Journal #2: Self-sufficiency or How to Cook, Clean and Fix Things in Rural Kenya

Salama from Wundanyi,

In university, a friend of mine had a poster on his wall on which it was printed: "A human being should be able to cook an egg, solve an equation, conn a ship, write an essay, mend a button, fix an engine, grow a garden..." I thought it a particularly inspiring quote, and certainly less trite than most motivational sayings.

Over the last two weeks, I've come to understand many of my shortcomings as far as those life skills go. It's an odd mixture of pride and pain, facing up to my ignorance of developing world household chores and learning to perform them.

As an aid to those who will jump the development gap in the future, I record here the tricks-of-the-trade for many simple household tasks.

Mending Mosquito Nets

The mosquito net over my bed had many holes, and was clearly not going to offer much protection. I examined it closely and found areas where previous holes had been sewn tightly closed. I looked at my sewing kit, then pulled out the duct tape.

I can't claim that duct tape application was much of a learning experience, but it got me into the right frame of mind for the next set of challenges, and added further evidence for the universal usefulness of duct tape.

"Duct Tape is like the Force. It has a light side and a dark side and it holds the universe together."

Washing Dishes

Yes, I have washed dishes by hand before, every summer for the last five years, in fact. So I didn't expect any difficulties, but there I was, scrubbing for five minutes and the first pot still wasn't clean. I suspected that the solid dish soap left behind by the last occupant of the house was the problem and resolved to dig out the small bottle of liquid soap I had brought for hiking.

The next evening, faced with an even larger number of dishes, I found the liquid soap equally useless. I had soaked the dishes, I had used a scrub pad, I had even resorted to scraping the worst parts with a spoon, but the washing was still taking much longer than it had in Canada.

That evening as I was attempting to scrub the soap off my body in the cold shower it occurred to me that perhaps hot water might help. So the next day I boiled up a pot and carefully poured hot water onto each dish.

Ouch. The dishes heated up until I couldn't hold them, the water splashed on and burnt my hands and the sponge I was using soaked up the hot water and I had to put it down every few seconds. The food remnants were lifting off the dishes a lot more quickly, but since I was spending half my time cooling off my hands, the dishes weren't getting done any faster.

The next day I bought two big plastic bowls, boiled my water, put most of it and some soap in one bowl, and the rest in the other. I was able to do all the dishes before the water cooled and managed to prevent most of the burns. Mission Accomplished.

Ugali

The Kiswahili (1) word for maize is ugali, and it is the staple food in this part of Kenya, often eaten as a complete breakfast. To prepare it, I had read, one simply added maize to boiling water and stirred. I tried this method and came out with a very lumpy, not-altogether-pleasant tasting, slightly burned mixture.

The next morning I tried adding the ugali flour to the water slowly, stirring all the while. The results were much better, though the taste was still lacking. Experimenting with different additives led to several good combinations: ugali and peanut butter, ugali and brown sugar and ugali and bananas.

Splash Bathing

Getting myself clean was giving me similar problems to cleaning my dishes, and I was wondering what exactly the two huge bowls in the shower were for. Having pointed them out to you, it is of course immediately obvious, but remember that there is no cleaning closet in my house, and the cement floored shower seemed like the best place to keep cleaning basins for washing floors or soaking stained clothing.

As I stared at the wash-basins/bowls, trying to convince myself to once again step under the cold trickle of water from the showerhead, it dawned on me that perhaps they were part of a hot water bathing scheme. All of a sudden another piece of the puzzle fell into place. The little cup on the edge of the shower wasn't a misplaced tooth-brushing aid, but rather a scoop for splashing water from the bucket onto myself.

The little mental realignment, from being frustrated that the wash basins were taking up my shower space, to being able to wash with hot water, gave me such a sense of fulfillment. Maybe I was finally starting to understand how life here works.

Kidney Beans

Canned vegetables are hard to come by here. There are quite a few fresh ones available at the roadside stalls though: pineapples, tomatoes, green peppers, cassava root, sukuma wiki (a relative of spinach), potatoes, onions and avocado, among others. Fresh vegetables are much better than canned ones, and as long as they can be peeled or cooked they are safe to eat. Beans, however, are only sold dried, though in astonishing variety from large wicker hampers on market days.

I bought a large bag of kidney beans and went home to soak them. Closer examination showed that my purchase came with a bonus offer of dirt, grass, twigs and pebbles. After five rinses, the beans seemed clean and I left them overnight.

Tomatoes and onions, fried up in chili powder gave a very nice taste to the beans, but the pebbles contributed the most exciting part of the texture. A few of them had managed to get through my rinsing process, and hide in the chili. I quickly learned to bite down gently and stop when I felt something solid.

I have since tried different methods of bean cleaning, and have discovered that by pouring half handfuls of beans into a dish, sorting out the debris then pouring the beans into the soaking bowl I can remove the pebbles with certainty. Unfortunately, this is a time consuming process.

There is also the float method, where you pour half handfuls of beans gently into a bowl of water and skim the floating ones off the top. Then you only need to examine the sinkers for rocks. Much faster, but not quite as consistently successful as the sorting method.

There is in Kenya a type of black rock with a surprising property: it floats. I guess that the very rough surface of the rock allows it to trap air bubbles that keep the small pebbles afloat and, unfortunately, in my food. The good news is that this type of black rock is not as solid as the quartz that also inhabits the beans, and can be crunched between your teeth safely though unpleasantly.

Light bulbs

In last week's journal I complained that half the light bulbs in my house weren't working, and this week I decided to do something about it. Having checked that the current bulbs were all 75 watts, I went to the hardware store and bought a couple.

