The Surprise Birthday

In the evening we had a surprise party for Owen. Our Program Coordinator had fabricated a ‘host home meeting’ with Owen and his counterpart to get them out of the house beforehand. When they finally came back, walked through the door, we turned on the lights and shouted ‘surprise!’ and I could tell from the flash of terror that momentarily crossed Owen’s face that we had indeed surprised him very much. There were balloons decorating the room and a high table with a beautiful pearl embellished table cloth, which I later learnt had once been his host mum’s wedding dress. We had fizzy drinks, gizzards (which I accept is chicken and asked no more), and an iced cake that had cost us almost £20 in English money. We played games and danced (except me because I have given up dancing). Recounting this makes it sound like a scene out of an Enid Blighton book. It didn’t feel that way at the time, but if I’m honest, perhaps it should have.

Making friends in Ghana

As has already been noted, I've been feeling quite lonely in Ghana. One of my solutions to this was to go for a walk and make friends with the people I bumped into.

One of the people I met was 'the lady at the bottom of the hill'. The first time we said hello, and the second time I invited myself in (the semi-detached is not the posh type, there are no fences keeping me off the square of mud outside the house that I’m going to call a yard) and asked to have a closer look at what she was doing. The truth was that I was bored and had time to kill, but for all the difference it makes, I was also genuinely interested because it had something to do with food. I watched and learnt as she showed me how she mashed plantain with banana with her hands (explaining kindly that I could also use a blender for this part if I preferred) then she mixed in some wheat flour and deep fried it in a vat of boiling oil that was next to her. She was making two types of things (and I can’t remember what either of them were called, however I did learn the word for delicious, which I retained instead: “Daveve”) the other one was similar but had egg in it and the four that was poured in was corn flour mixed with some spices. When I tried it, I can vouch for the fact that it certainly was, never before has a cakey thing been so very spicy! She vacated her chair and invited me in, but I’m sad to say that by this point, I no longer had time to kill and had to hurry off, but as I did so I was given a bag of deep fried cakey-things (her better selling variety too) all for free and promised that I would come back. I haven’t fulfilled this promise yet, and I should have, but I will go back and cook a batch for her. I hope benefiting from some close supervision.

It just goes to show, you can't make generalisations - not everyone is unfriendly!

Too much of a good thing will give you flu

Applying for a Ghanaian visa has made me ill. Well, indirectly at least. The trouble is that they require me to travel all the way to London in order to submit a print out of the application form that I filled in on their website along with my passport. (There is an option to do this by post, but after seeing the level of organisation present in the Ugandan embassy I wanted to supervise the whereabouts of my important documents in person as much as possible). After travelling all the way to town, it would seem a bit rude to go home again and neglect the many wonderful people I happen to know are living there. Particularly considering that (by virtue of being granted a visa to Ghana) I know I won’t now be available to see them again for at least 3 months – that kind of ultimatum focuses the mind! As such, in the duration of 4 days I have been delighted to see old uni housemates, ex colleagues, current colleagues, a school friend, the sailing community, friends from Kenya, and Londoners from when I was a Londoner. It’s been intense!
Luckily for me (and my limited budget), I am now very easily pleased. Freshly returned from Uganda all I really want in life is to sit on a sofa with a cup of tea, talk to a friend and to go on walks. This begs the question though, how much of a good thing is too much? I have shin splints from all these relaxing walks! I veritably hobbled home from the station at the end of it all. I actually had to take a rest and sit down on someone’s garden wall. The trouble is that if you burn the candle at both ends, ever so occasionally the whole candle gets too hot and melts. Before I left London I sprawled on the sofa with the wonderful friends who hosted me, all of us wrapped in scarves, croaking, eating ice cream and oranges. If Ghana's high commissioner could see me now, he probably wouldn’t let me in!

The Kenyan Wedding

Yesterday my good friend Jane got married to John (usually known by his surname, Miano). Both of them are Volunteers. Jane is from the Isle of Lewis in Scotland and Miano is from Nairobi. This pairing caused much excitement locally and I don’t think Njoro has ever seen anything like it. I was even stopped beforehand by locals who intercepted me on my way to the dairy to ask me about it. In these rural parts, they couldn’t believe that a white woman would marry a Kenyan.

To be honest they were right to be skeptical (not that I told them so) as the whole thing was an elaborate hoax. The couple, while good friends, were not really getting married.

Jane didn’t fly to Kenya with a wedding dress but she’s been to Nakuru this week and amazingly managed to get one for 100/= (which is less than 1 pound)!!!

