The Holidays, My New Flat-mate and Other Random Stuff

                Happy New Year to everyone! Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Year’s holiday. Life here has been somewhat boring as of late. Or I guess as boring as it ever gets when you’re living in a third world country…
       Sorry in advance for the photos this week being so teeny-tiny. For whatever reason the interface to upload is being painfully slow and refuses to upload anything over 60 kB... therefore, thumbnail sized photos. Hopefully it will get its act together before my next blog and I can re-post some of the pictures in sizes that can be viewed without the aid of a high powered microscope.

    My Christmas was fantastic. I spent the holiday at my friend Hannah’s house just under 2 hours to the North of me. It was the first Christmas party I’ve ever really helped organize and I think it went pretty well. We cooked for 12 people on 2 burners (one a gas stove and the other a charcoal one) and managed to (a) not burn anything (b) not serve anything cold (c) have enough food for everyone but not so much that we wasted (no fridge for leftovers…) and (d) not kill each other or anyone else. This last fact is the most impressive for me as I tend to be… shall we say, perfectionistic (you could also say, controlling, impatient, psychotic, or a slew of any other synonyms for bitchy), when it comes to planning and executing things like cooking Christmas dinner for more people than can be counted on one hand. At one point I did have to tell someone that I loved them but they needed to get the hell out of the kitchen if they weren’t going to help. Luckily they understood and left before there was any bloodshed.

         Speaking of which, we did slaughter a chicken for Christmas. Hannah killed it (knife to throat while standing of the wings and feet), another volunteer plucked all the feathers (dunk in boiling water then tediously pull every single feather out) and I “butchered” it. That word is in quotes because I had no idea what I was doing… and I did it with my dissection kit. Yes, I brought a dissection kit with me to Kenya and yes, I used it to butcher a chicken for Christmas dinner. I know I’m weird, hopefully someday I’ll actually get paid to work and have some money in the bank and then we can just call me ‘eccentric’ instead. Anyhow, I was really excited about the prospect of practicing my scalpel skills and it was admittedly fun taking apart the chicken… for the first half hour… then I was just annoyed. By the time I got all the meat off the bones and the rest separated for making stock I didn’t even feel like playing with the heart, which is usually my favorite part. Plus, no one seemed as enthused about the anatomy lesson I was dying to give as I’d originally hoped. 

Me with a chicken leg, mid butchering



                       Nonetheless, the point remains, Christmas dinner went off without a hitch, which is seriously saying something when you consider what we were working with. Hannah and I bought all the food beforehand and carried it in backpacks a few miles around town and then for 45 minutes on a matatu (public transportation vehicles here… think soccer mom minivan with 18 people shoved inside). We also walked 3 miles to town the morning before and bought 4 dozen eggs, which I carried the 3 miles back to her house in a cardboard box alternating between carrying it in my arms and balancing it on my head. Arrived home with all 48 eggs intact, thank you very much!

                Other than eating a ton of good food, the Christmas holiday was also wonderful because I got to spend a few days being an American, with other Americans, pretending we weren’t tens of thousands of miles away from home during the holidays. It’s really hard to explain just how needed that time with the other volunteers is to you. I don’t know if you can fully understand how lonely it is at site sometimes. It’s that whole “I’m standing in a room full of people but I feel all alone” thing. I see people every day (whether I want to or not and some days I really don’t want to) but I very rarely actually get to be myself. I’m a buttoned-up, skirt wearing, woman be-friending (most of my friends back home are men), culturally appropriate version of myself which can wear really thin. To have a few days to go and talk about stuff we never get to talk about at site, like how much we miss American food (mine: sushi, tofu, good cheese, candy without gelatin in it, Jack Daniels) TV, family gatherings, the weather, normal dating, sex (sorry Dad, Grandma,Grandpa… just pretend you didn’t read that last one), stupid pop culture crap, music, our cars… I could go on and on, but you get the idea. Having other people who can empathize with you is indescribably important over here.

                All in all, I have to say that my first Peace Corps Christmas was one of the best holidays I’ve had. It’s amazing how fast the other volunteers have become my family here. So, even though I missed all of you, I wasn’t lonely or sad on Christmas, I was spending it with my new family here.



The boys had a slightly different interpretation of what an ugly Christmas sweater was...



Some of the group with kids from near Hannah's house





                New Year’s was another story. I was supposed to go to another volunteer party near Lake Victoria… but I woke up the morning of to travel and felt like absolute hell. I really wanted to go so I stuck out packing and getting ready for about a half hour until I started puking, then decided a 4-5 hour matatu ride followed by an hour and a half on a ferry seemed like a bad idea. So, I spent New Year’s Eve at site, by myself, feeling like crap. Luckily I had Boo to keep me company and wasn’t actually too upset about missing the festivities.

