Introducing my team...Especially Claude

My team arrived on Saturday last week. This meant that I had a 11 hour round trip in the minibus to pick them up – not the best of days, but it was nice to meet them all. They seem a pretty cool lot. The quality that stands out more than anything is the diversity. One guy is from UK, Thailand and New Zealand. So between the 11 of us we can count 7 nationalities (despite having several bland people like me that only claim one).

While in the most part everyone is well travelled and/or street wise we have one notable exception: Claude. Claude is very posh, French, and turned 19 yesterday. Regardless of what he probably ought to be doing, he can usually be found without his shirt outside the classroom reading a book. His possessions can be found anywhere within a 2 mile radius because he has no idea how valuable they are in this country. So far he sounds a bit lovable and scatty. That was my first impression too. He was a bit of a liability because he kept taking his shirt off at inappropriate times (something shocking to the locals), but otherwise ok. Then, on the second day, the shirt that he chose to put on featured a large photograph of some full frontal female nudity. Plural. There were many nudes on the tshirt. We couldn't believe it! This is a culture in which I can't even wear shorts in order to be socially presentable.

On the third day we briefed the whole team on catching moped taxis but Claude didn’t want to practice. Upon being asked why, he told us wouldn’t feel safe unless he could take the wheel himself. Clearly taxi-ing was going to be a problem.

On the fourth day Claude decided to go for a run first thing in the morning by himself (as he keeps telling us, he likes to “explore Africa alone”). He inevitably got lost and then ended up paying a motorbike driver to bring him back to the hotel. He was so pleased to be back that he didn’t ask the price, but spontaneously gave the driver 10,000 shillings, which incidentally is 10x the going rate here.

Yesterday was Claude's birthday. He had gone to town with the group and they lost him (not surprisingly, as mentioned, he likes to "explore Africa alone" and so gets lost on purpose). To everyone’s surprise he resurfaced having been invited to the ‘stage’ (think roped off square) in a dance pop-up. Turns out Claude has talent and it is dancing. Sensing his opportunity, he immediately took off his shirt (because he had seen someone else in tribal dress without a shirt) and proceeded to amaze everyone. He tells me that he's had the best birthday ever and he has the video to prove it.

Delays and Dubai

My travel to Uganda has not been 100% smooth as my first plane was delayed by so long that I missed my connecting flight in Dubai. When I arrived in Dubai, I had to get a boarding card printed for my next flight by the air Emirates service desk. The chap I had been sat next to on the plane (Jessie, a multi-lingual bleach-blond first-year student, who was planning to revise for his university resits in Thailand) managed to get me to the front of the queue for first class passengers (some people have all the charm!) and I hoped that this swift service might help me get on board in time. Sadly not. So I hugged Jessie goodbye and was sent with a hotel voucher to the Copthorne Airport hotel as the next flight to Uganda isn’t until tomorrow. The man in front of me in the queue for hotel vouchers is migrating to Singapore. All his possessions arrive today in a container, while he will now be arriving tomorrow. This reminded me that my problems are small. The man behind me in the queue was on his way to New Zealand to teach rugby, he was issued a voucher to the same hotel as me so we strolled off together, and were presently allocated rooms on the same floor.

I did my best to send a message ahead to tell the organisation I'm working with about the delay but it was a real struggle because I was fighting to stay awake. Both the rugby teacher and I decided we would take naps until lunch. Although the bedrooms were very standard (I thought everything was done to excess in Dubai?!) the lunch buffet was glorious. The piece de resistance was that there was baklava for pudding (and lots of salad mum, don’t worry). There are lots of restaurants  and bars in the hotel including an English bar called ‘Biggles’ which I was very intrigued by – I’ve always wondered what international people eat at English restaurants. Turns out they eat shepherd’s pie, fish and chips, roast meat and curry. There’s that lifelong mystery cleared up. We had a couple of drinks there and I learnt that my companion (Will) not only went to Hoe Bridge School but lives in Woking and studied at Southampton.

In the afternoon we went for a walk. It would be a shame to be here after all and see no city. However, see no city was what we felt like we did as we couldn’t find anything particularly significant looking to see. Not even a sky scraper (how can a sky scraper hide?! I heard that there was meant to be one a mile high here). Nevertheless, in order to encounter all this nothingness we did have to venture out in the sweltering heat. It wasn’t long before we were both shining with sweat – not a good position to be in without a change of clothes. I dipped my feet into an office water fountain and even the water was warm! Presently we were offered a welcome interlude by the discovery of an ‘Irish village’ which needed some investigating and turned out to be a series of Irish pubs. Rather than being a non-smoking pub, or even a pub with a smoking area, we were seated in a small cordoned off non-smoking area of an otherwise smoke-friendly pub. How odd!

