes down.
Toilet paper, crushed insects, and, of course, poop might just swirl
around in a half-hearted attempt to drown themselves, but when all is
said and done, they still float in the toilet bowl water, unfazed by
my attempt to vanquish them.
The other problem is that it takes an inordinately long time for the
toilet tank to refill with water. Thus, instead of waiting five
minutes for the toilet tank to refill and allow another opportunity to
annihilate my refuse, I often will leave the bathroom temporarily to
do something else with all good intention of returning for my repeated
attempt at watery victory. But, as happens, I usually forget about the
toilet issue until, several hours later during another visit to my
flush-challenged toilet, I rediscover the soggy leftovers from my
previous call.
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| On a recent trip to the Nakumatt supermarket in Eldoret, I saw popcorn. I got so excited, I bought two 1-kilogram packages and brought them home. I love popcorn. I eat tons of it, especially when I'm home visiting my parents.
Then I realized that, unlike my parents, I don't have an air-popper for popcorn. (My mom was kind of funny when my brother and I were growing up. She would pop us popcorn in an air-popper, without any oil, butter, or salt, and we ate it plain as such. My popcorn never had anything added to it. Thus, to this day, I don't like having butter or salt in my popcorn, and I never buy the popcorn at movie theaters. The air-popper my parents own is the same one I used as a small kid; perhaps one of the best loved and most used appliances in the family kitchen.)
I later looked for an air-popper in Eldoret, and I could only find one for about $40. Much too expensive.
I asked Christina how she popped her popcorn in a pot on the stove. She told to add some oil, cover the bottom of the pot with popcorn kernels, and shake the pot gently while keeping it covered over a gas flame. I tried this, and ended up with nothing but burned kernels in the bottom of a blackened, sooty pot.
I tried again, this time using slightly more oil. About 25% of the kernels popped, but they popped rather half-heartedly. The other 75% of the kernels ended up being like small bits of edible charcoal.
My bungalow began filling up with smoke as the charcoal kernels continued to disintegrate into a fine, black powder in my misguided and prolonged attempted to coax more of the kernels into their forced fluffy state.
Several days later, Bill showed me his technique. It involved much more oil and a smaller stove flame than I expected. His popping rate was well over 90%, and his popcorn was nice and light and fluffy and big.
I've now been able to make one batch of fluffy white popcorn, albeit with a slightly oily aftertaste. Cooking popcorn, like cooking rice, is something I've never done before without a dedicated appliance for the job. I'm able to do it now on a stove with a pot -- but it'll never taste quite as good, I don't think.
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| I'm pretty sure that, growing up in Oregon, I used to call soft drinks "pop." However, when I went to college on the east coast, I was so mocked for my use of the word "pop" that I started conforming and saying "soda." This trend continued when moving to California.
I guess it worked out in the end. The Kiswahili word for soda is -- well, soda. That's one less vocabulary word I have to learn.
All the soda here is from Coca-Cola. It's fairly easy to obtain Coke, Sprite, and orange Fanta. There are also some other Coca-Cola branded soda that I wasn't familiar when I first arrived, like Stoney Tangawizi (a sort of ginger beer) and Krest Bitter Lemon (a tart, carbonated lemonade, my current favorite).
I always have a crate of twenty-four soda bottles in my house to offer as a drink to any guests that come. I offered one to Ednah the other day. After protesting, she acquiesed and accepted a soda -- but she didn't want the one from the fridge.
"Ah, no, no! Warm Coke, asante."
Warm? Who would ever want a warm soda?
I noticed this again when I ate at a Kenyan restaurant and ordered a Stoney. The waiter asked me, "Warm or cold?"
As it turns out, many if not most Kenyans prefer a warm soda (which isn't really warm, per se, but not refridgerated, i.e., room temperature -- which, given the equatorial location of Kenya, could actually be quite warm). I'm not sure why this is, except perhaps refridgeration is simply not that common and thus people aren't used to -- or even enjoy -- drinking cold liquids. | | |
| For quite some time, the theatre staff have been teasing me kupata mrembo mkenya -- that is, I need to find myself a Kenyan girlfriend. A beautiful one, specifically.
"Aiyayaya, no, no, no, no," James told me. "Unajua, Kenyans, they're not so pretty."
I found this somewhat surprising to hear from someone who not only was a Kenyan himself, but who -- just three weeks previously -- had become engaged to his long-term girlfriend (who, to be sure, is also Kenyan).
"Kenyans, si mrembo, not so pretty. You know, Kenyans, they have big everything, yeah? Big nose! Big lips! Big heads! And so dark!"
I asked James what sort of African he admired physically.
"Comoros," he said unhesitantingly. "And Seychelles. Wow! Those islands, whoa! Wow! So pretty! And, you know, on the actual continent itself: Ethiopians. They're so nice looking! Tall and beautiful and light-skinned. Wowz!"
I decided to not ask James what he thought of his own fiancee (who, for the record, is a very pretty Kenyan girl who just graduated from medical school).
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The work on the theatre project continues. When it's done, it'll be
two stories high and 10,000 square feet, the biggest building on the
campus.
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