good morning, Bungoma

It's 8:30 am, and I'm sitting in my bed in my pajamas typing up results from the productive asset survey, when I hear a chicken in the hallway, and then see it appear in my doorway. The scene unfolds: the chicken ducks into refuge under my bed, and I lean out from under my mosquito net and gather a few shoes, which I throw under the bed, hard, one at a time, to encourage its departure. The chicken is squawking loudly and indignantly; I'm yelling at the chicken ("This is my BEDROOM, chicken, have some respect for my privacy!") and I can hear our guard laughing outside my window.

Finally I get out of bed, put on pants, and chase the chicken into the hallway, where it has been leaving an especially large amount of droppings during the past few days - a fact that does not increase my patience with it. I get back into bed, and then I can hear Jake's cat hissing, and there it is, in my kitchen, having a face off with the chicken near the sink. I shoo them both out, and when they are gone they leave in their wake a trail of chicken shit and a single egg.

* * *

Rewinding another 12 hours, I finished Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen last night. Here's a look at page 253: (warning - take a deep breath and get into serious mode; this is not exactly suitable for a chicken-story follow-up)

There was in my time a law against bringing a wagon or cart on the roads without a brake, and the wagon-drivers were supposed to put on the brakes down all the long hills of the country. But the law was not kept; half the wagons and carts on the roads had no brakes to them, and on the others the brakes were but rarely put on. This made downhill work terribly hard on the oxen…. I have many times seen the carts of the firewood merchants which came along the Ngong Road, going to Nairobi the one after the other, like a long caterpillar, gain speed down the hill in the Forest Reserve, the oxen violently zigzagging down in front of them. I have also seen the oxen stumble and fall under the weight of the cart, at the bottom of the hill.

The oxen thought: “Such is life and the conditions of the world. They are hard, hard. It has all to be borne, -- there is nothing for it. It is a terribly difficult thing to get the carts down the hill, it is a matter of life and death. It cannot be helped.”

If the fat Indians of Nairobi, who owned the carts, could have brought themselves to pay two Rupees and have the brakes put in order, or if the slow young Native driver on the top of the loaded cart, had had it in him to get off and put on the brake, if it was there, then it could have been helped, and the oxen could have walked quietly down the hill. But the oxen did not know, and went on, day after day, in their heroic and desperate struggle, with the conditions of life.