Before dinner there was time for showers.  I was a bit cautious in mine not to wash under my arms in case my deodorant was the type that lasts 48 hours. I can’t remember if it is, but it’s worth a chance. These are desperate times! My deodorant is in my hold luggage and so I won't see it again until I arrive in Uganda.

This evening we’ve been to a pool bar where we were served no drinks but had a lovely chat with the Egyptian bar man. Apparently Dubai offers him a much higher quality of life than Egypt does as there is “100% no corruption here”, one is safe walking in the streets and he is very pleased to have moved – you never hear that side of the story do you? I was always told that Dubai’s many migrants were an abused underclass.

The other interesting thing he told me was that he had a great deal of respect for David Cameron for resigning because in many parts of the world leaders hold on to power for grim death and never recognise that it is time to hand over the reins. That too I found very interesting since the only opinion I’ve heard voiced in the UK is that Cameron (and every other leader who has resigned recently) is abandoning Britain in her time of need. When you look at most other countries around the world the UK isn’t doing so badly really even if it does currently feel like it’s falling to pieces.

I’ve got to be up at 6am in the morning to catch tomorrow’s flight. However, I think this hotel is in league with Emirates airline (I found their logo on one of the doors to lend support to this theory) as breakfast starts at 5:30! They cater to every culture here and so serve dinner (incidentally featuring another type of baklava) until 00:30am just for the night owls. The chef must never sleep.

After the bar I feigned excess tiredness (difficult considering that we were 4h ahead of the UK time zone) and left Will to watch his hotel room TV by himself. But before I went to bed he gave me his number so that once my travels are over I can contact him in the UK and let him know how it all went. How sweet.

The Kenyan Lunchparty

Host parents are encouraged to take their surrogate children to visit other parts of Kenya if the opportunity arises. My mama went to visit her cousins today. She didn’t think to invite me but as if to compensate for her disinterest, Jane and I went to visit her host mum’s parents in the ‘interior’. I do not know where the interior is and there certainly is no ‘exterior’. I think that interior is just a way of referring to rural areas or less wealthy parts – maybe both.

We travelled there in a landrover so old that it still had ash trays built into the doors. However, it did have a full set of working seat belts, which I was impressed by. Our 18km journey seemed to be going very slowly and extremely jerkily. I leant over to Jane in the back seat and pointed out that we were still in 2^nd gear, hence the terrible juddering of the car, it can’t be good for the engine to be driven like this. If only this simple explanation were correct. As we pulled over Jane's uncle explained that someone had been cleaning his engine recently and so the petrol tank was full of water in addition to petrol. The sensation was much the same as driving at 50mph in 2^nd gear but evidently more complicated. It being a Sunday my hopes weren’t high of help, but to my amazement we soon had a team of 5 mechanics gathered around the car. I’m so grateful to them for getting us started again (not that the quality of the drive seemed to have improved much but at least the car was running). We juddered along, right up until the first hill. At this point we established a habit of getting out and walking up every hill to take the weight out of it. This worked well for some time but then inevitably there was a hill that was too steep and we could go no further. So the women abandoned both the car and Jane's uncle to go on foot (we actually wanted to help give it a push, and did make as if to do so, but we forgot that we were women and therefore not allowed to do such things!) There’s an assumption here that white people can do no work and are generally incapable. Jane and I always enjoy surprising people by proving this to be wrong (we’re the only whites that do their own washing for example) and so we delighted in walking the remainder of the journey. Not least because both of us rather like walking and the scenery was amazing. To my amazement the scenery was lush and green, set on steep hillsides. It actually looked like another country, perhaps an Asian-pacific nation. If you saw a photo of it and had to guess where it was taken, you probably wouldn’t guess Africa.

When we arrived we were greeted by Jane's 'host grandparents'. They are 95. Grandmother has had a stroke and it affects her right side but she’s a very plump and smiley lady. Grandfather is slim, walks bent double due to a life of hard labour that has given him back pain (but he can stand straightened when he wants) despite his advanced age and physical state he still digs in the garden on a daily basis. The ‘Shamba’ (farm) on which they live is an acre and they haven’t let their old age stop them from working on it. I was shown a tall tree with no branches and a narrow trunk by his children and told that he’d recently had to be scolded for climbing and pruning it. I was amazed. Aged 24 I couldn’t consider climbing that tree! The children incidentally have told him they’d rather pay a tree surgeon than allow him to swarm up it again, but apparently he always just waits for them to go and then does the jobs he knows they’d disapprove of. Some people here really blow away your expectations away about the life expectancy of ‘poor’ Africans. I don’t think many of us in the UK imagine people living in such harsh circumstances living to be so old (other people have forgotten their birth date – I recently heard of someone claiming to be 203) certainly not in a more spritely state than our own pensioners.

