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!

Over Six Months In...

                Well, I've officially been away from home for over 6 months now. The time feels particularly long with the Holiday season slowly rolling by and me missing everything familiar about home. The time has also gone by quickly though and that gives me hope for the next 20 months continuing to fly by.

                Those of you who are reading this and know me know I have a tattoo on the inside of my right wrist. Those of you who know me really well know that tattoo reads “serenity”. Those of you who know me better than I know myself some days know that the tattoo is a bit of an ironic homage to my father and, because we are so much the same, to myself as well.

                When people ask what my tattoo means and I tell them “serenity” they ask if I’m a recovering alcoholic or they do the weird thing from some Seinfeld episode I never saw. Some people even ask if it’s a reference to the short lived TV show by Joss Whedon. It is inspired, not by these things, but by my father’s repetitive mumblings of the serenity prayer when I was a kid. I always thought it was particularly odd since he is one of the least serene people I know. Nonetheless, growing up my Dad always told me to have the courage to change the things I could, the serenity to except the things I couldn’t and the wisdom to know the difference. When I was 20 years old I was itching for my second tattoo and I eventually decided on the simple black kanji that is now inked on my right wrist, where I see it every single day.

                I said that it was an ironic homage to myself and my father because we are two of the most high-strung, quick tempered, non-serene people I know. We don’t know how not to get our way and we deal with incompetence and imperfection even less gracefully. So, I got “serenity” tattooed on my wrist, not because I am a recovering alcoholic, an avid TV fan of one sort or the other or a particularly serene person; I got it as a reminder to try and take it down a notch. The older I get, the calmer I get (and thank God so does Dad) and the more I realize that growing up really is summed up in that one short mantra.

                Be brave: Have the guts to stand up for what you know is right. “Be the change you wish to see in the world” and chose a genuine path of honesty and integrity over the people pleasing complacence that plagues our world. Don’t be courageous for egos sake but also don’t be a coward in reverence of the same thing.

                Be serene: Know that not everything is in your power to change or to control. Sometimes the best leaders are those that know when to hand over the reins, when to fold and when to all out admit they were wrong. Sometimes you have to step back and just let things happen as they will. Serenity is not complacence but tranquility in the face of a storm. It is taking a deep breath instead of screaming in someone’s face. Many times it is being the bigger person because someone else cannot be.

                Grow wise: I don’t know that anyone ever ‘becomes’ wise or is inherently so, no matter how old they might be. The key is learning from your mistakes and letting each experience prepare you more fully for the next one. Wisdom is not perfection, rather the admitted absence of it.

                Being here has really tested my serenity at times. My family sent me a package for Christmas that some things were taken out of. It really sucks and it’s really, really hard to not be upset about it. And I am upset about it, just not as much as I would have been a few years ago. The fact is we knew it was a risk sending anything worth even a few dollars in a package to Africa. People here are really poor and a ten dollar item could mean they can feed their family for a week. Still, it sucks. I was really looking forward to my package and, though it was still awesome to get, it was kind of a buzz-kill to discover that not everything was there. As my mom said, “guess there are thieves everywhere.” Isn’t that the truth.

                Growing up is also about knowing when to tackle a problem head on and when to stop, breathe, strategize and come at it from a different angle. I walk through the villages and see kids who are literally starving to death. They are skin and bones without shoes or whole articles of clothing. There are 5 year old working in the fields and it is the hardest thing in the world to not want to scream at the parents, to pick the kid up and take it home with you. “Why don’t you feed the kid? Why don’t you have less children? Why is he not in school, why have you not taken him to the clinic for the free immunizations?” I want to ask (scream) at the mothers. But, I don’t. I bite my tongue and shake my head and fight back tears of sadness, frustration and incredulous humility. Screaming at the mother might feel good for a minute, might make me feel like I’m doing but growing up, having wisdom in this situation, is knowing that screaming at the mother now would only shoot me in the foot. If I want to change anything, to really change anything, I need to be someone the community trusts. I need to observe and learn and only then can I begin to understand what I can do to help.

                My father asked me what it is I exactly do here. It’s a very good question. It’s a question I ask myself a lot. What the hell am I really accomplishing here? What am I even trying to accomplish. I explained it to my dad and to myself, like this:

                Peace Corps is a very different volunteer organization than most others. For one thing, we spend over 2 years here. Most of what we do is learn and only a small part is actual implementation. Maybe you think that sounds like a waste of time and money. Maybe you think your tax dollars would be better spent on giving money or supplies to Kenyans rather than supporting an American to live in their village for 2 years. Let me tell you something I’ve already learned here… Throwing money or things at these people isn’t solving their problems. In fact, in some ways it’s making them worse. They see white people now as donors, people who come to drop things off, people who don’t know anything about them but have deep pockets. That’s a really big challenge for someone like myself who actually does know about their culture, someone who speaks the language and (mostly) eats the food and who doesn’t have any money at all to give them.

                Large donors come here and give away things without doing any research, without doing any education or training and that, my friends, is the true waste of money. One aid project I’ve had direct experience with gave away hundreds of thousands of household water filtering units. No one uses them. I go into the villagers houses and see them collecting dust in a corner. These filters are a fantastic idea; they are cheap to upkeep (you just have to rinse out the filter!), easy to use and effective at making water safe for people to drink. Why don’t people use them? They are slow and they are different. We’re talking about people with little to no education who don’t understand why or how it works. Beyond that they don’t understand why they should filter there water at all, they’ve never done it before, why start now? I’ve heard of people taking them apart and using part of the filter as a club to beat their kids with. I had someone tell me the filter put drugs into the water and would cause infertility.

                The point of that story is that the filters, while in essence were a good idea, were a huge waste of money. The donor spent millions and accomplished next to nothing because they didn’t do the leg work first.  Peace Corps is about the leg work. We don’t have lots of money to throw at people or organizations. We are about making small, appreciable changes that can have a big effect in the long run. If I can find out why that mother is having so many children and why she can’t feed or clothe them and if I can do something to change that at the root level of the problem, that has the capacity to change everything.

                So what am I doing? I’m learning, I’m observing, I’m gathering information and finding out the “why”s behind the problems before I try to do anything about fixing them. Why does that mother have 9 kids? She’s been told that taking hormonal birth control causes infertility. How do I know that? Not because she told me (she in this case is a fictitious amalgamation of the average woman in the village) but because I listened to conversations women didn’t know I understood and because the teachers in my primary school, women who have gone to college told me the same thing; that using birth control will make you unable to have kids again.

                If I had come in guns blazing my first week at site and lectured women on how they should use birth control I would have been wasting my time. They know what it is; they are just misinformed about it. It’s not about telling them they should use it, it’s about telling them it’s safe to do so. Beyond that it’s about convincing their husbands of the same thing and showing them that it’s economically advisable to reduce family size. Husbands here still have all the power; it is not uncommon to hear about a man beating his wife bloody because he found out she is taking birth control. So, the point is, the story is much bigger than just supplying birth control, it’s about education and empowerment and that is what Peace Corps is all about.

                Peace Corps is teaching me about what my tattoo mean to me all over again. It reminds me to have the courage to try and change the way things are. To remember to have the serenity to know my limitations and to understand that some things are not within my power to change. It prompts me to think before I act, to be wise enough to tackle the projects I can be successful at, those that will make small but appreciable changes and will be sustainable rather than those that are big and flashy but will flounder and fail when I leave and will, in the long run, change nothing.

     

Pics, pics and more pics!

     If a picture is worth a thousand words, this blog entry, which is much overdue (my apologies) should be a long one. After many requests to see what my house looks like I'm finally posting some pictures. I kept putting it off, waiting for my house to be 'clean' and then I realized that may never happen. I'm messy by nature, put me in a small space and that only exacerbates the problem! Anyway, the first few pictures here are of my house and my 'compound'.

 

View of the sunset out my living room window

A view of my house from the front yard. The 2 windows in the picture are my room, the rest of the family house is behind and off to the right. The left window is my living room/kitchen/office and the right is my bedroom.

My nuclear war bunker. Ha, so after you walk through the door in the picture before, you take a left down this dark hallway and that's my  'front door' on the left. Aaand that's my sweet ride on the right side. It has a bell. And a shopping basket tied to the back of it for carting fruits and veggies home from town. Gives a whole new meaning to the term 'riding in style'

Welcome to my living/dining/sitting/ kitchen/office room. I do everything in here except sleep. Yes, Mom, it's messy... sorry, I'll clean before you come to visit, promise. On the left is my "kitchen" I have a little gas stove I cook on 2-3 times a day. My 'pantry' is the green shelf on the left. My coffee table has become a dumping ground, obviously, so I usually end up eating from my lap.

The other "half" of my multipurpose room. That furniture in the corner covered in stuff is my desk...

My bedroom.Yep, still half living out of suitcases... they're under all the clothes along the wall...

The other "half" of my bedroom. my "closet/dresser" and that on the left is my count-down chart. I 'x' off 1 day every night and it counts down all the way to the end of my service. Ha, it's taller than I am. I've got a lot of x's to go, but its a nice way to make the time left seem like a tangible entity rather than this colossal amount of time.

     Alright, so that's basically my house. Someday I'll have to take some pictures of my bathroom and "shower" situation so you can truly appreciate my daily life here. Now, I'm just posting some pictures I've had for awhile. First, these are from the school where I teach science to class seven students:

We have kids in classes (grades) 1 - 8. All the schools, public and private, have mandatory uniforms.

Some of my Class 7 kids in our classroom. I have about 75 kids total split into 2 classes.

Some of the younger kids. They LOVE having their picture taken.

Block of class rooms, each door leads to a classroom, a square concrete room with one blackboard and home-made desks that regularly fall apart. When it rains the water on the tin roof is so loud you can't teach. Their is no electricity at my school.

      So, I love my school and my kids most days. Some days they make me want to scream because, like all kids, they have the propensity to drive you nuts sometimes. One of the biggest problems we have in my community is kids dropping out of school after class 7 or 8 because they don't have the school fees for high school (public primary schools are 'free' but ALL secondary (grades 9-12) schools cost money to attend).   Most of these kids only chance to ever get out of the field and the tiny village they were born in is to attend secondary school.
      I have an idea to start a scholarship fund to send 1 kid per year to secondary school based on an essay or story writing contest. I've just started to think about it but I wanted to put some feelers out there and see if anyone would be willing to donate on a yearly or one time basis. An average school here costs between 200-300 US dollars per year. Eventually I'll be a grown up and have the money to sustain a fund on my own, but for now it would be through my friends and families donations that I would be able to carry out this plan. Even 10 or 20 dollars would be a huge help; its amazing how much so little can do here. As I said, its still in the very early stages, just an idea, but if you're interested, please shoot me an e-mail at "LindsayInKenya@gmail.com" and I will keep you updated.   Thank you in advance for your support.
       Okay, a few more pics...

I introduce you to 'baby Linds', 2 hours old in this picture. Yep, she's named after me :-)

A screaming 2 week old baby Linds with her mom Celestine. Linds is wearing the shirt I bought for 35 cents in the market!

                        Finally, I leave you with a few pretty pics of the flowers outside my clinic...

    Alright folks, that's all for now. Love you and miss you all a lot. Been thinking about home a lot lately with the holidays coming up! Here's wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving if I don't post again before then!

A little bit o- humor... I hope

Hi all! It’s been a long time since my last blog and just wanted to let you all know I’m still alive over here.  Didn’t really feel like writing a traditional blog entry or regaling you with any poignant and serious stories so I’ve made a top ten list of sorts which I hope you’ll find entertaining:

Ten ways to know you’re in Peace Corps Kenya:

1.         Upon finding a bug in your coffee/cereal/fruit you pick it out and keep eating.

2.       You have become really good at waiting for people and consider them on-time if they’re 30 or less minutes late.

3.         You will respond to any variation of your first or last name (Liz, Linds, Lynn etcetera) as well as ‘mazungu’ (white person) madam, sir (yes, even as a woman), wewe (you in Swahili), mama, sister, miss, white person, lady, msichana (‘girl’ in Swahili) bella (like chaobella) and American.

4.          You are really, really good at turning people down when theyask you to:

a.       give them money, candy, the loaf of bread you’re carrying or your bicycle

b.      buy them shoes, clothes, a soda or a plane ticket to America

c.       Procure for them a visa, green card, a spouse in the US or money for their school fees/organization/children/etcetera.

d.      Marry them and take them back to the US with you

5.            You’ve had a conversation while taking a poo with a 6 or 8-legged creature living in your choo (outdoor bathroom). You’ve also named this creature.

6.           Ignoring children while they sit on your couch and stare at you while you study, cook, clean or read is a bi-weekly activity.

7.          You strategically place heavy objects (shoes work well) and scraps of paper around the house as cockroach killing weapons.

8.        You regularly text your friends about your bowel movements.

9.           Multiplying by 85 is a daily activity as you try and explain to people how much things is the US cost (the exchange rate is about 85 shillings to the dollar) and how much that plane ticket to the US is gonna set them back (it’s a couple years salary for the average Kenyan)

10.      You’ve realized that even when you’re both speaking English, you’re still speaking 2 totally different languages:

·         ‘spinach’ isn’t actually spinach, it’s any green leafy vegetable matter

·          ‘chicken’ can be any part of the chicken

·          ‘help me with’ actually means ‘give me’

·         ‘friend’ means lover

·         ‘I think we’ll see each other again’ is a pick-up line

·         ‘doctor’ is anyone who works in a clinic, even the cleaning staff and the receptionist

·         A ‘child’ is anyone under the age of 25

·         ‘American’ means money

·         ‘25, unmarried, no children’ means ‘defective’

·         ‘road work’ is jogging

·         In response to men asking you out:

o    ‘no’ means yes, you’re just playing hard to get

o    ‘yes’ the first time means ‘I’m easy’ and they’ll leave you alone unless they’re into slutty girls

o   ‘yes’ the second time means ‘I really like you’

o    ‘I have a boyfriend/husband’ means okay but we’ll have to be really sneaky

o   ‘I am a US government employee and I am not allowed to date host country nationals or give them my phone number’ confuses the hell out of them (it’s also complete bullshit, I might add)

·         ‘You look smart’ means you look attractive

·         ‘you’re looking so fat!’ means you’re looking good

·         ‘guest of honor’ at an event means you’re supposed to donate the most to the cause

Well, that’s all for this week folks. The culture differences make for some funny moments and I’m really going to try and start writing them down for you all. I guess I can include one more quick story because I wrote it in an e-mail to my mom and forgot how entertaining it was until just then.

To preface this story I should tell you, if you don’t already know, that I live in 2 rooms of a family’s house. The father of the house pretty much leaves me alone unless he needs to ask or tell me something, but the mother of the house… well she’s kind ofspecial. Though I’ve told her a million times that she needs to slow down when she speaks Swahili to me and not incorporate luyha words because I don’t speak luyha (the local dialect which is in NO similar to Swahili) she insists on speaking at the same rate she does to native speakers and after a few weeks of this I gave up trying to talk to her in Swahili. As a consequence, though I’m actually pretty good, she thinks I don’t speak Swahili at all and continually tells people this which, as you can imagine, annoys me to no end. On top of that she has this unrelenting need to introduce everyone to me. It’s subsided a little since the first couple weeks when she was literally bringing people into my living room at all hours of the day and night to meet me. I think it stems partly from her belief that because I never come and hang out with the family in their part of the house, I must be really bored all the time. I’ve explained to her that I like spending time by myself, that I’m not just sitting there staring at a wall, I’m studying or reading or working on a project, but the concept of ‘alone time’ doesn’t really exist here. Anyway, this story is a product of all of those things…

8:30am couple weeks ago she (the house mama) walks into my living room with some guy and tells me she has a present for me. Literally says “I brought you a present,” and I’m annoyed because it’s 8:30 am and I’m getting ready for work and half-dressed and now there’s this 20 something Kenyan guy standing in my living room and I have no idea who he is or why he’s in my living room at 8:30am and the house mama has this huge grin on her face like she’s brought me a pony with glitter in its mane or something. So I look at her and say “I don’t understand.” Because, let’s face it, when someone walks in and says they brought you a present and that present is another human being, who you’ve never met… well that’s a little odd for everyone involved… unless it’s a bachelorette party and then the intent is fairly well implied… Anyway, the house mama tells me that this is so-and-so and he’s a student like me and I can teach him and he can teach me Swahili. She’s brought me a friggen friend or a mate and by the ridiculous grin on her face, I think she thinks she’s brought the later of the two. Super.

I should interject here and say that it’s not that I hate people (well okay, for those of you that know me well, it’s a little bit about the fact that I hate people…) or don’t want to make friends with the Kenyans, it’s just that by the time I get home at the end of the day I’ve been dealing with culture issues all day and the last thing I want to do is have to do that in my own house. They don’t understand that I completely alter my personality in public, or that it’s exhausting to greet the 500 kids on the way to town that want to say hi to the white lady, or that at least a dozen people ask me to buy them things or give them money every time I’m in town, or that I have to haggle with shop owners and vendors every time I buy something because they see my white skin and automatically double the price of things. By the time I get home I’m tired of being culturally appropriate, all I want to do is sit on my couch in shorts and a tank-top (neither of which I can wear outside my house), put on some shitty American music, and read a book or study for the MCAT alone and in blissful peace.

                Anyway, back to the story. I’m standing there not appropriately dressed for male company, still perturbed and confused as to why 8:30am on a Tuesday morning seemed like the best time to have so-and-so over, but I figure I better try to make some sort of conversation so I ask what and where he’s studying. Turns out he’s in his first year of undergraduate studies in mechanical engineering at the local college. So he’s not even 20-something, he’s like 18 and in a completely unrelated field of study. The only thing that mechanical engineering has in common with biological sciences is an overlap in math, which was my least favorite subject. That and the fact that the average student in either field is usually pretty dorky. After 4 or 5 more awkward minutes in which I explain that there is actually very few things I can teach a mechanical engineering student but that he’s welcome to come hang out at some time that isn’t single digit morning hours, they finally leave and, much to the credit of so-and-so, he has yet to come back. Best present ever; the kind that knows it’s unwanted and returns itself to the store. J

                Alright, well that’s it for this week folks. As always hope you’re all doing well. Miss you and love you and counting down the days (literally, there’s a chart on my wall) until I will be home to see all your bright and smiling faces again.

School, market, orphanage

                So, first things first, I added some new photos last week, in no particular order, just a few of my favorites so far. If you’ve already looked at that entry, I updated it and added a few more today, so check it out again if you want!

                In an exciting turn of events I got a new friend living in my choo (bathroom). I’ve named her Bessy:

Bessie, the black widow spider (called button-spiders here) living in my bathroom.

                So I think I mentioned in previous blogs that I was trying to get a position teaching at a local primary school. I succeeded and I finished my first week of teaching this past week. I’m teaching science to about 45 grade 7 kids on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. So far I think it’s going well. I know it’s going to take some time for them to get used to my English (the teachers informed me last week I had a very strong accent and were shocked to hear that they had a strong accent to me too…) and the different style of instruction. One major criticism of the Kenyan educational model is that it doesn’t give kids enough freedom to think creatively, to synthesize information and make leaps in logic, all things which are particularly important in the sciences. One newspaper article I read in the Kenyan national news last week was that teachers at a university level were noting that kids coming from primary and secondary education had no idea how to think critically; they were so used to the rigid “A+B always equals C and we never ask why” framework that they had a very difficult time when asked to think outside the box.

                So, I’ve made it a particular goal of mine, even before reading that article and especially now after, to try to get the kids thinking about the world around them in terms of the question ‘why’. I told them the first day of class that I love good questions and that every Monday we were going to come up with a ‘question of the week’ as a class. It had to be something no one in class knew (except me & me not knowing either was an exceptionally good question) and it had to have something to do with science. Our question from this week was ‘why do some eggs turn into chickens and others don’t?’ believe it or not, none of the kids knew the answer on Monday. Every Thursday we’ll answer our question and if anyone comes to class with the correct answer, they get rewarded with candy. I also reward intelligent questions with candy. Trust me, after the kids figure out that questions equal candy, a lot more hands go up.

                The idea of trying to get the kids to ask questions is to a) have them participate in the learning process, they get to guide the class a little bit once we finish with the required material b) get them to look at the world around them with a critical eye, asking why things are the way they are.

                I’ve also introduced the vocabulary words ‘hypothesis’ and ‘prediction’ to them. Believe it or not these kids had no idea what it was to make a guess as to what will happen. Even after explaining the concept, there were kids that were very confused. Their student book (you can’t really call it a text book per say, for the entire year it’s got 135 pages) doesn’t have any prompting to consider what will happen in an experiment before you actually carry it out. So, I’ve started to try and get the kids thinking about what might happen and then explaining why they think that. I’m excited for class to keep evolving, for me to keep learning Swahili and about the education system here and to, hopefully, get some kids interested in science.

                I visited the local market with my supervisor (Nancy) and her supervisor (Caroline) last Wednesday and took some pictures. We were looking at the garbage disposal ‘system’ used in town. Basically, people throw their trash into designated areas and then once a day a city tractor comes by, loads up the garbage and takes it a few miles from town to dump it in a place designated as a landfill. There are no trash bins here (they would just get stolen), no dumpsters, no recycling centers or community clean-up days. Kenya is a beautiful, beautiful country… the garbage everywhere is a huge distraction from that. 

                Besides the garbage the market has a lot of interesting things to offer. Everything here is fresh and grown locally for the most part (some things like water melons are imported from Uganda… but even that’s only 75 or so miles away).  They eat a billion different kinds of greens here, basically anything that grows and isn’t poisonous gets used as food, pumpkin leaves, cow-pea leaves, weeds, all get mixed together and cooked into a spinach like mix.

                There’s also a bunch of different kinds of beans here, some I’ve seen at home, like black beans and others I’ve never even heard of like green-gramms and monkey-nuts…

                And, my personal favorites, dried termites… you fry them and eat them as a snack or in a meal. I would love to explain to you what they taste like but I haven’t gotten the guts to try them. Maybe some day… maybe…

Bag o' dried termites... apparently you fry and eat them. The Kenyans swear they're really good...

      There are also tiny little dried fish called 'omena' that stink like you can't imagine. God help you if the person next to you on the bus gets on with a plastic bag full of these guys, it'll be a long ride, especially if there's a chicken in the lap of the woman on the other side of you. This is not a random example, it actually happened to me on the way home from Port Victoria a couple weekends ago.The Kenyans keep asking if I eat fish (since I don't eat, chicken, beef, goat, any other kind of meat) and I tell them yes, but that I don't like the fish here. They always have a hard time understanding how I could not love the smelly little guys... I think I'll save my money and get sushi on the rare occasion I get into Mombasa or Nairobi!

Omena, tiny, smelly, dried fish.

                So besides the market and the school I also visited some orphanages last week. I was surprised by how good the kids looked and the conditions in which they were living. I guess I went in with the notion that an orphanage in Kenya was going to be this awful sight; kids in tattered clothes, hungry, depressed, playing with garbage on a swing set that’s just as likely to fall apart as entertain them. Our first stop on Tuesday morning was a Catholic orphanage in the center of Kakamega town. We walked past the prison, down a long dirt road to the compound which was surrounded by high concrete walls painted with a world map and a big smiling image of Jesus, back lit with an ethereal glow, a kindly look of pity on his face. We swung open the big metal gates to reveal an immaculately groomed common area, bright green grass, neatly trimmed bushes and flowers, a garden in the distance to our right, a building under construction to our left. My supervisor Nancy started pointing things out to me. There was a school ahead of us across the lawn, pictures of the alphabet and numbers painted on the walls of the buildings. Inside kids of varying ages, 5 to 11 or 12 sat in green and yellow school uniforms listening intently as a teacher pointed at things on a chalk board at the front of the room.  

                The new building was to be an expansion of the school, they wanted more space to have kids boarded so they could have a larger student population. As it was they had 350 kids in classes 1-8 attending school there. As we crossed the lawn, past the single story school building I noticed the playground and couldn’t help but smile. For one thing, the equipment was actually in good repair, one of the first safe looking playground structures I’ve seen here. Secondly, all the equipment was painted in Kenya’s colors; green, black and red.

