One Shot Entries for Various Challenges

Summer Shorts - Summer Friends

Mid-year school break always meant a road trip to our grandparents' home, many kilometres away from the city. I enjoyed the trip, despite the sauna-like conditions of our old car as the hot African sun transformed it into a baking dish. I especially liked when we drove past the tea farms, a sea of bright green leaves all the way to the horizon. The tea pickers were the mermaids of this land-based sea, carrying baskets that were larger than their lean bodies on their back and filling them with repeated pickings of two leaves and a bud.

Many backseat battles and peace treaties later, we roll through inky darkness into our grandparents' compound. For the last few metres of the trip I usually forsake the confining safety of my seatbelt and turn around to look behind the car. There are no streetlights here. Only the deep red glow of the taillights, like animated eyes straining to see through the seemingly solid blackness. It's breathtaking. When the taillights are off, however, the spectacular show of starlight begins, as if the sky has a point to prove. It has no need to. I've always loved it here. Way more than the city.

Golden light spills from the houses built in a sort of semicircle near the place baba always parks our car. The kitchens are the best lit, with both firewood and soft electric lamps. Nights are always the toughest. It's why baba purposefully ignores all our pleas for food during the long trip here. The first night is easily the toughest. With two grandmas, it is our imperative as dutiful grandchildren to fill up on two dinners. And because our arrival is, for whatever reason, cause for celebration, the first night's dinners are usually more like feasts, rather than meals.

Our younger grandma has a mastery over spices, wielding them with elegant flare in all her dishes. However, the trueness and simplicity of the other meal, with the exact same dishes, makes for a wonderful juxtaposition to the tastebuds. It might be a battle to fill my belly with all this food, but I live for it. I'm always certain to grow at least half a foot each time I visit this place. Sometimes it's horizontally, but I don't mind.

My cousins and I spend half of the day playing soccer with a battered ball that doesn't hold much air anymore, no matter how many times you try and pump it up. I suspect it has a hole. Or holes. But every four on four match we've had so far has been as important as any World Cup Finals match, so there's no time to worry about trivial details like that. The other half of the day is spent finding new ways to tease me for being a city kid. It's never malicious. Just tiresome.

In school, back in the city, we get punished for speaking our mother tongue. Here, I get "punished" for speaking English or Swahili. It always amazes me how my mind easily slides back into speaking the local language after a year, but as expected, it's never perfect. My intonation and vocabulary are always rusty at the beginning of the holiday, only to achieve perfection at the end, right before we leave to go back home. It's a cruel fate. A few days into the holiday, I'm usually over all the jokes being made at my expense. I had a plan though. Something I did every time I came here, at least for the last four years, from when I was six.

As with every night, my food coma rolled into sleeping through the night, my full stomach fuelling fantastic dreams. However, unlike other mornings, this time I wake up very early. Early enough to beat the sun. I lay on my bed for a little while, waiting for the sun to catch up. Once there's even an inkling of the sun's rays peeking through the translucent curtains, I begin to gently extricate myself from the entanglement of limbs that is the sleepover of cousins and neighbourhood kids on several mattresses pushed together against each other to create a giant bed. My cousins tell me this is only allowed when we come from the city for the holidays, but I know no different. It's how I've always fallen asleep here.

I accidentally step on an arm. Or shin. Everyone is scrawny enough for both to look the same, and it's still pretty dark. I stop, waiting to see if the limb's owner will wake up. I shouldn't have worried. The Kool Aid Man could crash through the bedroom wall and only a few of the boys would stir, to get more comfortable in their slumber.