She was to have 3 bridesmaids: her Kenyan counterpart (Mercy), the other female in her working group (Georgina) and me. 

I went over to Jane's house on the morning, carrying 20 hot chapattis in a plastic bag as a contribution to the wedding feast. Jane was very nervous, ironing her dress, and wondering why on earth she’d agreed to the whole thing. One of her main worries was that her parents, (who are a bit cautious about  Jane's adventures, having never left the UK), weren’t convinced that the wedding wasn’t real – they seemed to think that Jane was being hoodwinked into a union that she didn’t intend to make. It’s not easy having such unhappy parents on your wedding day. Luckily they were very safely on the other side of the world and so not in a position to intervene and had to limit themselves to distressing their daughter over text.

Once we were all dressed up and ready to go the Kenyan girls arrived and started getting ready. I was quite surprised by this. It’s the bride that’s meant to be late to the wedding, not the guests. It turned out that they’d been readying the venue all morning, they just hadn’t told us (otherwise we’d probably have been there to help). The other surprising thing was that they proceeded to put on nice dresses in shades of black and white. This is so obviously inappropriate in the UK that it barely needs saying. Luckily the maid of honour had been tipped off in advance and so was wearing blue. It's the opportunity to learn about these cultural differences that makes the whole thing fun!

We had quite a bit of time while waiting for everyone to get ready and so I popped out to visit one of my entrepreneurs, bedecked in full finery and low heals (which is significant when you consider the uneven road terrain), to get a mandazi for the bride. Joshua had sent me a text message to say he’d done a batch of coffee flavoured ones that morning and Jane is particularly partial to his creations so it seemed like the right thing to do. She is probably the only bride ever to be sat on a sofa in a wedding dress munching on a mandazi while waiting for her girls to get dressed.

When everyone was ready we walked to the wedding venue, leaving just Jane and her maid of honour behind. Despite the fact that the venue was about 2 mins away on foot, they were waiting for the car to pick them up, in traditional fashion.

The trouble was that certain details of the wedding hadn’t been organised yet, particularly who would be where, when. The other problem was that half our wedding guests were volunteers in Nakuru town along with the wedding cake. Unfortunately the president was visiting Nakuru to celebrate the fact that the vice president had been acquitted of the charge of inciting the post election violence and all the roads had been shut as a safety precaution, preventing them from coming. By 12noon, the wedding was 2 hours late, the guests had arrived, I was quite bored and had been teaching ‘I’m sorry I haven’t a clue’ games to the children. At long last I set off on foot to collect the bride.

At the home I found Jane and Mercy (the maid of honour) rather restless, perhaps unsurprisingly. It was funny to see a woman in white wedding dress and veil stomping impatiently round a dusty Kenyan yard with washing flapping on a line overhead. We contacted our Program Coordinater to come in his car (he’s the most senior figure here) and I convinced Jane to wait 10 minutes for him before stomping her off to the wedding on foot. Luckily he did arrive in time.

John (our program coordinator) was absolutely delighted by the scene. He’d got balloons attached to the car and once we were inside he drove while beeping the horn continuously. To introduce John, he's best described like the character of God in ‘Bruce Almighty’ – to see him laughing and whooping was a very different experience. I wanted to ask if the volunteers had ever staged a wedding before, but seeing John’s reaction I no longer needed to – he’d definitely not ever had a team of volunteers do anything of the sort. I wasn’t sure whether he was s-bending in the road out of celebration or to avoid the potholes. From my seat in the back of the car it was hard to tell. When we got there they opened the field gates and all the guests crowded round singing. We hadn’t had a wedding rehearsal, choosing instead to have a hen night and so we didn’t actually know what to do. An Usher rushed over to the car when it stopped to tell us to get out when the music started playing, this was good, we at least had some sort of idea what to do. After what felt like a very long wait we heard ‘Isabella’ playing. It made me smile because it was inappropriately romantic for a fake wedding. The other thing that made me smile was the difficulty we had walking up the isle. We had to go very very slowly. Mercy and Jane had been practising this at home, but I hadn’t and rather struggled to go at the ridiculous pace. Worse still, it’s all caught on camera. The isle was flanked on each side by large white gazebo style tents full of wedding guests. They were decorated with tinsel, fake flowers and were populated by Kenyans and UK volunteers as well as a few locals. At the front of the isle was a Matt wearing a priest’s collar and his mama's sun glasses and ready to give a short sermon on the nature of love, Arman was summoned as best man to take a reading from the gospel of entrepreneurship. Matt had written some wedding vows which made everyone laugh and then announced that John may kiss the bride. To our absolute amazement the loving couple then proceeded to do just that.