We were joined by 2 of Jane's uncles and one of their wives. The 2 men looked very similar and both spoke good enough English to convey some wicked senses of humour (1 managed to convince me that he had 4 wives). They are actually a family of 10 but many of the siblings weren’t present. Jane and I were given a tour of the farm while lunch was cooked by some ladies (I’m not sure who they were, I’m sure at least one wife was there but there were 2 others I’m less confident of). As neighbours caught sight of ‘muzungus’ (white people) in the site they popped round to visit. One old lady (who didn’t speak a word of English and I would venture, not Swahili either, I think she was chatting away to us in Kikuyu, her tribal language). She had a big bag with her and I was given the chance to carry it Kenyan style. Jane had had a similar experience the weekend before. Jane had been lucky, the bag for her had been quite empty. Mine was full of potatoes! Without realising this she offered to escort the old lady all the way to the main road. Oh my gosh! Happily for me, Jane also offered to take turns with me as we trudged down the little dusty track and the old lady took over before we reached our final destination. The lady (who can’t have been younger than 75) was delighted by all this and found it very funny (probably because it was a white person doing physical labour, which would have been considered to be quite startling) she chatted to us most of the way in fluent Kikuyu and so neither I or Jane (who is better at speaking Swahili than me as she’s got a social host mum who likes to teach her) understood much at all. (I did get one word, ‘gosh’, but it wasn’t much help in putting a sentence together).

When we got back to the house, which I probably ought to describe to you a bit better, it was nearly lunch time. The home is a series of out houses. I understand that it wasn’t always this way but as the family ‘progressed’ (in their words) they learnt that having a firewood stove in the house wasn’t healthy so they moved the kitchen outside. Also the animals no longer sleep in the main house, they sleep in the detached kitchen where there is a wooden pen. There are also outhouses for a corn mill and a couple of bedrooms. The building in which we ate was the biggest, it had 3 rooms, the one I was invited into was large (about the size of our kitchen), had a concrete floor, corrugated iron walls, it was gloomy with windows only on one side of the room, it was lined with an amazing number of chairs and there were 2 tables in the middle (but too many chairs for the seats to correspond to a place at the table). Living room chairs in Kenya are always decorated with cloths that are about the size of napkins and they always have matching sets. Even though this family were less well-off they still adhered to this slightly bemusing tradition. My host mum will change her ‘napkins’ every few weeks. At the moment we have blue ones with white trim, before that we had ones that looked more like woolen doilies, before that it was very big white ones (actually the latter set were more like table cloths than napkins). For lunch we had chapattis, peas and chicken. I was quite pleased about this because it’s a well-balanced meal (something you should never take for granted!) and I haven’t eaten chicken in a very long time. I really shouldn’t have been so pleased. I had served myself 2 pieces of chicken in the gloom. The first turned out to be kidney, or at least that’s what it tasted like, but it was much bigger than a kidney should be (about the size of a 10 year old’s fist), maybe I shall claim it was a lung. The second was a leg or wing, but had no meat on it, just skin. Nevertheless, I’m glad that it wasn’t a head or foot, because both of them were in the cooking pot. Also, I do love chapattis.

When all the plates were cleared, we were encouraged to have seconds. Surprisingly Jane and I weren't very keen to get more 'chicken roulette'. I compromised with a little more chapatti and veg. Then when this still didn't seem to be enough I had thirds. Despite this grand gesture, Jane's mum told everyone we met that her two girls wouldn't eat ANYTHING. Frankly, she feared for us.

I like Jane's mum.

