Shopping Day....actually Waiting Day

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So we have the new volunteer center, but no furnishings. We’re starting a clinic for the school and community, and an art project and program in the school, but we have no supples. We have a big celebration coming up on Saturday, but no decorations. Today was our day to take a driver and car to Kisumu, 2 hours away, and do some MAJOR shopping. Even in a car, the road was extremely rough. The scenery was extremely beautiful. My bum was extremely sore and my legs extremely cramped from sitting on a worn-out back seat for 2 hours. We started off really good - got tons of notebooks and school and art supplies for the kids at a great deal (I’m calling Todd “The Magic Man” from now on). Stopped at a pharmacy wholesale store and got most of the medical supplies for our clinic. Stopped at a fabric store and got a huge roll of mosquito netting and fabric for the art project. Things were flying off our list. Then we hit the Nakumatt (major department store, like a Wal-mart Supercentre) and it kind of went downhill. We need 16 bunkbeds, 2 single beds and 3 double beds for the volunteer centre, but after looking at the prices, Charles said he could get a local carpenter to construct them at about a third of the price. So we picked out mattresses and moved onto the next item - dressers. Again the prices were ok, but the carpenter doing the beds could do the same thing, for a fraction of the cost, and then everything matches, right. Okay we need linens for the beds - well we have 5 sewing machines, and sheets are a great beginner project, so we’ll just get fabric. But now that we need to pay the carpenter with cash, and Kisumu’s Forex is about as accommodating as the ones in Nairobi, which is close to zero, and the money transfer from Cristelle hasn’t arrived into the bank account yet, we can’t really buy much else today. So we ended up waiting a lot (did I mention that everything here in Kenya takes a kazillion times longer than it should?), getting a few decorations, some hardware to get the internet set up on all the laptops, 4 bottles of wine, cranky, tired, sticky and stinky, so it was definitely time to go home. We had tentatively planned another shopping day later in the week to catch a couple things we missed, I guess it’ll just be a full day there too. We got home by 7, showered, ate and now I’m catching up on the much needed blogging. My cold isn’t getting better, or worse, so it’s definitely time for bed. Todd said Heather and I can sleep in again tomorrow, as we’d planned a full day of assembling beds and furniture, which now doesn’t need to be done. Oh, but I’m sure we’ll still find lots of things to do, after we both cure the crankiness with a good night’s sleep.

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