Tala

Kenya, Rants

If you own a restaurant or store and you’re planning to sell cold drinks, Coca Cola will give you a free refrigerator. I guess it’s a good deal but there’s one condition: you can only stock Coca Cola products in the fridge. Sure, Coca Cola’s product line includes something for everyone (even water, Dasani!), but don’t even think about sticking a 7-up or a left-over hamburger in there, man! I’ve been paying attention for a few weeks now and I can’t remember seeing this rule violated. Certainly, the little store at our college has a small fridge and you’d never catch us stocking it with anything but Coca Cola products. The same goes for all the cafes I frequent in Tala.

I wonder what the consequence is if you get caught with an Alvaro (soda from East African Breweries), a Red Bull, or a 7-up in your Coca Cola fridge? Who knows, but it cracks me up to think about the plethora of laws broken every day all over Kenya. To name a few:

  • Urinating in public (possibly even on the “No Peeing” sign)
  • Littering! (usually next to the “Keep Kenya Clean” sign)
  • Smoking in public (yes, it’s illegal)
  • Carrying extra passengers in matatus (public transport vehicles)
  • Bribing police

It’s pretty comical, but is the Coca Cola man really that scary? Could an encounter with the big, bad Coca Cola man be worse than a fine for peeing on a wall? What about being sent to jail for stealing (or worse, mob justice)?

Kenya, Teaching

Two of my three classes finished today and they’ll take their exams next week. I didn’t have any failures last semester but this time around we had some irregularities. For instance, the students reported to school two weeks late! I don’t know why, but they did. The IT instructors had assumed this meant we’d have two weeks tacked onto the end of the semester but we were wrong to assume. When I thought we were halfway done with the semester we learned that we only had two weeks left. Ahhh! So I had to rush my last assignments, tests, and lectures, but I think I managed OK.

One metric I have is the number of students who correctly answer a certain question on my final test; last semester every student got it incorrect. I’m not sure what I did differently this time, but everyone got it correct. Woohoo! It’s a simple logic-based programming question and I ask them what the following code should print when it is executed: Continue Reading

Animals, Kenya

By now most of you know that I run a small animal shelter out of my house here in Kenya (I guess I am following in my friend Marg’s footsteps). I made a fun little discovery in my house last night. “Fun” being that it was a scorpion. “Little” being that it was hardly an inch long. My camera is completely worthless these days so all I have is this terrible picture. I poked him and he definitely tried to sting my toothbrush with his tail. Who knows what other tiny monsters are lurking around my house… ahhh!!!