Little Drunk Chef

After the wedding I was exhausted, as was my Kenyan sister, Georgina, but our mum wasn’t in so we had to cook dinner. We could have bought it in town but knew that we’d be in trouble if there weren’t leftovers at home for mum. So I went home to cook. Importantly, I’d drank almost a quarter of a litre of brandy at this point, but I didn’t feel very drunk and so I’d forgotten that I wasn’t sober. I approached dinner by chopping up all the types of vegetable that I found in the fridge and making a stew. This was all going rather well but then I couldn’t find any carbohydrates to go with it. No pasta, rice or potatoes and so I decided to make dumplings. There was a hitch with this – no milk. Ever resourceful, I decided to use tea instead (because there was always a thermos of tea in the house, whatever time of day). I thought this might taste a bit odd and wanted to mask the taste of the tea with ground black pepper. Unfortunately, my hand slipped while pouring this in and rather a lot was added. This couldn't be helped though, the show must go on! Having come this far I didn’t let the next discovery that I didn’t have baking powder stop me either, so I used bicarbonate of soda instead (despite the fact that I didn't have an acidic ingredient to activate the rising agent in it). I then found that I had rather a lot of mixture. Not to worry, I poured it all into the pan to top the stew (what’s the point in leftovers right?) The problem then was that I had an enormous quantity of mixture, and it took forever to cook. The second problem was that it tasted disgusting (possibly because it wasn’t cooked). This was more of a problem. Especially when my quite nice stew was underneath. Georgina (my Kenyan counterpart) was very kind about it. She said that she liked it and then didn’t eat it. When I came home the next day from my day trip I found that it had all disappeared which was rather a relief. Jane says it makes her feel good to know that even I mess up in the kitchen sometimes and so I’m happy to think that this disgusting disaster has brought comfort to someone.

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.

Kidney Bolognaise...mmm delicious?

I have accidentally invented a new classic dish: Kidney bolognaise.


This came about as a result of an error made by the muppet doing the grocery shopping (i.e. me) who was unable to ask for "mince" in Swahili. I therefore got what looked like diced steak, because as it transpired, the butchers didn't have a mincer. I stood there, the wally I am, watching them hack a lump off the dead cow strung up in the shop window and chop it up for me, wondering if it was going to turn into mince at any point. It was then wrapped in newspaper and handed to me; no such luck.


I resolved to cut all the meat up into small parts so as to look like mince and compensate for my mistake. This worked very well for all the parts that didn't have bones in.


While cooking it dawned on me that my 'diced steak' may have more than diced steak in it (ie kidney). It's the smell of it that gave them away. I don't actually like kidney (apparently this is typical white person behaviour, we're not keen on innards) and as a result I wasn't prepared to taste test my creation until I was jolly sure it would taste nice. Instead I gauged the taste of my dish by smell.


Unsurprisingly, the smell caused me to believe that it didn't taste like spag bol should and so I put a WHOLE BULB of garlic in to compensate. After that I felt brave enough to give it an actual taste and found that it tasted powerfully of garlic. Caw!! So I added some extra tomatoes to dilute the flavour and hoped for the best.


I presented this dish to my family as a cross between Kenyan and Italian cuisine. A "sort of spag bol". A nice compromise. I didn't enjoy it myself because of the kidneys but Georgina (my Kenyan sister) loved it and resolved to cook it at all sorts of future events such as birthdays. So in many ways my odd creation was a success.

Hot Cross Buns. How hard can it be?

I got the idea to make hot cross buns for my host family at Easter. Unfortunately, I was too busy at the time and so it’s taken me until today to make this happen.

My host family were initially very impressed at the idea. They particularly liked the fact that a ‘Muzungu’ (white person) would acknowledge the significance of Jesus on the cross.  I didn’t like to correct this view and say that I am a typical English atheist ready to embrace anything I can eat.

There were 3 of us who had taken on the challenge of baking today; 2 were suffering debilitating hangovers and 1 had an oven in her host home. Perfect.

The day started easily enough when I went round the supermarket to stock up on ingredients. It’s a bit hard to know how many grams of sugar ‘3/4 cup’ is, but I managed. Luckily for me none of the Kenyans have had hot cross buns before and so they won’t know if I mess up!

                                                                                                                                                                

The more I cook in Kenya the more I learn. The egg shells here are tough, for instance, and so in order to crack an egg, you should tap it against the wall rather than the plastic mixing bowl. It feels quite counter intuitive, and I’m sure my UK-mother would be alarmed, but it’s much more effective. The recipe also required a lot of kneading. It’s not something I’ve ever had to do much of before and I would have been very unconfident if it were not for the fact that two of my entrepreneurs have patiently taught me to knead dough within the past month (one was a baker and I was learning his trade, the other wanted to find an activity I could do with his mother), both believed themselves to be my first teacher (clearly I was a slow learner!). It was nice to be able to put these skills to good use and soon our dough was looking nice and smooth

After 2 rounds of kneading and leaving the current filled dough to prove while naps were taken, we were ready to put the 19 spiced balls of dough in the oven on gas mark 3 (although I can’t be 100% sure about this as I know very little about gas marks, it may be that 3 was a poor guess). Lighting the oven was a bit of a faff because it made us so nervous to put our hands inside a flammable gas chamber while holding a lit match. Worse still, the oven kept going out once we turned the gas all the way down to gas mark 3 and cockroaches continued running out which was quite off-putting. Presumably they weren’t enjoying the gas chamber either (although I’m glad they were running away from the baking tray – it seems like the most hygienic direction).

