Cheese!

So this is my last week in Kenya!

This weekend, for the first time, I made cheese.

One evening I’d bought a liter of fresh-from-the-udder milk and was boiling it to make cocoa, as I normally do. But it smelt a bit cheesey and started to separate. In stead of giving it all up as a bad Job I carried on boiling it until the whye looked clear and then sivved it through a (clean) white T-shirt.

The whey is still in the fridge, anyone know what it’s good for?

The cheese was bagel-quality cream-chese! Yum!

Also this weekend I went to visit the home of Mr Kioko, the accomplished catapault maker and system’s administrator who has featured on these pages in the past. A long journey in two vehicles over, in part, bumpy marram roads. The return journey was half in darkness and by about 8pm we turned onto the road that leads to Kangundo (6Km from Tala and last stop before home) and the vehicle puttered to a standstill. The conductor ran off into the darkness with a can to get fuel.

Good that we were almost home; better that we were close to Kangundo (I’d not much have liked to have been stranded out in the wilds between here and Machakos); best that we got in another vehicle and left the quiet bus standing there.

When back to Tala I still had to bicycle back to Holy Rosary, Kioko accompanied me; he seems to have some sort of genetic night-vision. I was using kind of intuitive proximity to him and his bike in order to keep on the road. At one point I squeezed my one working break like my life depended on it, to avoid some animal that was running in front of us.

“What did you think that was?”, he asked.
“I’m not sure”, I replied panting with effort of catching up with him again.
“It was a paper bag”.

Hmm.

Then I learned that his nocturnal navigation was as much a matter of faith as my own. A cyclist coming in the other direction almost hit him. Here’s how: the guy was on the wrong side of the road, but riding on the tarmac. So he passed between Kioko, who was keeping to the left, and the edge of the road on his left. At the endge of the road there is an inch or two drop(!) to the dirt so nobody really wants to go there in the dark at speed. This guy appeared from nowhere right in front of us and heading at a lick! He passed us in a wind. Kioko swore. We went on laughing and decrying the mad wrong-side-of-the-road guy, but I was still straining to see anything in front of me and wishing there was a moon.