A public holiday in the life of me...

... consists of the following:

• Sleep in a little, waking up at about 7:45am.
• Heat some water on the gas stove so I can take a bucket bath - it was only about 23C when I woke up this morning - MUCH too cold for a shower with cold water!
• Enjoy some coffee that Jackie made earlier with some bread and peanut butter.
• Hang my laundry, which I washed last night, out on the line to dry in the sun.
• Go to the office, check the email, distribute my powerpoint presentation that I made yesterday about the wonders of literacy work to the team that was leaving today.
• Pose for a few photos with the team that left today, bustle them all in the trucks and off to the airport. Once we got to the airport, I collected their paperwork, and gave the group an orientation to the procedure whilst Richard took care of the check-in etc. I was pretty proud of the way Richard and I handled the group in the airport - it's not an easy task to get a group of 10 people through that airport with all their luggage. I forgot what it's like to have a North American sized luggage allowance to travel with - they had SO much stuff! The procedure here is that you check in at one desk, then you beat your way through the crowd with all your luggage to the other side of the desk, where you pick up your bag and carry it to the security desk, where you open it up so the guys there can look through it all! So while Richard was doing the PR thing, I was handling the crowd and helping them get themselves to the right place at the right time. Thankfully, Richard saw one of his buddies there, and the buddy figured out the crowd was with him, so he let the whole group just put their bags in the pile of stuff going to Nairobi. Next, you take your papers over through the mob to the customs/immigration desk. There, you push your passport through to the guys sitting there, and while they stamp the passport, you sign your name and passport number on a list. Because Richard and I were trying to get them to process 10 passports at once, I just grabbed the list and took it over to a different counter. Richard then passed me each passport one by one and as they were being stamped, I was signing them onto the list (of course, the folks in the group were safely nestled out of the way in a corner!). Me and Richard made quite a good team, and got those folks through the airport in record time, with absolutely no hassle whatsoever! It was great!
• Returned from the airport and started doing some prep work for the Writer's Workshop that we're teaching next week here in Jb.
• Ate an amazing lunch of jacket potatoes, eggplants, tomatoe salad, coleslaw and pineapple!
• Answered some more emails about various bits and pieces, including an email to our friends from another NGO with advice about how to divide up billing for their generator.
• Drove the second truck with Richard to the tire repair place so we could get the new tires put on the old Hilux. Wow, what amazing tires they are! Maybe I'll even have to take a photo of them. Hung out with the Somalis a bit while they changed the tires.
• Drove with Richard in the second truck to the shop where they sell tires so we could buy a new one for our MCC neighbors whilst we were out. I was also in search of some milk. Of course, this being a public holiday, it was hard to find a place open that sold tires, and it was hard to find a place that sold milk (obviously the two items could not be found in the same place! But we finally found the tire, and off we went back to the Somalis who would then fix it to the rim.
  
• Still no milk. So I walked across the street from the tire repair place to look for milk. Yes, they had milk, but were charging 2 1/2 times the normal price! I didn't want milk THAT badly! (by the way, we're talking a tetra box of UHT milk, not nice fresh 1%!).
• Finally, the tires were ready on the Hilux, so I got the honour of taking the new tires on their maiden voyage whilst Richard waited for the MCC tire to get fixed. What a difference a new set of tires can make on a truck! Wow. Smooth ride, let me tell you... well, ok, as smooth as a ride can be on the roads here. You still need to make sure to wear a sports bra if you want to be comfortable... but maybe that's too much information... On the bright side, I DID manage to find some milk at the shop just a few blocks from our house :)
  
• Got back just in time to make use of the remaining hour of generator time to do some month-end admin stuff, as well as making a new ID card for one of our staff.

And that was how I spent my public holiday.