this adventure. We had been planning this since April and finally
everything fell into place after exams finished at my school last
week. I left a hefty stack of papers to grade and on thursday morning
began the 5 hour trip to mombasa.
I met Jeff there and we grabbed some lunch and some ice cream. Yummm!
We began our search for an oil drum (55 gallon or 200 liter for this
project), since his previous efforts had proven fruitless. Our first
two also efforts proved fruitless and as we contemplated heading
towards a more questionable neighborhood, Jeff decided to ask a
passing auto-rickshaw (I still call them by their Indian name; old
habits die hard) driver if he knew a place to get an oil drum. "Oh,
sure. You want to go to the drums place." Then he proceeded to let us
know how to get there.
When we arrived, we marvelled at all the drums and work going on. A
man named Salim approached up and we began to negotiate the price. The
final bargain was that he would knock the price down to 1000 shillings
(about $12.50) if we could give him some advice on cook stoves. He
showed us the immense pile of sawdust he had accumulated and asked if
we knew anything about those sawdust stoves. Apparently I was
knowledgeable enough that he held up his end of the bargain. I told
him what I knew, which seemed to correspond with his experience in his
native Yemen. I actually hope to visit Salim again and discuss some
other topics. The conversation was all very interesting. I guess that
all depends on finding time to visit Mombasa again.
Anyway, after this, we began the onerous trek with our lovely blue
barrel back to Jeff's site an hour and a half south of Mombasa. We had
a bit of an issue with the price of transporting the barrel, but we
managed to haul it back to his place without too much fanfare. Jeff's
site is glorious and right on the ocean with abundant rainfall. We ate
supper with the family that he stays with and then got ready for bed
and talked about plans for the following day and life in general. We
crashed around midnight.
The morning began with a brisk shower, which was fantastic. The heat
was oppressive the whole day, and we made sure to talk to lots of
people as we went about our business. The primary objective of the day
was to prepare the drum by cutting holes to allow air flow and finding
a cover. After researching the metal workers in town and haggling the
price, we got the work done. We also grabbed some dried makuti
(coconut fronds that are commonly dried for roofing materials) to use
for our burn. With all the heat, we decided that we had earned a
respite, so we traveled to a tourist hub to figure out how to get the
coconut husks for the following day. The real purpose of the trip was
to get some eats. I opted for a cheeseburger, fries and a coke. It had
been a while.
Then we travelled back to Jeff's site to relax since jeff was feeling
a bit under the weather. I fear that I slowed us a bit, which was
probably a bit unpleasant for him. I ate with the family while Jeff
rested that evening, but as we got ready to crash, we discovered that
neither of up was tired, so we waxed philosophical until 1 AM.
The next day, we wanted to collect the coconut shells (vifuvu)
discreetly so that we could do a small burn to work the kinks out
before making this a community activity. The negotiating process was a
bit high strung, but we got our supplies and put them out in the sun
so that chickens could clean them and the sun could dry them. We
relaxed a bit before the big event. At this point, I confessed to Jeff
that I think that I have only made charcoal about 6 times before
including 2 colossal failures (he was present for that one) and I had
never done it with coconut. I think with the amount that I discuss it,
people assume that I have done this dozens of times. Still, I felt
confident that we could pull it off.
Keep reading the next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment