Day 7

Salaamu all, Sriram here! Today was a big day for our team. After much discussion with Elvis, our new contractor, we finally signed the contract today. It was a full-out official event with the students, mentors, WatSan officials, Gregory, the school principal, and Elvis all surrounding a large table filled with signatures, handshakes, and smiles. As part of the school’s usual courtesy, everyone was offered a soft drink at the end of the meeting­—and this time, I was smart enough to politely decline, instead of secretly dumping my soda and getting caught like last time.

Meanwhile, our bodyguard, Jared, and Tom were busy with pumping water from one of the concrete tanks into the other tanks. This is where Jared truly proved worthy of his bodyguard title. Using a handmade wooden ladder, literally a ladder that could break at any second for any amount of weight, Jared climbed to the top of multiple tanks. Even though the ladder shook vigorously and could snap any moment, he successfully laid across the top so that he could hold the pump into the tank. This did involve getting splashed a lot, making it seem like Jared fell into the tanks, but all was well as Kenya’s heat dried him instantly like a towel. With all the excess water we had from the tank we were pumping, we were able to make the villagers very happy as we gave out hundreds of liters of free water. You could quickly see everyone’s smiles because they were relieved of the stress of walking several kilometers to obtain a few liters of water for one day.

Celebrating our victory with the contract signing, pumping of water, and making the villagers happy by giving them free water, we decided to head to Kisumu to grab some lunch and finish some needed shopping.  Earlier today, Ajay contacted his Gujarati hardware store friend Hiren Mehta for recommendations of restaurants, after which we decided that we would go to the Laughing Buddha in the Tuffoam Mall. Once we got to the mall, we saw that everything was closed……even though it was a perfectly sunny Thursday afternoon. So we continued our search and finally we ran into one restaurant called Pankies which seemed promising because it offered African, Indian, Italian, and American cuisines. Julia was ecstatic to order a hotdog from the menu because she was really missing American food. Jared ventured to try a burger, Tristen decided to try the savory Penne Arrabiata, and Ajay and I decided to go for some Indian food.

Here’s what came out of the kitchen…….

1. 2 plates of different paneer (cheese cube) dishes à The Indian Food
2. Shell pasta in a flavorless white sauce  with a tiny piece of toast à Penne Arrabiata with Garlic Bread
3. Tiny, cold, hard, buttered sausage in a mini sub-sandwich à Julia’s Hot Dog
4. A dry, flavorless patty between 2 odd tasting buns à Jared's burger 

The Indian food wasn’t too bad, but the other food was terrible….We laughed hysterically about the food that came out, missing home food dearly, going to the point where we cried, some of us from laughing too hard and others from actually crying. As you can see from her expression below, Julia was the most disappointed as her hot dog turned out to be a mini, frozen, buttered rod of meat.

Having enjoyed an unpleasant lunch, we went to a store to get some more jugs of water. Julia stayed behind in the car because the hot dog she barely ate made her feel ill. Apparently, while we were shopping, Julia had an old lady come and preach to her in Swahili for about 15 minutes. John came to the rescue and redirected the lady’s preaching from Julia towards himself. But, nonetheless they still had to cough up 20 shillings for her to leave them alone. They also bought some fresh sugar cane from the streets for us to try—in the time John finished an entire bag, Julia had one. When we finally got back and Julia told us her stories, we started returning home to Kolunje. We quickly got our minds off of food as we sang along and danced to the songs Jared played like Rather Be, Temperature, and the Pokemon theme song.  To make our day even better, it started raining while the sun was out, leading us to a vibrant rainbow in the sky, for which we hypothesized that instead of a leprechaun with a pot of gold, there would be a mzungu (white person) with smiles at the end of it. We reached home full of joy from the music and beautiful sky, after which Julia decided to become a model. We decided that instead of building rainwater catchment systems for the schools, we would sell our own product of the Julia Rain Catchment. She comes in three models as you can see below. Choose your favorite and place your order today!

Choose your favorite and place your order today!