Carpenting

Sam, Jo and I spent about seven hours today acquiring materials for and building wooden solar ovens. We had no kit, and no instructions or guidelines other than some basic passive solar theory. The only electric-powered tool we had was a drill. It was tough. Things were fun, and then they were frustrating, and then everyone was swearing every 30 seconds or so, and then we actually started feeling a sense of accomplishment, and then things got silly, and now I'm pretty sure that I could sell a garden gnome I made myself for maybe §40, if you know what I mean. Joseph, a cool young Maasai man and our "field assistant" for MAE 436 (although we spend no time in the field for this course), showed up to help us out (although our prof was absent for the entirety of the construction). Around the sixth hour, he began improvising some lovely little ditties that I greatly appreciated, both because they mentioned African wildlife and conveyed a sense of violence.

The lyrics of the first, Big Lion, were as follows:

Big lion, in that bush, but I will hit him with my big stick.
(repeat ad nauseum)

His later work included a variation of Big Lion:

Big lion, in that bush, and when he sees us we run like deer.

After Josephine pointed out that acting like a deer is not the best way to make yourself insusceptible to lion attacks, it reached its final form:

Big lion, in that bush, and we will run like lightening
(giggle at the absurdity of running like lightening,
which I suppose isn't done in Kenya, at least not idiomatically)

Although we made it through many refrains of Big Lion, and a few of Big Elephant, my favorite was the hyena song:

Hyena with one short leg and lots of sharp teeth. One bite, one kilo of donkey.

This was only sung a few times, and was usually followed by an admonition to be very afraid of hyenas. Even if they inexplicably have one short leg.

Right-o, then, I have a thesis funding report to be nursing along. By which I mean, I am going to sleep now.