Ona lighter note….I had an interesting experience while in our little village outside of Kitale. I accidentally got addicted to nicotine…yea, that stuff in cigarettes!You may ask, “how can you accidentally get addicted to nicotine?” Well, let me tell you this little story…
Everymorning we had “Tea Time”. I LOVED tea time, like I couldn’t wait to have breakfast so I could get more of this tea. In
Kenya, they call their “tea” “chai”. So we had brought to us an abundance of this chai. And this chai was so good I could never have just one cup…that was absurd! By the end of our month, every morning I was downing up to three cups (and I like to use the largest mug I can get my hands on, so they were big cups) of this chai. This always posed a problem because we would go out into our door-to-door evangelism and I would be dying to use the bathroom, aka squatty potties. I never thought I would want to use a squatty potty as bad as I would on these days because my bladder was so full of this chai.
Well,fast forward a couple weeks later. We are in Tanzania and I am sitting with a friend from another team talking about how I would do almost anything for a Kenyan cup of chai at that moment. And that’s when I found out why my little tea addiction was so extreme. She was telling me how she recognized that the stimulant
in this tea wasn’t caffeine but she couldn’t figure out what it was. So she asked her contact what was the stimulant in the chai tea and they just casually responded, “oh, that’s nicotine.” What!!!
