The speed of village

Today my three fellow trainees in my village and I found out that technically, we don't live in a village - we live in a hamlet. A HAMLET! It sounds pretty mystical and brings lots of images of medieval/ feudal Europe to mind. I must say the reality of our hamlet isn't nearly so glamorous, but it's a fun fact to know. 

After lunch and taking a quick test regarding our readiness to serve, I walked back to my house to get some cord we needed to build a tippy tap at our "school". No one was in my house, but as I was leaving to head back to school I was summoned by my mama, who was sitting inside mama Fatuma's front door, having lunch. (I think my mama, like me, likes vantage points where she can see everything that's going on. :) ) "Kata! NJOO!" Come! My mama yells after me. A lot of people call me Kata, which is actually a verb meaning "to cut", along with several other meanings. 

So I enter mama Fatuma's house, where I find my mama, mama Fatuma, her husband, their son Mustafa, and some other teenage boy who might work for them (there are so many teenage boys everywhere and often it's hard to tell where they come from and what they do exactly). Mama Fatuma tells me I must sit down and eat (this being just about an hour after I already ate lunch at school), and I know it would be a losing battle for me, and there's fresh-cooked ugali and beans so I cave. After a fair amount of ugali and a small bowl of beans, and after chatting and watching Mustafa struggle determinedly and good-naturedly to peel an orange, they finally let me go, probably almost half an hour later, when my mama realizes that my teachers might have wondered where I went off to.

The moral is: never expect to get anywhere or do anything in a timely manner, and if someone is offering you good food, take advantage of it. Especially if they're good company, too. :)