Very little cooking time had elapsed when the oven ran out of gas and everything came to an abrupt halt. My host by now was fast asleep on her sofa and we didn’t like to disturb her more than necessary so we decided to take a couple of still squishy buns to a nearby house with a microwave. We were welcomed there by the friendly resident volunteer-host-mother (Elizabeth) and given a cheerful lesson in how to operate the necessary appliance. She appeared to have a great deal of faith in our ability to bake bread in her microwave; which was good, at least someone did.

3 minutes later the microwave pinged and we took out a piping hot bun. I know that microwaves tend to cook from the inside out and so although the outside didn’t look cooked (the cross was barely visible – it was white against beige) we felt that it might taste good inside. We burnt our fingers investigating this and were surprised to find that the inside was actually like toast. (There’s a reason we don’t microwave sandwiches back home and this is it). We were just about to put a second one in for a shorter amount of time (alternative options were few!) when the power cut out. This is not uncommon in Kenyan households but it’s not unannoying either. Now we really were challenged.

The first thing to do was make a list of people we knew nearby with ovens. The list was quite long, but when we made a few enquiries we found that not a single one of these ovens were operative! There was one family we knew with a functioning oven that lived a good distance away and eventually we resorted to asking them if we could visit (it was that or try and cook the buns in a borrowed toaster and I wanted to keep that as a very last resort). However, when I got in touch I was dismayed to find that their oven was electric and, while this meant there would be no more trouble with gas marks, it was also the case that we still couldn’t be helped until the power came back. I decided to sit it out and waited for the power. It came on at my side of town at about 5pm, dusk was at 6:30pm and I didn’t get news that light was back at the oven side of town until 7pm. I was beginning to lose my sense of humor at this point. Hot cross buns were more trouble than they were worth. Walking around after dark here is not advisable, particularly if you are a lone female with pasty white arms glowing like a beacon advertising your presence. I stomped off to my various friend’s houses to find the trays of buns I had stranded in everyone’s kitchens. Firstly to my friend with the exhausted gas oven (no luck, her house was locked) and then to Elizabeth’s house with the tray of buns in her microwave…if only I could identify her gate. I did eventually find a house that looked like hers. I would have been more confident if it were not for the rawkus female voices I could hear inside as I knocked hesitantly on the door – I’m sure that the homeowner I’d come to meet was quite a quiet lady. I felt such relief as Elizabeth opened the door and invited me in. As I was ushered into the kitchen I saw Jane, another host-mum and owner of the kitchen I had occupied earlier in the day. The ladies were having a wonderful time. Theirs were the clamorous voices I had heard on the doorstep. They were very pleased to see me and amazed me by opening the oven door to ask me if the buns were ready yet. I didn’t even know Elizabeth had a functioning oven! Actually, as it transpired, nor did she until Jane had come over and decided to use it, thereby turning it on for the first time since it had been purchased. It turned out that they had been trying to get hold of me for some time in order to ask me to help them know when the buns were done.

It seemed to me that I’d arrived at the perfect time, just as everything was looking nicely browned. I was wrong again (of course – why change a winning theme). As I ignorantly offered to prepare these two wonderful ladies the first taste, I picked up a bun, knife in hand, ready to cut it in half, and realized that only the top half was cooked. The bottom was still cold and doughy. That was unexpected.

What I hadn’t appreciated is that what we had was not an oven so much as a grill, so it was necessary to turn every bun upside-down in order to cook the bottoms too. Unorthodox but effective.

As we waited for the buns to finish, volunteers began to fill the house, joining the host mums and me. By the time the batch was ready there were 9 mouths to feed, 5 of which had never tasted this Eastertime classic before. It pleased me so much to slather my UK traditions in melted butter and share them with my Kenyan friends that I very nearly forgot the stress I’d gone through to produce it.

My host sister wants me to cook her pizza next week. I’m not sure I can cope.