My hands are beginning to look ROUGH. It's because I've actually been using them...
... mainly in my household chores. They are numerous, despite the fact that my apartment is just a 12x12ft room with a small bathroom attached. To begin with, there's laundry to do, and hand-washing is the name of the game. Once a week I sit in my bathroom with a plastic bucket in front of me and I scrub clothes for a good hour-and-a-half. When I wash my jeans, bedsheets, and bath towel in particular, I feel as though I'm wrestling with some big guy. Every time I challenge him to a match he resists being beaten down, wrung out, and hung out to dry, and usually gets the upper hand over my weakened, aching muscles. And the detergent. It burns! My knuckles have bruises from that detergent; the white powder sizzles the already-raw skin on my fingers and it continues to burn hours after I've finished doing my laundry.
... mainly in my household chores. They are numerous, despite the fact that my apartment is just a 12x12ft room with a small bathroom attached. To begin with, there's laundry to do, and hand-washing is the name of the game. Once a week I sit in my bathroom with a plastic bucket in front of me and I scrub clothes for a good hour-and-a-half. When I wash my jeans, bedsheets, and bath towel in particular, I feel as though I'm wrestling with some big guy. Every time I challenge him to a match he resists being beaten down, wrung out, and hung out to dry, and usually gets the upper hand over my weakened, aching muscles. And the detergent. It burns! My knuckles have bruises from that detergent; the white powder sizzles the already-raw skin on my fingers and it continues to burn hours after I've finished doing my laundry.
My apartment complexDo I complain about hand-washing my wardrobe every week? No, not at all. Instead I've developed an appreciation for the effort that goes into a seemingly simple task. I've always taken doing laundry for granted back home where everyone lives by their machine washers and dryers without a second thought. In particular, I've come to admire the Kenyan women who I've seen sitting on the street corners of Nairobi, waiting for cars to pull over and hire them to do washing or other house-holds chores for just a few Kenyan shillings.
But of course there's also cooking, a much more enjoyable endeavor! Ugali, Chapatis, Egg Chapatis, Rice Pilau, Vegetable Stew, Fried Rice, Ndengu (aka lentil stew), sauces, relishes, mashed banana dishes... when it comes to Kenyan food, I've tried many things. Yet I admit I have not yet mastered the art of making chapatis. A "chapati" is basically just flat bread fried in oil and eaten with Ndengu or other kinds of stew. Yet during the mixing process, the chapati dough must be exactly the right consistency with enough oil added so that the bread doesn't become dry and brittle, but remains soft and flexible. Then the rolling requires artful skill and attention. The chapati is useless, according to a Kenyan friend of mine, if it is not rolled in a perfect circle with just the right thickness. I'm glad that friend wasn't around the last time I tried making Chapatis because it turned out to be a fiasco. My little kitchenette in the apartment looked like a war-torn disaster zone, and I even got a battle scar, burning my forearm on the hot frying pan as I tried desperately to role a perfect chapati circle! But I'm fine. Just learning, I suppose. Next time will be better, but I think I'll wait a few days and let my burn heal before I attempt making chapatis again.
Cooking and doing laundry are of course essential tasks for me here. Yet they have both become increasingly difficult to accomplish due to the water shortages I've been experiencing in my home. With the country currently facing a severe drought, water rationing has become a normal part of every day life. Some days, maybe even two or three days in a row, I wake up in the morning to find that there is no water in the pipes. In these cases I resort to my water storage tank, graciously supplied to me by my OAIC office even though it was expensive. When using it I carefully measure how much water I fetch in the bucket to wash my dishes, take a bath, or do my laundry. I've come to realize the amount of water I've been wasting back home in my comfortable, yet somewhat irresponsible, American lifestyle. Other mornings I wake to water gushing out of the faucet. Those are the days I rejoice and cherish a hot shower right away before the water vanishes again unexpectedly. I can only imagine what this water shortage situation looks like in Nairobi's slum communities such as Kiambio or Kibera, and elsewhere around Kenya, where entire families do not have the luxury of a nice water storage tank sitting right outside their door...
So even though my hands are becoming rougher every day, for me it means that I am adjusting to a new lifestyle here in Kenya. I shake hands with people whose palms are rougher than my own, acknowledging the strength and capability required for various aspects of Kenyan life, and I aspire to it!
Cooking and doing laundry are of course essential tasks for me here. Yet they have both become increasingly difficult to accomplish due to the water shortages I've been experiencing in my home. With the country currently facing a severe drought, water rationing has become a normal part of every day life. Some days, maybe even two or three days in a row, I wake up in the morning to find that there is no water in the pipes. In these cases I resort to my water storage tank, graciously supplied to me by my OAIC office even though it was expensive. When using it I carefully measure how much water I fetch in the bucket to wash my dishes, take a bath, or do my laundry. I've come to realize the amount of water I've been wasting back home in my comfortable, yet somewhat irresponsible, American lifestyle. Other mornings I wake to water gushing out of the faucet. Those are the days I rejoice and cherish a hot shower right away before the water vanishes again unexpectedly. I can only imagine what this water shortage situation looks like in Nairobi's slum communities such as Kiambio or Kibera, and elsewhere around Kenya, where entire families do not have the luxury of a nice water storage tank sitting right outside their door...
So even though my hands are becoming rougher every day, for me it means that I am adjusting to a new lifestyle here in Kenya. I shake hands with people whose palms are rougher than my own, acknowledging the strength and capability required for various aspects of Kenyan life, and I aspire to it!
Some interesting photos from these past few weeks:
Several cows riding in the back of a small pick-up truck, Downtown Nairobi.
The graduation ceremony for Daniel (center), a co-worker of mine from OAIC. Also pictured: Daniel's family&friends, and John Padwick, a British expatriate and one of my supervisors at OAIC.
At the Animal Orphanage, Nairobi National Park.
Uhuru Park, Downtown Nairobi.
Ethiopian Food. It may look unappetizing here, but the taste is fantastic.
Great entry, Mara! I read it with interest this morning after arriving back in Budapest after a 7 hour night-time drive from Romania with Eva. I was never so glad to get out of a country as I was when we crossed the border back into Hungary! The pollution, crowding, crazy drivers on the streets, and discrimination by the Romanian government against the Hungarian ethnic minority in Transylvania makes kind of a toxic brew of negativity and stress that I wanted to escape. Lucky me, that I don't live there and that I have the option to get out and go live somewhere else! I am glad to hear you are developing a new perspective on the things, like laundry and cooking, that take a lot of effort in a place like Kenya or Romania, and that you once took for granted, like your sister still does!
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