Next the couple left the ‘church’ followed by best man, maid of honour and me to enjoy their first dance together which was very sweet and extremely well documented by the many cameras. The following step was the cake ceremony. This is very important in Kenyan ceremonies (because they don’t traditionally ‘kiss the bride’, they feed her cake instead. Our wedding was a hybrid so that's why we had both). So Jane fed Miano cake, Miano fed Jane cake. Then Jane fed the best man. Miano fed Mercy and me. Then the cake was cut up and all the guests were fed. Once everyone had eaten cake they went up to the buffet (which had tragically run out of plates when I got there, so I ended up eating off a second hand plate, using my hands instead of cutlery - classy). The entertainment of the afternoon was music and dancing as well as an enormous waterfight.

You can't shock a chippie. Fact

There comes a point in the night after which, drunk people should stay on the dance floor where they can't embarrass themselves becasue no one can hear them talk and their flails look like wild moves if only lit by a strobe. When they stray off it to get chips, that's when the trouble starts...

A few weekends ago I was at a fundraising party for a charity in Kenya (my own fundraising party, in fact) and all the guests were tasked with completing certain missions before the night was up in order to earn points. Some missions were easy and earned few points (hug a bouncer), others were more more challenging and so earned lots of points (turn a team of 5 people upside down in any way you like). On my way home with a few fellow party-survivors I  was very happy (not least because it wasn't my home I was going to but a friend's, thereby ensuring that the social spectacular would last another day). Much mischief had been achieved, much wine had been drunk and much funding had been raised. To make matters even better it was snowing and none of us were sober enough to feel the cold. Win, win.
You might think at this point that we were on the pinnacle of drunken satisfaction, but no, as we skipped through the snowflakes we came across a chip shop, still open at 3am. Marvellous! And once inside, with my sufficiently greasy order placed, I realised that there were still one more challenge that could be completed. Hurah! This in fact was a much more exciting pursuit than food, which I soon forgot about. It was imperative that I exercise the opportunity to take of an item of underwear and wave it in the air (thereby earning 5 more points for my team). Actually, better still, everyone ought to join in, that would be more appropriate. One female friend was keen but the other required a bit of cajoling. The boys weren't invited to join in - we needed them to hold our jackets and be the photographer. Bras were waved vigorously in the air. What a triumph! As the scene unfolded the man behind the chip shop counter tried in vain to attract our attention to tell us our food was ready (not that we were at all interested. Let's face it, it's not every night you get to wave your bra about, but it's fairly commonplace to eat cheesy chips) he was not remotely sympathetic and seemed slightly irritated that we were taking so long to leave the premises. The fact that we were in the middle of something more important clearly didn't register. It must be the case that the staff of late night take-aways have seen it all before. Customers enthralled in the tasks of being eccentric can in no way surprise them. They see the most idiotic of human antics, probably quite regularly.

Some might say, it was out of pure respect, we didn't waste his time but ran out into the night, chips in one hand underwear in the other.

There is nothing better than a good friend

I've often joked (or at least I like to claim I'm joking) that I'm not sure what relationships are for. I see boyfriends as a bit of an inconvenience. I mean, they do things like share their flu, require you to meet their extended family twice removed and eat sensible meals at a sensible time (no more emergency cornflakes at 10pm). I could go on. I won't. You might start to think I'm not kidding.

Last week I went to the cosy little pub in my parent's village with a good friend. Drinking nothing more potent than diet coke I laughed until my sides hurt. We prattled on until we were the last people in the pub and the staff were waiting to go home (probably wondering why they were being paid to wait on 2 individuals who clearly only intended to part with a pitiful amount of coinage in order to fuel their evening). By the time we bumbled out I was quite high on endorphins (which was lucky as it proofed me against the heavy rain) and my cheerfulness carried over into the following day. I swear, if any guy can make me laugh this much, I'll put aside everything I wrote in that first paragraph. He can have a second date regardless of all other flaws*.

* Unless he doesn't want one, in which case, I'll have escaped this rash promise with my freedom and flu-free status in tact.

Aqua aerobics at Virgin Active

I was supposed to be having a day of Christmas card writing and sleep when I got a message asking if I might like to come to a fitness centre instead (of course I would). My friend (Jess) had got 2 induction sessions at Virgin Active which meant that we could use all the facilities for free as long as we pretended to be interested in becoming members (although if I’m honest, when we learnt that there’s a 90s disco dance class in which they turn the lights out and give everyone glow sticks, we very nearly were interested).

It felt a bit voyeuristic being shown around the gym while feigning enthusiasm. My favourite part was spotting a woman on a leg exercising machine while totally engrossed in a novel from the waist up. What we really wanted was for the tour to be over so we could go swimming.

Eventually it was and, once changed, we shuffled out of the changing rooms in our brightly coloured bikinis (feeling a little self-conscious because all the serious gym-goers were in black one-piece costumes manufactured by speedo). More awkwardly still, we found we’d shuffled into the wrong room and were standing in a busy stairwell. The place was like a maze! You don’t really want to be lost in your swimwear though, it’s quite a compromising time to walk into inappropriate rooms. Someone pointed us in the right direction which was relatively helpful and (after another unintentional foray into a deserted corridor) I followed Jess into the pool room. She was looking over her shoulder, talking to me and reversed straight into a very toned, good looking Asian guy wearing nothing but a small towel around his waist. He seemed alarmed but I thought it might make my day.

After doing the obligatory few introductory lengths in the pool we spotted an aqua aerobics class a few swim lanes over and decided to join in. A lot of the ladies were taking it very seriously but we were not (perhaps me least of all because I had left my glasses in the changing rooms, couldn’t see a thing and was making up a good 60% of the manoeuvres). Our instructor didn’t seem to mind though – I suppose as long as she sees a lot of happy ladies exercising enthusiastically then the class is a success. A new level of glee was reached when ‘good Christian men rejoice’ came on and it was announced that we were to do some sort of barn dance/ceilidh. I can’t get enough of those on land let alone in the water! As it turns out, this is not an easy thing to do in a swimming pool as you move at half the speed owing to the water resistance, which in turn means it takes twice as long to correct your mistakes (which should be numerous, or you’re not having enough fun). There was a lot of splashing and a lot of giggling (from one particular dance pair, who couldn’t believe their luck at ending up in a swimming pool barn dance). Whenever the dance allowed us to get close enough, we'd continue our conversation. The conclusion of which was that when you reach an age whereby you can no longer muster an enthusiasm for clubbing, you go to aqua aerobics classes instead. This fulfils a basic human need to laugh and dance at the same time.

You might think it would have been funny to be a fly on the wall during this scene, but there’s a group of middle aged men on exercise bikes who went one better than that. One wall of their gym is made of glass and overlooks the swimming pool. I do find that slightly weird, but it’s hardly worth worrying about.

After this strenuous class we went to the sauna. I didn’t think I liked saunas (the air is so hot it’s almost dense and so they make me feel claustrophobic) but once inside I changed my mind. I actually found the sauna quite a funny place. It reminded me of the London underground. Everyone sits in extremely close proximity but we all do so in silence, as if no one else was there. Only in the sauna they’re all wearing speedos (going one up on the underground) and of course no one comments on the weirdness of the scenario. The steam room was a bit better in this sense and seemed to feature wearers of longer shorts. But the bubble pool was best of all.

Passive aggression like I've never seen it before

There comes a time when the girls have to leave the office, go get pizzas and  let off some steam. It's for the good of our health and stops things getting bottled up. It's fair to say that morale is pretty low in the office at the moment - we've put our hearts and souls in and now there's nothing left. What interested me was the extent to which this was beginning to show in ridiculously trivial ways, none more so than Jade, (the type of  hard working person who was probably top of every class at school). She was about to go into a [somewhat tyrannical] management meeting and so, in a kind of advance retaliation she resolved to eat as much garlic as she could. Pizza express were only too happy to oblige. We had garlic bread, garlic oil and garlic butter on our dough balls - it was great!

As anticipated, what wasn't so great was the management meeting itself. It alarmed me to hear that both of them had spent the meeting crying! Jade, because she'd been been criticised for an hour. And Martha (the boss), in case her unborn child grew up to be like Jade!

The garlic was fine, but now everyone's crying, this is getting ridiculous.

