The Cake Day

When Anastasia, the head mistress of Compass Foundation, was explaining different things about the school to us, she came to the kitchen where she picked up these little tin bowls shaped as hearts. She told us that they used to bake cakes for the children before they ran out of funding for the ingredients. So now the children get one very conservative scoop of beans and maiz a day which, for some of them, is all they may recieve until the next day. I just couldn't get my mind off these cakes and before we left I made sure to ask Anastasia for the ingredients. I had decided that I wanted to bring back the cakes, even if for just one day as a special treat and all the ingredients came to under fifteen dollars in which Nicole and I split. It's amazing, you can literally feed an army of children for fifteen bucks. When I had envisioned the children feasting on the delicious little cakes I never really thought of the preperation and who would do the brunt of the work. Turns out that we were. And the conditions? Well lets just say they were like nothing you'ld ever find in Canada. The kitchen is the most backward and shack-like thing you can imagine. Constructed with a tin roof and walls held together with a basic wood frame and one window (and not a window with glass haha heavens no! I guess it's more of a square hole with planks of wood on hinges if one so desired to close the window) cut jaggedly into the tin wall. Theres also a point of entry (a larger hole) but other than that there is no ventilation. The kitchen contains: a double burner stove, a fire heated oven, three wooden tables for food prep and counter space (one on each wall, except for the wall with the stove and oven, which left a considerably small amount of walking space) and a small closest filled with broken cleaning tools and mismatched dishes etc. The first thing to do was get the fire started for the oven and stove so each was loaded up with long pieces of fire wood and the burning limbs hung rather dangerously out of the small fire compartments of the stove and oven. All the while the kitchen filled up with the vast amount of smoke produced from the fire. At first this was unmanageable, my eyes would tear up and my throat would burn to the point where I had to thrust myself out of the kitchen and gasp for fresh air. The cooks always got a good laugh out of that. The cooks, by the way, spoke no english so conversing was always full of hand gestures. There was one parent that was helping out, however, and she did speak English and sometimes translated for us. So the next arduous task was washing the ancient and long since used tins. Instead of placing the tins in the closest, the sensible place to put unused items, they had been littered on the counter tops but mostly on the floor behind the oven. And so along came the cooks with long straw brooms and swept out all the tins from the corner along with lumps of dirt and filth. Then the tins were carted out to another cook who scrubbed them in a tub of hot, soapless water. Once the tins were "clean" they  were brought back into the kitchen for our disposal. So while all this hustling and bustling was happening Nicole and I mixed the ingredients for our wonderful cakes. Three cups (a literal drinking cup) of Not For Sale Kenya Government Vegetable Oil which Anastasia supplied us with. Then 2 kg of sugar, 3 litres of milk, a kg of margerin, two packets of strawberry drink mix (for colour), three bags of flour, 12 eggs and lastly water measured out by the cooks. I think they added about three litres. The water, by the way, was brought in from a cart pulled by a donkey lead by a rather angsty Kenyan man. The water had to be purchased for 120 shillings, roughly a dollar fifty. The consistency of the mix was similar to that of pancake batter. The next task was not pretty. We had to oil each tin (fifty per batch) by hand. This government not for sale oil had become chunky and solid, down right revolting and even worse when you had to dip your fingers into it. Next we filled each tin with a table spoon of batter and popped it into the oven aall the while we would dash outside to breath fresh air whenever our lungs became to filled with smoke. When the first batch came out of the oven we realized we had not oiled the tins enough and so before we could use the tins agian we had to scrape the cake remnents out. I was handed a pair of broken scissors (from the ground haha) and Nicole a dull buck knife. The saying appropriate here is T.I.A or This Is Africa haha. Oil, fill, scrape, gasp for air, repeat, repeat, repeat.... We did this from 9:30 til 3:00. By the end of the day I hardly even noticed the smoke in the kitchen or the complete shade of black that my hands had taken on. The Swahili chatter from the cooks was really quite melodic. It was a true taste of Kenya. So just as we were finishing up with the last batch we began to hand out the treats! I felt like I was a disciple complaining to Jesus saying "there are still 200 children left to feed and we've already given away half of the cakes!" but miraculously there were over fifty cakes left at the end of the distribution. Thank-you God! And thus concludes the wonderful Cake Day.

                           
                                These pics should give you and idea of the kitchen and it the smoke