Where did Saturday go? Perhaps nowhere except from daybreak soon after 6:00 a.m. to dusk at 6:30 p.m. My activities—such as they were—all took place inside the walls of Kundayo within an oasis of peace and calmness. John as usual took a long outing by dalla-dalla and foot to downtown and back. Meanwhile, I continued reading Ruth Oseki’s novel My Year of Meats.
In the late afternoon, just as we had settled ourselves on the garden terrace to be closer to the internet source, Mama Kundayo came floating across the courtyard hoping for a nice long visit. She watches an enormous amount of international news and wondered if we had her about the woman in Australia who had found a snake in her toilet. We had not, but I googled it and found the BBC story. I dutifully showed the photos to Mama, who recoiled in horror. This led to questions about snakes we had known in the Congo and snakes that we have in the USA. I found plenty of snake action videos on YouTube, all of which terrified Mama. Yet she kept wanting more. When I tried to excuse myself to go and make dinner, Mama foiled my escape by ordering us all Swahili coffee. It was my discovery of a video of an epic battle between a black mamba and a rattlesnake which finally put things over the top and closed the show. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMIpKIsu-C4 Spoiler alert: the mamba won.) Mama claimed she was going to have nightmares, but she had asked for it.
The day ended with medallions of petit mignon, fresh green beans, boiled baby potatoes, and fresh fruit salad for dessert. The day ended more happily than usual because we had managed to convince Maso that we had a faulty cable box and had procured a new one which didn’t flicker on and off constantly, so we were able to watch some BBC news before we went to bed.
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