#6 Kenya – The Library & Random Facts

Our project during our stay here at the orphanage is to make the library a truly warm and welcoming place as well as an educational one. This being said, we set out to clean it, paint it (as well as the baseboards and crownmouldings), decorate it, build some shelves and furnish it with some educational material. Now that doesn’t sound to complicated, does it? One would think that a budget of $150 US would be more than enough to accomplish this in Kenya. Yet, as already mentioned, never expect anything and never assume anything.
Turns out that wood in Kenya is super expensive. 14 dinky little boards, un-sanded, uneven and with chunks coming out of them (all supposedly measured but of different sizes) ended up costing us over $35 US. But before we get to the boards and the shelves lets start with the cleaning. Washing filthy baseboards and walls with cold rain water and a bar of soap isn’t exactly a walk in the park, especially when you can’t just keep on refilling your bucket with clean water. So one wipe with a rag turns the water brown and then you’re scrubbing with brown soapy water. After that, although you have a broom, you don’t have a dust pan so you’re using an old pane of glass to pick up all the crap. Next, there’s about 4 layers of old super glossy paint on all the mouldings and all the walls. We want to sand the stuff down, but not having sandpaper, we ended up having to use kitchen knives. We did all the fireplace mouldings but gave up on the baseboards. Now we’re committing the biggest sin possible by repainting all the mouldings and baseboards with super-glossy white paint.
We also had the local handyman come by to assist us with the construction of the shelves. Firstly he bragged about the fact that all the work round the orphanage was done by him – primarily the paint job. If I were him I would never have fessed up to that. The paint is uneven, the baseboards are painted pink and the pink smudges over an inch onto the wall. There are also tones of paint blobs all over the floor. So that being said, Mr. Handyman told us he would help us drill holes in the wall so that we could do a built-in book shelve. When he said this I thought he would show up with an electric drill to drill into the brick. Well, what essentially happened is he came with a hammer and a wedge and basically began hammering huge holes into the wall. We had drawn approximate lines of where we wanted the shelves – i.e. measured out the height at which we wanted them. I remember Robin commenting that hopefully he’d come with a leveller. I didn’t say anything, but figured that this was too much to hope for. Turned out I was right. He didn’t bother measuring anything so now we have two holes that are pretty level and then the third hole that is about 2 cm higher. And this holds true for all the other holes he did.
Another thing that we’ve been able to accomplish in the Library is the painting of the fireplace with Bermuda Blue glossy paint. That on its own was not much of a challenge. However, washing the rollers afterwards of the paint is a whole different story. Robin tried to rinse them in a tub of water and the paint would absolutely not dissolve in it. It would, however, come off onto her hands but then would get stuck to them. It was a hilarious sight considering that her hands matched her shirt and her shorts. We were laughing that instead of being called a mzungu she should be called a bluezungu. I’ve honestly never seen paint do that. It completely would not wash off in water. It was like glue
So this library is truly a “make-it-yourself” adventure where you’re only allowed one knife, an old saw and two horrible brushes. Luckily though we have two extra sets of hands helping us now. Adrienne and Malaika, two Canadian girls, arrived last night also through GVN and are helping us out. Hopefully now the work will go a bit quicker.
Other than that, with the 3000 Shillings that we got from GVN we’re going to buy a big world map and a dictionary as well as an atlas. We’re planning to have the kid’s handprints on the door and the Footprint Prayer over the fireplace. With Robin and me heading back to Kisumu to pick up more material we’re also planning to buy some for a curtain. So for now we’re keeping our fingers crossed that the end result will look good.

Now some other random facts:

— The highschool kids go to school for 5am and come back at 7pm and also have class until 1pm on Saturday
— The primary school has over 1000 kids.
— You can use a bicycle to sharpen a knife
— A five year old kid can eat as much ugali as my entire family can eat potatoes (there’s 4 of us).
— Wood costs 30 Shillings (50 cents) per foot
— Gas costs approximately 70 shillings per litre (1.05 cents)
— Avocados grow on trees and they are 3 times the size of avocados back home and cost 10 shillings (15 cents) for three.
— Kids here pinch and rub at our skin to see if the white comes off.
— Showering every 5 days is acceptable and the saying “if it’s yellow let it mellow if it’s brown flush it down” is mandatory.
— If your feet are dirty at night you just put on “bed socks” to keep the dirt on the inside of them rather than on the bed sheets.