Two Cokes and a Fanta

Aoife was initially planning to leave Edundja on Tuesday, but the school staff had organized a party for both me and Aoife for Wednesday, so she ended up staying an extra day. Funny enough, even though it was not a surprise party, no one really talked about it to us. Only Kavungo. At the staff meeting the week prior, he excused Aoife and I from the meeting early to discuss the last agenda item, which was Contributions. The party was not going to start until 4p, so Aoife and I went to Hangala’s to watch satellite TV before heading over. Wow, with both of the village celebs in town, I was experiencing the high life – hot water at home and CNN at Aoife’s! Disappointingly, after 10 minutes of BBC, CNN and Al-Jazeera, I realized how little had changed in the news cycle since I left the US. Watching the news is a bit like watching soapies – nothing ever changes, but you keep on watching. We flipped around a bit before turning off the TV, but thought that it was hilarious that 90210 re-runs were on.

At 4p we headed to Kandja’s bottle store and were the first to arrive. Shai and Johanna were there to braii the meat, but no one else was there. Soon, people started to show up and I learned that this is the first time that the entire staff of the school has gotten together, outside of school. Some of the primary school teachers came as well – Johnson, Delicious, Soini, Teodore – as well as the retired pastor and several others. Jonnah became "Mr. Cash" because Kavari took up a collection of change for the jukebox and put him in charge. We took lots of photos. Kavari commented that one of the pictures of me between her and Maria was “Two Cokes and a Fanta”. Obviously, I was Fanta. There was lots of dancing, beers kept coming and we stayed out until around 10:30p. We walked home in the dark with Kavungo and Esther accompanying us half way.