I'd be a climbing star by now but life gets in the way

My weekend got off to an amusing start on Friday night when I failed to go to bed at a sensible time. I was just settling down at 1 am when Tim (my housemate and honorary brother) came bounding in, extremely drunk, wanting a hug. He took off his trousers (as everyone knows you can't get into bed with trousers on) and jumped in. I had a hug and heard all about his evening. Then, after being allowed to play me just 1 Coldplay song (against his better judgement as there really were a great many he thought I ought to hear!) he got out of bed, realised how drunk he was, picked up his trousers, then picked up my trousers and was preparing to put them on when he caught sight of my bra, which had been put on the chair underneath them. This terrible sight filled him with horror and so he left immediately. In the morning I put on my jumper, went downstairs, and climbed into his bed to see if he was hungover yet. Luckily he was still drunk and so agreed to come climbing.
Reflecting on this trip, I definitely think that our technique is starting to improve, even if the difficulty level of walls hasn't. We've set ourselves the challenge of doing a 'blue' or 'salmon' coloured route by Christmas (they're equivalent levels). The trouble is that people tend to put on weight at Christmas time, which then makes it harder to climb walls. A healthy eating binge has been suggested in order to conquer this as soon as possible. It's either that or we could progress by turning up without hangovers on a full nights sleep. Hmm, the 'body of a god diet' starts here.

Surprised by my drunken self

I got an email at work today from a chap I don't know called Mark. Apparently I'd given him my company email address (not sure why!) on Saturday night while quite drunk and he also appeared to be under the impression I'd instructed him to use it in order to start a game of noughts and crosses. Better still, he clearly felt some need to tell me that his name wasn't Hector (I didn't like to ask why!) It's just not the sort of thing you expect to catch up with you at work on a Tuesday afternoon! I think maybe I put 'noughts and crosses' next to my name in his phone as a reminder of who I was as we had just played a game on a big toy set in a children's playground (which is where the (now not so literally located) house party had ended up). Looking back, the fact that I then asked to borrow his jeans in order to climb a large plastic palm tree, before magnanimously giving him my dress in exchange when he agreed, probably made me a little more memorable still. I hadn't thought of that. Remembering this, I put my cross in bottom left. It's the least I could do.

The most upsetting cinema trip

One of the things I enjoyed most today was going to the cinema with the girls to see Suffragette! Our age means we get in for £5 at the Barbican and so we basically couldn't go wrong from there. To my disappointment the film turned out not to be feel good comedy as I'd expected (like Made in Dagenham) but an emotional roller coaster that had us laughing and then crying to such an extent that I began to fear for the safety of my contact lenses. We all came out with very different opinions of it too. Rebecca and Tash felt a sense of righteous indignation and believed that it was a film everyone ought to see. However I had a number of issues with it. Firstly I felt that the main characters marriage wasn't very convincing. It fell apart so easily. Secondly I wondered why our heroine kept going to feminist meets when she didn't believe in the cause at first - that behaviour made her life very complicated! Third I wondered whether they glamorised violence a bit and overplayed the roe of media attention. After all, if violence really was all that effective then the IRA would be respectable by now and if press  coverage were that big a deal then fathers for justice would have justice by now. I kind of felt that there was more story that didn't get told. Yes a woman died in front of a racehorse but (aside from the question of whether the rider survived) it's not clear how this translated into votes then or my ability to buy a cinema ticket using my own money today. Tash says that's the point, the story isn't over yet. To be fair, that's one thing the film did really well. There was so much we wanted to talk about afterwards and I've been thinking about it all week. It's struck me that since the film industry is one of the most unequal industries today, this is an ironic meta study of inequality. In fact I've found the film so thought provoking that I've started recommending it to people. This in itself is a great reason to see it.

Needoo Curry House

This evening after work we were supposed to go to the increasingly famous curry place Tayyabs. It's in the 'up and coming' backstreets of Whitechappel. They feel pretty rough but I suppose that this must be what brick lane was like before it 'up and came'. However, I spoiled all of our plans by not managing to leave work on time. It was 7pm before I got away and by the time I arrived, Tayyabs, which by now has a reputation for itself, was full, with queuers loitering between the tables. As such we went to the spin off restaurant around the corner. Needoo was apparently founded by a rogue waiter after an altercation at Tayyabs. From the outside it looked so seedy that we nearly didn't go in but it was by now so late that we were hungry enough to risk it. All in all I'm glad we did. There were no people queuing in awkward places, the service was exceptionally fast and there was giant cutlery mounted on the wall which amused me. If anything the food was actually too authentic as Sam and Joe struggled with the spice. All the dishes were said to be 'medium' so there was no way out for the faint hearted, unless you are preprepared order from the less authentic 'chicken tikka masala' section of the menu, which no one was. We speculated that even the mint sauce had a kick to it and had to call in emergency yoghurt. I personally quite liked it but must admit that the level of spice did stop me from comparing the 4 dishes we'd ordered as they all tasted of 'robust heat' to me. In a nice way. Sam disagreed, but then he had begun an affliction of wild heat-induced hiccups.