Day 73– Sep 10, 2005, Saturday: African Tea

We woke up and were excited for a Saturday breakfast. To our dismay, it was pancakes. We don’t mind the pancakes, they are great, but these were like Frisbees. Seriously, they would making a crack sound when you bit them, kinda like a Ritz cracker. They actually didn’t taste bad, it was more funny than anything.

After breaky Ruth took off to Walmart to load up on some last minute Africa stuff. Mosquito repellent, mosquito nets, batteries…stuff like that. The kids and I chose to hit the pool. It was awesome. Out of nowhere Jessika decided to try to dive. She didn’t just stand at the edge and sort of fall forward. She started from about 15 feet away, ran as fast as she could and launched herself headfirst toward the water. It was great. She is the talk of the town. Jonny has started wanting to swim without his floatie. He does really well. He freaks me out because he stays under the water about 20 seconds longer than you would expect. He tried a backwards dive today a few times (basically a belly flop on his back) luckily he was wearing a rash shirt so it didn’t sting too bad. I got a bit of a sunburn, but we had fun. Then we all came home, ate and slept. We need days like this after packing everything into the weeks.

We had corn dogs for dinner, a big win with me and the kids. After that, Ruth and some ladies headed for the kitchen to make some breads and cookies. I can’t wait til she gets back so I can sample. Of course, the kids and I went to the pool again. Jessika tried out her new dive another 30 or 40 times. We played ball tag with a bunch of folks in the pool. Our version of ball tag is basically throwing the ball as hard as you can at someone else. It’s a pretty soft ball, but it gets interesting.

At about 10pm we went to an African Tea that our friend Timothy invited us to. Apparently the youngest African makes tea and the rest dance the night away. They planned on being out until about 1am. We just stopped by for about an hour. The tea was a real strong sweet, minty shot, kind of like espresso. It took timothy about 10 minutes of pouring and mixing and piling in sugar to make it. Ruth got into the dancing a little bit, but I’m saving my moves for Uganda.

Here is Timothy brewing

Here's Ruth jammin'