Friday
Fridays are my day off because I frequently work on Saturdays. Plus when I arrived, they offered and practically insisted that I take a day off in the middle of the week, so why argue with taking Fridays off?
Well I woke up to find that the sticky mouse traps we had laid out the night before hadn’t worked, and he somehow got around them and had gotten into even more food. So we upped our tactics with some insane sticky glue we found hidden in a cabinet, and baited all the traps with peanut butter.
The power also was still off. It normally comes back on in the night, so I can charge things again. But my laptop was completely drained, and it still didn’t come back on all morning, so I later took it into town to charge it at a restaurant.
The morning was spent around the house, then I went in town to a craft market. This one is the best and cheapest in town, so I got a few souvenirs for friends and family (and of course me!) :)
I had a few more errands to run in town, which is usually pretty stressful, navigating through the congested, chaotic town center. Battling off boda boda guys saying, “yes Mzungu, we go?” and the streets overcrowded with foot traffic as well as taxis, cars, and bodas coming out of nowhere, always leaves me on edge.
I then met a friend, Rachel, another short-term missionary, and we went to this great second-hand clothing shop in town. I got a few things that will be good to wear to work, then we went to a Thai restaurant in a really nice hotel. The hotel was so nice, it was a little strange stepping inside to that distinctive smell of a hotel pool, high arched ceilings, large glass windows, and a piano playing, after the grit and chaos of town. But it was so nice to retreat there and almost feel like we were on vacation for an evening.
After dinner, we went grocery shopping at a very Western shopping center. (I know, terribly boring blogging material, but remember-- some days are not about this crazy adventure I’m supposedly on, but it turns out I’m just living life). I hate the boda boda guys who work outside that shopping center. They’re really aggressive and charge ridiculous prices because they know they get business from a lot of bazungu. We might have taken one of those guys, but since it was dark it’s usually safer to call someone you know, so we called a good driver that we know. When we came, we first passed through all the boda guys practically running us over with their bodas to get our business. They saw us telling them no, then talking to this other guy, Robert, the one we had called.
We were standing there negotiating the price with him, when all of a sudden, one of the other guys came over, pulled his key out of his boda, and walked away ranting and raving about something. Rachel and I were a little concerned and didn’t know what was going on. Robert told us that they thought he was stealing their customers. There are concentrated areas called stages where bodas work from, and since Robert didn’t belong to this stage and these other guys did, they thought he was encroaching on their territory and stealing their beloved bazungu customers who didn’t even want to use them anyway because they’re aggressive and rude.
So to show them that we knew him and had called him to come for us, he called Rachel’s phone. She showed them that her phone was ringing, and they gave him his key back, but yelled at him to never come back to their boda stage again. And now they just lost 2 customers for good because I know I’m now going to do everything I can to never use those guys again.
When I got home, the power had just come back on. It was a little frustrating since I’d been carrying my laptop around all day so I could charge it in town, and it was heavy by the end of the day. But still, power is better than no power.
Well, good news and bad news. We finally caught the mouse. He finally went for one of our traps, but despite our efforts to not kill it by only using sticky traps, it turns out the glue was pretty powerful, and he fell on his side struggling to get off it. We could tell that there was no way he was getting off the trap without ripping off his fur, so we had to let the poor thing out of its misery. We weren’t happy to have to get rid of it that way, but after several days of throwing away food he got into, and cleaning mouse feces out of the cabinets, we were glad to finally have gotten rid of it.
