Two Very Brilliant Things I’ve Discovered In Kenya
1. Pee buckets
Jenly turned me on to these. Then I realized at our cross-sector meeting that a lot of other volunteers use them, too, because we had a 15-minute roundtable discussion over dinner about pee bucket techniques. It’s just like it sounds – a plastic bucket you pee in.
When we went to Jenly’s site for Eco Day she announced enthusiastically that we were all welcome to share her pee bucket with her. The choo was a short hike from her house along an uneven dirt path, so peeing in her bucket was more convenient at night or whenever we felt lazy.
On my way home from her site, I stopped in Kapsabet and shopped for the perfect pee bucket – I was looking for just the right size and color, with a lid. I found a 5-L sea green one for 30 shillings, and when I got home, I immediately wrote Pee Bucket on it so that no one would decide to drink or wash their clothes in it. My own choo is only 25 yards from my house and has a light, so there has never been an issue of accidentally dropping the flashlight in there or crashing into a tree along the way. But it has always been one of the worst smelling family choos in Kenya, because I share it with three other adults and seven kids whose idea of using the choo is to use ANYPLACE in the choo (How exactly do you land a piece of poo right in the corner unless you’re firing it out of a cannon?) During the day the biggest flies in Africa, who happen to all live down inside my choo, find their way out of the hole and zoom around the stall buzzing at the top of their lungs. After awhile I just became impervious to the smells and the deafening hum and the pus-filled bodies crashing into my butt. The only thing that bothered me was that my clothes would be impregnated with the choo smell for hours even after a 30-second stint.
But the pee bucket has changed all that. Now I pour a few teaspoons of bleach and a cup of water into the bucket, and wait for it to fill up. It’s impressive how much fluid passes through me each day. It’s impressive how I no longer worry about whose body excretions I’m tracking from the choo into my house on the bottom of my flip flops, or whether the choo smell from my clothes is seeping through my skin into my bloodstream. Tonight I tried using my pee bucket as a poo bucket, after consulting with other Peace Corps pee bucket experts. The key is lining the bucket with a plastic bag. I’m not sure how I feel about it after only one experience. It was cool to lift a heavy bag of poo and wonder if the reason I walk so slow sometimes is that I’m carrying around a couple extra pounds of pure poo. It’s also cool to be able to poo anywhere in my house, or to be able to send text messages or write a letter while I’m on the bucket. But pooing in a place that’s not a toilet or choo seems incongruous with my limited ideas of proper poo sanitation.
If you visit me, you get to use the Guest Bucket.
2. Murenda
My favorite vegetable in the world is kong xin cai, also known as ying cai in Taiwan. It might also have an English name, water convolulous, whatever that is. I tried to plant some in my shamba but I think I planted them too early and they never germinated. Then I discovered murenda, a local vegetable also called murere, or riwek in the local Nandi language. It tastes almost exactly like kong xin cai, but its appearance and texture are different. The leaves produce this gooey substance and if you don’t cook it long enough the leaves are slightly prickly. There is a local vegetable in Borneo called jungle fern that looks completely different from both murenda and kong xin cai, but tastes almost the same. Jungle fern is also gooey, and the edible parts are the leaves and young shoots, which end in a curly tendril. A plate of sautéed jungle fern looks like little green seahorse tails tossed with spinach.
Jenly turned me on to these. Then I realized at our cross-sector meeting that a lot of other volunteers use them, too, because we had a 15-minute roundtable discussion over dinner about pee bucket techniques. It’s just like it sounds – a plastic bucket you pee in.
When we went to Jenly’s site for Eco Day she announced enthusiastically that we were all welcome to share her pee bucket with her. The choo was a short hike from her house along an uneven dirt path, so peeing in her bucket was more convenient at night or whenever we felt lazy.
On my way home from her site, I stopped in Kapsabet and shopped for the perfect pee bucket – I was looking for just the right size and color, with a lid. I found a 5-L sea green one for 30 shillings, and when I got home, I immediately wrote Pee Bucket on it so that no one would decide to drink or wash their clothes in it. My own choo is only 25 yards from my house and has a light, so there has never been an issue of accidentally dropping the flashlight in there or crashing into a tree along the way. But it has always been one of the worst smelling family choos in Kenya, because I share it with three other adults and seven kids whose idea of using the choo is to use ANYPLACE in the choo (How exactly do you land a piece of poo right in the corner unless you’re firing it out of a cannon?) During the day the biggest flies in Africa, who happen to all live down inside my choo, find their way out of the hole and zoom around the stall buzzing at the top of their lungs. After awhile I just became impervious to the smells and the deafening hum and the pus-filled bodies crashing into my butt. The only thing that bothered me was that my clothes would be impregnated with the choo smell for hours even after a 30-second stint.
But the pee bucket has changed all that. Now I pour a few teaspoons of bleach and a cup of water into the bucket, and wait for it to fill up. It’s impressive how much fluid passes through me each day. It’s impressive how I no longer worry about whose body excretions I’m tracking from the choo into my house on the bottom of my flip flops, or whether the choo smell from my clothes is seeping through my skin into my bloodstream. Tonight I tried using my pee bucket as a poo bucket, after consulting with other Peace Corps pee bucket experts. The key is lining the bucket with a plastic bag. I’m not sure how I feel about it after only one experience. It was cool to lift a heavy bag of poo and wonder if the reason I walk so slow sometimes is that I’m carrying around a couple extra pounds of pure poo. It’s also cool to be able to poo anywhere in my house, or to be able to send text messages or write a letter while I’m on the bucket. But pooing in a place that’s not a toilet or choo seems incongruous with my limited ideas of proper poo sanitation.
If you visit me, you get to use the Guest Bucket.
2. Murenda
My favorite vegetable in the world is kong xin cai, also known as ying cai in Taiwan. It might also have an English name, water convolulous, whatever that is. I tried to plant some in my shamba but I think I planted them too early and they never germinated. Then I discovered murenda, a local vegetable also called murere, or riwek in the local Nandi language. It tastes almost exactly like kong xin cai, but its appearance and texture are different. The leaves produce this gooey substance and if you don’t cook it long enough the leaves are slightly prickly. There is a local vegetable in Borneo called jungle fern that looks completely different from both murenda and kong xin cai, but tastes almost the same. Jungle fern is also gooey, and the edible parts are the leaves and young shoots, which end in a curly tendril. A plate of sautéed jungle fern looks like little green seahorse tails tossed with spinach.
posted by Justina at 11:33 PM
1 Comments:
Wow.
You take Pee Buckets to a whole new level for me. Mine was a tiny thing, just for night/rainy-day use, and I lived in constant fear I'd be dumb enough to accidentally kick it over right after I filled it and be forced to mop my own urine off the floor...
But damn, was that thing handy...
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