By Claire Meriwether
From July 4
Our team is cooking breakfast for dinner on the Fourth of July, and almost all the ingredients are all there for the meal – it’s just the eggs that are missing. No problem, I think to myself, I’ll just hop down to the duka for the eggs. Dukas are the little shops that you find along the roadside (though they look tiny, do not be deceived – the shelves can be packed with items from sodas to toothbrushes, flour to laundry soap). So I take a quick shower, pull on some clean clothes, grab my little cloth backpack and head on down the dirt hill towards the nearest duka. I ask a friend what the Kiswahili word for ‘eggs’ is before leaving. Mayai mayai mayai. I repeat what I have learned for the duration of the 5 minute walk, just to make sure the word doesn’t leave my mind before I have a chance to impress the shop-owner with my new vocabulary.
I arrive outside the duka, and proudly ask for some mayai. The owner smiles when I use my new vocab word, but tells me that there are no eggs there today. No problem, I think to myself, I’ll just push on to the next duka. Four dukas down the road, I am still eggless. The doctor is sitting outside the clinic when I go by, and I explain my predicament. He laughs and tells me that I will just have to get my exercise and walk down to the market. And with that I realize that my 10 minute trip for eggs will turn out to be nearly 2 hours.
Near the back of the market is where I am finally able to buy the large quantity of eggs that we need. The eggs are placed in a plastic bag, which I then place in my little backpack. The market, as always, is chock full of people walking rapidly in all directions, vendors calling and reaching out, men pushing rickety wooden carts that are empty going up the hill and overflowing with bunches of bananas coming back down the hill as they set off to deliver the produce to households. It is impossible to not be jostled and pushed in this thick crowd of people, something that never really bothered me until I found myself standing there with a knapsack full of eggs. Precious eggs for which I had already travelled about an hour, precious eggs which were needed for dinner that night. I assume my most athletic stance, taking the knapsack in front of my body and boxing out with my elbows (thanks for showing me how it’s done, Plumlee brothers). I want a sign to hang on my bag that said something like, I’m not crazily overprotective of this bag, and I’m not a mistrusting person, it’s just that I have 30 eggs in this backpack right now and I really want to make it home with all of the shells still very much intact.
As I gingerly navigated my way back out of the market and started my trek back up the main road, my first thought was that this will be the story I tell myself back on campus the next time I am frustrated that I have to take the time to go all that way to Target or Whole Foods for just one little thing. The eggs and I did make it home, and scrambled eggs will forever be associated with the Fourth of July for me now.
