New Rituals

I have become accustomed to new rituals and things that I can no longer think of as everyday. Today I want to take a look at these and give you a little insight into my new world of rituals and adaptations.

Recently, my friend said to me, "Now you're eating like the Kenyan without a bake!" Well, that's true. I still use the dish a lot, but I always catch myself eating my beans or vegetable pots with Chapati or Ugali, and all with my hands. It's a foolish change to eat with your hands again. Why again? Well, when we were kids, we all started touching the food with our hands and fingers and then eating. That's the most natural of all natural things. At some point in our early childhood, we get distracted in our culture and we eat with snacks. In the meantime, it is easy for me to eat with my hands again, and I also learned in patience, because holding a hot chapati with hot beans in my fingers is another challenge.

Washing hands before eating has also become an absolute ritual for me. In each restaurant you will find a washbasin or a water tank with soap and napkins. Before and after each meal, hands are thoroughly washed, and then eating with hands is one of the hygienic things. You like to go here to wash your hands, because either they are located directly in the restaurant or they come to you at the table, where you then wash their hands in a bowl. In Austria, I would never have stood up in the restaurant before, went to the lobby and washed my hands.

Toothbrushing after eating is not uncommon, and this is done directly at the table. Very discreet, but at table. No one gets up and goes to the toilets to brush their teeth.

Let's stay for dinner. We don't own a stove. No, we don't eat raw either. We've got a gas bottle and we're cooking on it. Our gas bottle has a “hardening plate” directly above the opening, on which we have a pot space. I'm an absolute fast cook, well, that's not inside anymore. Now it can take 30 minutes before I have my pasta on my plate. I also learned that you can't always cook all the gas. Very often it happens to me that the water from the rice has already evaporated, but the rice is even more than crunchy boiled.

The question always arises whether I actually wash the laundry with my hands. Yeah, and everything. Whether towels, jackets, shoes, blankets or bed linen: we wash everything with our hands. Good music and motivation help a lot. The laundry will then be hanged on the washing line on the balcony in our case. But we also have laundry lines hanging in the courtyard of our house that we can use for larger things. In the countryside, people hang their clothes on bushes or on the roofs of houses.

Our door doesn't have a normal door lock, no, we use a curtain lock. It still feels inclined to walk through the area with a small curtain lock when I leave the house. Our door is made of metal and can be locked down again, so we are safer than safe. We also have a guard and an entrance to the entire facility.