When I opened the box, I found the familiar glass sphere attached a rather unfamiliar looking metal part with two small knobs rather than the threads that we're used to in Canada. My first thought was that I had purchased the wrong kind of bulb. Then it occurred to me that it was entirely possible for Kenyan light fixtures to be different from Canadian ones, and perhaps it was my expectation, not the bulb, that was wrong.

So I pulled over a chair, climbed up, grabbed the bulb and twisted. It responded by bathing the room in light. I let go in surprise, and the room went dark. I tried again with the same results. Apparently the "two knob" system doesn't hold bulbs in contact with the fixture as well as the threaded system. With some fiddling I finally managed to get the bulb to stay lit. The next bulb was exactly the same, except that a piece of paper had been wedged into the fixture to hold the bulb in place. A non-fire-marshall-approved practice, I imagine, but with a little fiddling the bulb turned on, and no smoke issued from the paper.

Eventually, I managed to get all the bulbs working, without having to replace a single one. "If it's broke, fiddle with it before you fix it" seems to be a good rule of thumb for Kenya household maintenance. But it's comforting to know that if any of the bulbs actually burn out, I've got two spares to exchange them with.

Pasteurising Milk

The question in last week's journal brought a number of answers, from the very precise "Bring to 72 degrees Celsius for 16 seconds, then cool rapidly" to "bring to a boil then remove from heat". I'm pleased to report that I am now adept at knowing exactly when to remove the pot lid in order to boil the milk without having it erupt onto the stove. And I haven't caught mad cow disease yet.

Hand Washing Clothes

I have washed the odd piece of clothing by hand, and I'm familiar with the soaping, rubbing and rinsing processes. Tedium was certainly part of my expectation for the task. But total and utter discouragement wasn't what I had bargained for.

I probably shouldn't have chosen a late night after a long day for my first effort, but I needed clean clothes. So I boiled some water, split it into two bowls, added detergent and just enough cold water for a bearable temperature to one then threw in the first pair of pants.

Now I have to confess (come clean, for those of you given to enjoying bad puns) that I haven't really washed clothing by hand before. What I've done is washed stains out of clothing before throwing the clothes into the washing machine. I now understand that there is a difference. Rubbing soap into a few spots, and trying to rub clean every single inch of a pair of pants are tasks on a different scale. It's a bit like the difference between frying yourself an egg and cooking a five-course meal to serve eight.

The first pair of pants took twenty minutes. I was glassy-eyed by the end of the second. When I moved the third pair to the rinse bucket I realised that all of the soapy water had been soaked up by the clothes and transferred to the rinse bucket. Frustration. Heating more water meant spending at least another ten minutes and it was already well after 10pm.

I pushed the buckets into the spare room and went to bed.

The next evening I gathered the laundry with renewed energy, this time carefully ringing each article of clothing into the soapy bucket before transferring it to the rinsing bucket. I managed to finish an entire load of whites, before the blisters became too painful to continue. The force of the twisting clothes being rung dry had rubbed and rubbed and rubbed until the top layer of skin had separated from those below it.

But the whites were clean and hanging to dry, so I went to bed satisfied that my efforts had not been in vain, and that with a bit more practice I would develop the necessary calluses to do both whites and colours in the same evening.

Chapatis

Having mastered ugali, I decide to try my hand at chapatis. I got an easy recipe, mixed the dough and rolled it out. My rolling pin is a cylinder of wood, tapered from the centre to the ends. The tapering caused the chapatis to not roll out evenly and required lots of tilting and extra pressure to get the dough to the right thinness. Even then, the chapatis weren't exactly round, and had a bad habit of sticking to the rolling board, even though it was well floured and the dough had just enough water to stick together.

Chapatis are fried, not baked, and they fry very quickly. Between the difficulty in rolling them out and their habit of sticking to the rolling board, I was leaving the pan without a chapati about half of the time. This waste of propane didn't appeal to my environmentally conservative side, and I resolved to buy a proper rolling pin to speed up the process.

The result of my first effort was a fair bit stiffer than the chapatis available at an Indian restaurant near you, but they tasted good, and could be pulled apart in layers like real chapatis, so I was pleased with my success.

I couldn't find a rolling pin in any of the stores, so I used the same weirdly tapered one for my second effort. As I was rolling the dough, I realised that by putting more pressure on one side of the pin, I could get half of it in contact with the chapati, a significant improvement. Then I noticed that this method slightly rotated the chapati with each stroke, preventing it from sticking to the rolling board, and promoting an almost perfect roundness. The chapati also traveled towards me with each stroke, but once it got to the edge of the board, I could put more pressure on the other side of the pin and roll away from my body to move it back to the center.

In one eureka instant, the problems of roundness, sticking and uniform thickness had all been solved. The tapered rolling pin now not only made sense, but became an ingenious idea. I wonder how many other little tricks I 'm missing.

Lighting the oven

Amidst all the successes, I have had one consistent defeat. My oven refuses to light.

It's a propane oven and at the bottom is a little hole surrounded by burnt matches. I assume that turning on the gas and putting a match through the hole should light the oven, but despite being able to hear the gas hissing away I can't seem to get anything to light.

It true that I'm not very brave about letting the gas accumulate, and haven' t let it run for more than thirty seconds. So the question for this journal is "How do you light a propane oven?", and no, there's no self-ignition button, I've checked.

Potential visitors shouldn't be scared off by this journal entry. I promise not to laugh at you for making the same mistakes I made. And if you make new mistakes, all the better. We might discover the reasons behind another ingenious tool of rural Kenyan life.

(1) "ki" is the prefix indicating "language of" so Kiswahili is the language of the Swahili people, while Kitaita is the language of the Taita people.

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