I'll Get Used To The Shouts Of 'Muzungu!' From Car Windows

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Outside in the courtyard of the orphanage, Vikta is wearing my sunglasses, and Sandi keeps wandering into the room forlornly because he wants his "sister" - after two days and a very long evening walk to the fruit market, this is his preferred name for me - to come out and play again. This might just be impossible as I am actually melting into the leather chair I'm typing from. Nothing could have prepared me for the brightness of the sun, the astounding vividness of everything, from the colour-coded city buses decorated with sparkling decals of the driver's favourite football team (and in one case a fluorescent portrait of Barack Obama, who seems to be a bit of a semi-local hero) to the kaleidoscope of mangoes, avocados and bananas which cost the equivalent of five cents apiece at the cheapest fruit stands. Knowing practically no Swahili aside from the words for 'fox', 'welcome', 'fine, thank you' and 'can you recommend a good restaurant' turns out to be much more of a barrier than I thought, but it's turning out to be very easy to bond with the kids at the orphanage as long as you've got chalk and a working knowledge of superheroes. However, I do learn a lot of new words every day, last night's very useful and applicable addition being 'hakuna mende, asante'. Meaning 'No cockroaches, thank you'. It was so kind of the guest house to include a veritable ecosystem free with the room.Outsmarting the most perfectly-evolved creature in the world (supposedly it's the cockroaches who will survive long after we humans fail to adapt and die out. After the past 48 hours I do not doubt this) turns out to be a very difficult task, so you take pride in the smallest victories. Last night I experienced a swelling o the chest akin to that of being the archer who saw his arrow land with a thunk in William the Conqueror's eye - are we somehow related? - when I soaked my extra washcloth in bug repellent and tied it tightly around the hole underneath the sewage pipe into which I had just watched three of my brown glossy nemeses disappear...and we had NO roaches last night. Thank you. Thankyaverymuch. We didn't even have any phantom cockroaches, as in the night before when Lydia shook me awake and in a doxycycline-addled voice shrieked "IT'S.....RIGHT....THERE!" Luckily I haven't noticed any effects of my own malaria pills (except I could swear I saw a billboard move on the way back from the airport. I felt it probably wasn't a good idea to mention it though), but I actually had to turn on my flashlight and reassure her in a tone easily recognised by most mothers of five-year-olds that there were no monsters under the bed and no cockroaches in the mosquito net. As our flock continues to arrive one by one, with every bumpy ride in the back of the battered blue HOCEF pickup we have to figure out how we're possibly going to fit one more person in the bed. I've shuttled back and forth to the airport seven times now; in a country where seatbelts and road signs are just whimsical ornamental touches, this is always a rather exhilarating experience. Now Sandi is tugging at my trouser leg, so I'm sort of required to conclude because it seems to be a matter of life and death that he shows me the lion he drew on the steps outside, NOW. Tutaonana ('see you later')

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