Friday Computer Iissues

Friday was my day for a crisis. I have much of what I’ve done for Hekima  Place on my Mac computer and Friday it died.  Well, the computer didn’t actually die, but either the power supply died or the battery died. Kate was gone when it happened, so I had panicky thoughts that there wasn’t a Mac store in all of Kenya and I’d be without all my files until Rick could bring me what I need. But when Kate got back, she told me that, amazingly enough, there’s a Mac store in the new shopping mall in Karen, the Galleria. Karen is one of the seriously upscale districts of Nairobi – lots of wealthy western foreigners and government officials live there.  Lucky for me, it’s only 35-45 minutes away, depending on traffic. I hope I’ll be back in business by the end of the day tomorrow. In the interim, I’m using a spare computer from the office. Not much RAM, but it got me on the internet – at least until I ran out of minutes on my modem.  

So with no computer, I had to find something else useful to do. All employees around here have multiple jobs, and one of my responsibilities is watering the orchard of young fruit trees as well as the flowers and shrubs around Karibu House where I’m staying.  So I spent the afternoon hooking up hose pieces (with some help from Stephen, the animal handler) to make the water reach to the far end of the orchard. The first time I watered, I carried buckets to about 25 trees, all a goodly walk from the spigot so being able to use a hose was WONDERFUL! None of the hose pieces have screw fittings on them. There are just a series of smaller and smaller hoses that fit tightly inside the next larger ones. When you really need to hold them together tightly, the ‘uncles’ (that’s what the guys who work around here are called) bind them together with strips of rubber cut from old inner tubes. It took me about an hour and a quarter to give everything a good dose of water.

Thursday night I worked on math homework with the 8^tth graders until 11:15. And that was having started at 7:15 pm. They had 40 problems to do, some simple, but at least half not so simple. I don’t know what their teacher is thinking! They have other homework to do as well. I don’t know how much sleep they get, but it’s not enough – don’t see how they can function in school. They get up at 6 am everyday at the latest and the older girls go to school half a day on Saturday as well!