I started Tuesday bright and early with a conference call with our advisors in San Francisco. As always, we had questions answered, but didn’t feel satisfied at the end of the call. But at least we got some answers.
We could only get one car to go into the field on Tuesday and since three wazungu (white people) are a crowd, I volunteered to go to the office and organize things for the rest of the week while Tanya and Jaclyn went to map cases. I won’t go into the boring details (mostly because I already can’t remember them) but the day flew by pretty quickly. By 3 pm I was pretty much done with what I needed to do so I headed home.
Our drinking water was completely empty so I decided to get a new jug then go down to the pier and swim in the high tide. When I opened the front door, I saw a swarm of ants trying to make their way inside! They were everywhere!! At first I thought they were carrying food from inside the house out into their home, but when Tanya and I looked closer, we realized that they were carrying ant larvae from under the porch into our house!! It was so disgusting. I tried to sweep them away with a broom but they just kept coming. Next I got my spray bottle of Deet and sprayed the hell out of them. That stuff really does the job; there were any bodies everywhere. Not wanting to use my entire bottle of Deet, I took the water jug and rode down the street to find some insect repellent and fresh drinking water. For $2 I got a large can of bug spray and when I got home I emptied about a third of it in every nook and cranny that had a hint of an ant. I hate ants. I would be an awful Buddhist.
Since all of that took about 45 min, I didn’t have time to go swimming and make dinner before the book club meeting that was at 7:30 so I just hung out for a bit then helped Tanya and Jaclyn cook dinner.
At 7:30 we rode our bikes down to Mbweni Ruins hotel (where the pier is) and met up with 10 other white women who have a moving library. After introductions, we went around in a circle and everyone gave a brief description of the books they had read recently. Then we went around again and everyone got to choose one book from their collection of 700+ books. We kept going around in a circle until everyone had taken all of the books they wanted. The organizer recorded our names and the book number so they can keep track of who has what so it really is like a library. The book club meets once a month on the second Tuesday so we have plenty of time to read our books. Since I have a Kindle with 30 books on it, I wasn’t planning on taking anything but they had a copy of a book I’ve been wanting to get so I checked that out and I’ll read it next. Tanya and Jaclyn both took 3 books each so now we have some good reading material in the house.
We rode home around 11 pm and it was very pleasant to ride at night with the cool breeze and little traffic. For the first time I wasn’t afraid for my life at every moment.
The three of us did some planning for the following day then talked about things in general so I didn’t get to bed until after 1 am, which is the latest I’ve stayed up since coming here.