                Passing the playground we came to the housing unit for the orphans living there. A nun greeted us at the door and introduced herself as sister Carol and proceeded to show us around the compound. They have a total of 79 orphans but about 25 are away at secondary schools where they board, so right now there are about 45 kids actually living in the compound. The bedrooms are smaller than my room back home (14x13) and have 7 single bunk beds in each. Carol tells us that it’s not too crowded right now; only some of the kids have to share beds, but that when the older kids come back from school it gets a little bit full. Nonetheless, the rooms are neat and clean, the clothes neatly stored in one big wooden dresser. We visit the rooms of the older kids first, and the dining hall, the bathroom, wash room and then we went to see the orphanages smallest occupants in the infant ward. Up until this point I was doing pretty good emotionally, like I said, I was actually pleasantly surprised by the cleanliness and general appearance of the space. All that emotional stability went right out the window when I saw the babies.

                The first room was full of empty cribs all neatly aligned in a row, their metal bars painted white, light pink sheets tugged snuggly around tiny mattresses, mosquito nets hanging like little gossamer forts over each bed. We turned right, and I noticed a sign that said “please don’t enter without permission” and another that warned you to wash your hands before handling the babies. I have to admit, I giggled a little; the first thing that came to mind was the animal shelter back in the states that had signs all over to wash your hands before playing with the different puppies. Mind you, I hadn’t actually seen the kids yet, as soon as I did it wiped the smile right off my face.

                It was bath time in the infant room. Three women stood in what looked like a make-shift kitchen, a concrete slab for a work space and a giant concrete sink sunk into the far corner of the slab. At least a half dozen babies were lined up on the slab, assembly line style, waiting for their turn to be dunked into the sink. When I saw babies, I mean babies, these kids were all under 6 months old, some much younger than that. Some were bundled in blankets with just their little faces, feet and hands poking out, others lay naked atop their blankets, their little round bellies puffing out with each breath. Some slept, others looked around, put their fists in their mouth or reached their hands toward the ceiling for something to hold on to. I hadn’t washed my hands and I didn’t want to interrupt the worker’s washing duties, so I just stood in the room for a few minutes looking down at the babies. One in particular locked eyes with me early on and kept staring at me, his doe-like brown eyes seemed to be intently searching for something reflected in my eyes.  He reached his hand up towards me, tiny little fingers aching for human contact, for someone to hold onto. Not picking that baby up and coddling him was one of t he harder things I’ve done. Being a crier by nature, I was fighting pretty hard at this point to keep the tears from spilling over my eye lashes. Once they start it’s pretty tough to get them to stop.

                I took one last look at the babies all lined up in a multicolored row of blankets and black skin and stepped out of the room. I stood there leaning against the wall as my supervisor had a conversation with sister Carol and the women cleaning the babies in Swahili. I probably could have understood some had I been listening but I was too busy wondering how someone could possibly give up one of those kids. The nuns told us that a lot of them are brought after being found in bushes, doorsteps or the side of the road. When I looked up from trying to get my emotions in check I was dumbfounded by the sight of a baby being unwrapped from her blanket to be washed. 

           This is, up until this point and I hope for ever, the sickest kids I've seen in Kenya. Her arms and legs were skin and bones, not a drop of fat to cushion her joints, her elbows and knees stuck out at harsh angles, knobby protrusions from emaciated flesh. She squirmed at the cool air, her legs curling to her chest where each one of her ribs could be counted. Her stomach was sunk in, the top of her hip bones visible, her eyes sunk into fatless cheek bones. The conversation that Nancy and Sister Carol had been having were about this baby. Apparently she’d been brought the day before after having been dumped in the bushes. She was deaf and mute and obviously hadn’t been fed in quite some time. Her body kicked and curled in an unnatural way as the worker’s bathed her, whatever the cause of her lack of hearing and speaking, it had clearly affected her physically as well. The nuns guessed she was a month or so old but I think it was fairly obvious that she was much older, maybe 2 or 3 months but was severely and chronically undernourished to the point of obvious growth retardation. I’m honestly surprised that she was still alive. The nuns said that she would be brought to the provincial hospital that day for advanced treatment and I really, truly hope that she was; without it I don’t think she has a chance at survival.

            I have more to say about the other orphanage I visited last week and the school kids at Divine Providence, but this blog is getting quite long so I’ll say goodbye for now. Tune in next time for more stories about abandoned kids… and hopefully something a little happier will happen in the next week that I can fill you in on too. Until next time, all my love from Kenya.