                Boo, by the way, is my new kitten. She was living on Hannah’s farm (her mom was killed somehow) and I fell in love with her over Christmas and decided to bring her home. Oh, I forgot to add into the Christmas party story that I had to, on Christmas, go get a rabies shot because Boo accidentally bit my thumb. I say accidentally because it really wasn’t her fault; I was a dumbass and fed her fish out of a margarine lid I was holding in my hand… after having broken the dried fish up with my fingers.. ie, my thumb smelled like food and was within range to be mistaken for a fish. Given my aversion to needles and the fact that it was Christmas, I was not a happy camper about it (many tears were shed at the hospital). It does go to show how in love I was with the cat though, as I still wanted to take her home with me.

One of Boo's favorite sleeping spots.

                Boo is adjusting well to her life in my tiny house. I’m not sure how old she is but 6-8 weeks seems like a solid guess. Accordingly, she has 2 modes right now. She is either running around my house like a psycho with Puss-n-Boots eyes and her fur puffed out attacking everything she can reach, or she is asleep. There is no middle ground, which means I alternate between thinking she is a complete pain in the ass (I’ve begun referring to her as ‘sumbua’ [sue-m-boo-ah] at these times, it means ‘bother’ in Swahili) and thinking she is the cutest friggen thing I’ve ever seen. I’ve also “litter box” trained her. There is no litter here so she has a box with newspaper in it (as a consequence Boo is actually forcing me to pay attention to current events since I have to buy a paper a couple times a week now). I’m pretty sure she’s a genius because she figured it out in one try and hasn’t pooped or peed anywhere else since the first time she peed on the floor and I said ‘no’, put her in the litter box and put the tissue I used to wipe the pee up in there with her. She also understands “no” already and comes when I call her. Plus, she was passed around over Christmas between a dozen drunk and rowdy people in the midst of three constantly fighting puppies and never once spazzed out, scratched, hissed at or bit anyone except me and my food-smelling-thumb. I have extremely high hopes for her. I’m thinking the next order of business is to train her as a ninja attack kitten to hunt and eliminate the bugs in my house.

                Cat lady jokes aside (and I know some of you are making them), she is a really nice distraction from the sometimes mundane day-to-day drudgery of my life at site. I would be lying if I said I didn’t have conversations with her sometimes. To her credit she always looks at me like what I’m saying is really important, which is more than some of my ex-boyfriends have been able to manage.  I also woke up the other morning to me spooning my Carebear and my Carebear spooning Boo who was curled around one of the Carebear’s fuzzy pink feet.  I was laying there and couldn’t decide if my life was awesome and right out of a kitten calendar or really, really, painfully pathetic. Maybe a little bit of both but I lean towards the kitten calendar. My best friend at site is a one and a half pound kitten with probable bi-polar disorder, so sue me.

                Let’s see… what else… like I said, not a whole lot is new around here. The new addition to the clinic still hasn’t opened. They said hopefully by then end of this month but let’s just say I’m not holding my breath on that one. So, for the time being I’m working on making some sample pieces of jewelry to see if there’s a viable market for it either here or in the states. Consequently, I spend a lot of time sitting alone in my house listening to music and making beads/jewelry. I’m really looking forward to the day I can start teaching other people how to make the pieces, though I’m sure that endeavor will come with a whole new set of challenges. People in the village and around work are already asking me to make pieces for them, which is great except that everybody wants it for free. That wouldn’t be a problem except that I make nothing here and the materials for the jewelry are coming out of my monthly living allowance. That and they don’t seem to understand that hours of hand beading go into each piece, it’s not like I have a troupe of little elves that come make stuff while I’m sleeping.  Though I bet I could hire some village kids for near nothing… kidding, I wouldn’t do that, though really, truly, I easily could.

Other random things:

On conquering childhood failures –

Since I learned to ride a bike, waaaay back in the day of matching fruit of the loom sweat suits in jewel colors and unitards with dyed jean overalls over them, I saw some kid ride his bike down the street with no hands. Of course it looked awesome and I immediately wanted to do it too. I tried for years but never succeeded. Hell, before coming to Kenya I’d ridden a bike maybe once since I got my first car when I was 16. Needless to say I forgot about my quest… that is until I saw a teenage Kenyan boy riding down the street pedaling away, hands resting idly by his side. My passion was renewed and I’ve been trying to ride no handed for the last couple weeks. Well, ladies and gentleman, today I succeeded. Almost two decades later I can finally say I can ride a bike with no hands! That little victory made me giggle the rest of the way home. Sometimes it really is the small things in life.

                On my messy house –

For years my mother (and sometimes father) and I have been at odds over the condition of my various living spaces. When I was a child it usually turned into tears and/or screaming arguments about me making my bed or cleaning up my dishes. The teenage years were even worse. Mom let me have more space, telling me that as long as I kept my door closed and she couldn’t see the mess, she would try not to nag me about it all the time. That space turned into weeks and months going by without my room being cleaned. There were times I would literally have to leap from open spot to open spot on the floor because I had so many clothes, books, shoes, art project of the moment, etcetera scattered about. I loathed making my bed and only did it when I knew company might be coming over and might want to see my room. I have always (and to the chagrin of my waist-line probably will always be) a midnight snacker. That habit turned into a lot of empty cereal bowls being left in my room, and half empty water bottles. I used to joke that I was just getting ready for the alien invasion like the little girl in ‘Signs’; if those suckers wandered into my bedroom I'd have a convienient supply of stagnant water to splash their way. Once, in a rare thorough cleaning, I found a spoon that had been under the bed so long it had turned into a science experiment; there was a thick layer of fuzzy greenish substance growing on it.

Well, the point of this little story is to say that I am no different here. However, I do curse my messiness at times. For instance, when it’s 3 in the morning and Boo has found yet another piece of paper to chase noisily around my room. Or when my little neighbor kids (4,6 and 10) come to visit and cannot help but touch everything they see. And I do mean everything. They want to know what my flashlight is. They want to look through every single photograph and book I have out. They want to play with my camera and my phone and my batteries and my ear buds and my bottle of glue and my shoes and my cup of pens and pencils and my box of colored pencils of which they want to test out every color on scraps of paper. They pick up my nail polish and start painting their fingers. They dig through my beads and inevitably spill them everywhere.

So, mom, be assured, when I have children of my own (and I can’t just lock them out of my house like I do with the neighbor kids when I’m not in the mood to have their adorable yet infuriating little paws all over everything) my house will be markedly more clean. Though, I’ll probably still have a room that is a disaster area at all times. A place I can lock the kids out of. A place I can go and revel in the glorious disarray.

                On Being a D-List Celebrity:

Remember when you were a kid and you thought how awesome it would be to be famous someday? Or maybe that was just me when I was young. I thought it would be great to get to live the glamorous life, to dress up in fancy clothes whenever I wanted, for people to recognize you on the street and want to greet you, maybe have their picture taken with you. Little did I know that by moving to Kenya I would get to experience a little bit of what I imagine life to be like for celebrities.

I can’t leave my house without someone going out of their way to greet me. I can’t leave my house without being judged for what I’m wearing and how I look that day. If I don’t leave my house people speculate that I’m sick or something is wrong with me. If I am seen with a man he is automatically assumed that he is my beau. Little children scream random greetings at me from blocks away. Everyone wants their picture taken. Men are constantly telling me they’ve fallen in love with me at first sight and want to marry me. Literally lost count of the number of serious marriage proposals I’ve had in the last 5 months. Everything I do is interesting and worth watching, even if what I’m doing is a mundane task like washing my clothes or walking down the street. People stop and stare at me when I walk by them or worse yet, when they walk by my house and see me in the yard doing anything.

So yea, being a white person in Kenya (at least in rural Kenya, Nairobi and Mombasa aren’t too bad) makes you an automatic D-list celebrity. And let me just tell you, I take back ever wanting to be the least bit famous. I miss being able to take a walk and not get stared at. I miss being anonymous, average, not-worth-noticing and it is one of the things I most look forward to upon returning home.

 On Peace Corps Being Like Dorm Life (or what I imagine it to be like since I never actually lived in a dorm...)

 

There was a fuel shortage in Kakamega (my town) about 6 weeks ago. Or course, this is when my propane tank, the only way I have of cooking food, ended up running out of fuel. So, yea, I ended up without a heat source for a little while. Then, I went to training and bought a pitcher that boils water using electricity. I considered this problem solved though the Kenyans think I’m insane. Little do they realize I have had a lot of experience hanging out with guys whose idea of ‘cooking’ is making ramen noodles. Do you have any idea how many things a person can do with ramen noodles? I'm relatively sure there is actually an entire cok book dedicated to ramen noodles, perhaps it is something I shoudl invest in... So, anyway, I eat variations of ramen noodles every single day. It's been 6-ish weeks and I've yet to get bored.

I also have a tiny refrigerator which makes the whole ‘no cooking’ thing easier since I can refrigerate fruits, vegetables, pasta salads and hard-boiled eggs (if you leave them sitting in hot water long enough they eventually hard “boil”). But, the tiny fridge means that it’s a constant struggle to fit everything in there. I jocky things around trying to decide what is most important to be cold that day… and then the electricity goes out and it doesn’t matter anyway because after a few hours everything is room temperature again. This leads to lots of “smell testing” to determine if things are going to kill me when I eat them. So far, so good.

I also feel like the miniscule amount of space I have here resembles dorm life. In reference to my story about my messy house, it would be a lot easier to keep the kids out of stuff if I had space to set things aside. As it is, my coffee table doubles as my work space which doubles as my kitchen table which doubles as my footrest  which doubles as my desk. The only thing I don’t do on my coffee table is sleep (mostly because there is no room, I don’t think my mattress is actually any more comfortable).

Anyway, all that adds up to me feeling like I’m living in a dorm sometimes. I am 25 years old but I feel like a college freshman all over again. Hell, I just ate cheese flavored Dorito-like chips for breakfast. Case and point.

Alright friends, until next time (when hopefully I can upload some normal sized images) love you all!