peregrine by nature

Don’t come to Africa if you think you have nothing to learn here. Take the west with all its time saving gadgets and falsely modest claims of the workaholic and see that it is yet unsatisfied, as empty as a vacuum.
One of the Rats of Nimh on the short story, The Rat Race

“It was about a woman in a small town who bought a vacuum cleaner. Her name was Mrs. Jones, and up until then she, like all her neighbors, had kept her house spotlessly clean by using a broom and a mop. But the vacuum cleaner did it faster and better, and soon Mrs. Jones was the envy of all the other housewives in town- so they bought vacuum cleaners, too.

The vacuum cleaner business was so brisk, in fact, that the company that made them opened a branch factory in town. The factory used a lot of electricity, of course, and so did the women with their vacuum cleaners, so the local electric power company had to put up a big new plant to keep them all running. In its furnaces the power plant burned coal, and out of its chimneys black smoke poured day and night, blanketing the town with soot and making all the floors dirtier than ever. Still, by working twice as hard and twice as long the women of the town were able to keep their floors almost as clean as they had been before Mrs. Jones ever bought a vacuum cleaner in the first place.

…the reason I had read it so eagerly was that it was called “The Rat Race”- which, I learned, means a race where, no matter how fast you run, you don’t get anywhere. But there was nothing in the book about rats, and I felt bad about the title because, I thought, it wasn’t a rat race at all, it was a People Race…”

Attaya, or gunpowder tea is strong, sweet tea served in tiny glassfuls in a 3 round ritual. Water is boiled on a fuurnu with a small packet of tea leaves and a full kas of sugar, each round with added sugar to symbolize the growing sweetness of friendship. Or, alternatively, the first bitter round is for life, the second for friendship and the third is the sweetest, for love. The tea is poured impossibly high from kas to kas, up to a two foot arc without spilling a drop. This creates delicious foam. Return warga to fuurnu and bring back to a boil. Serve scalding hot. Second and third rounds add mint.

When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then – that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it.
–CS Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet