Nothing Too Exciting

Well, nothing very exciting to report. I'm back at site after a LONG trip from The States. My last flight got detoured and I ended up spending 13.5 hours in a tiny airport in Mombasa, Kenya only to fly 38 minutes to Nairobi and then, since I arrived at almost midnight and had nowhere to go until morning, I spent the next 5 hours sleeping on the floor of the airport. I woke up at 5 in the morning to find a bunch of other white people camped out on the floor next to me.  Then from there I still had an 8 hour trip to get to Hannah's house. My next planned trip home is over a year from now and I'm already dreading it. Note to self (and other international travelers): don't be such a cheap ass when buying airline tickets... pay the extra hundred bucks to not have to take 5 different flights and spend over 2 straight days in either an airport or on an airplane.

I had a really nice trip home and got to see pretty much everyone I wanted to who actually lived in the state... unfortunately that meant I didn't get to see some of my very favorite people who reside in Miami, New York, North Carolina, Colorado and Wyoming... believe me, if I'd had the time and money I would have visited every one of them. That said, I was extremely happy to get to meet Trenton, my best friend Kelly's new baby. Okay, he's not really that new, he's 7 months, but since this is the first time I met him, he's new to me!  I also got to my friend Kayla's cute pregnant belly and look forward to meeting her son the next time I'm home... when he'll be almost a year old :-(

All in all it was wonderful to see everyone but I'm happy to be back here and ready to get going with all my projects. Thank you to everyone that made time to see me while I was home and check back next month for a more exciting (hopefully) blog entry!

All Kinds of Things are Flying...

I know, I know; it’s been far too long. My apologies if this is the third or fourth time you’ve checked my blog recently and only now found it updated. If it makes you feel any better it’s 4:49am in my neck of the jungle and I’m just starting to write this month’s blog... which will actually be published next month by the time I'm through writing it ...  for the third time.

                The first draft was written almost 4 weeks ago and, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t have a whole lot to write about. Life was pretty “same-old, same-old” and so I’d started compiling a random and unabashedly self-deprecating account of some of my funnier moments in Kenya so far. I promise, at some point I will post those stories, likely having added a dozen more by that time.

                Having read over my second draft, I found it uninspired. Whatever day I was writing it I apparently wasn’t in the mood to be doing so. My prose is dry and factual, like a newspaper article about politics. Really, it was boring to read and the last thing I want to do after a long hiatus is bore you.

                So, having been up for almost 2 hours already with a wonderful (and unfortunately all too typical) case of insomnia, I am starting this blog for the third and hopefully final, time. Here’s to it being worth the wait…

Since Boo is more cat and less kitten (and let's face it, therefore less cute) here's a completely random picture ofan adorable Ugandan baby that was sitting on front of me on the matatu back to Kenya (don't worry, the story about Uganda is coming later in the blog!)

                Time is an interesting thing to think about. The older I get the more it seems that time slips by without my noticing and yet, in the very same instant, the clock seems to be ticking louder with each passing day. Never has this been so apparent as it is now, as I count down the days until I fly home to take my MCAT. I simultaneously wish for the days to magically pass faster, as though instead of waking up tomorrow (which would be a lot easier if I could actually sleep in the first place…) I could wake up to discover a week had elapsed, and at the same time desire for the days to stop their forward march towards May 24^th; the day of my test.

                On one hand I am so excited to see everyone. I haven’t hugged my mother in almost a year, haven’t smiled to myself at how tiny she feels, like I am now the parent and she the child. I can’t wait to see how many new grey hairs my dad has and if Smidge the Chihuahua, his third (and favorite) daughter, has followed suit and replaced the black hairs around her mouth with white ones. I’m excited to see my sister’s new haircut, talk about her new job and have an all-night Glee marathon. I could go on and on talking about all the people I can’t wait to see, to hug and catch up with, to be reminded of all the reasons I love them so much in the first place.  Partly because that list would get boring and more so because I shudder at the thought of leaving anyone out, I will cease and desist on my laundry list of all the things I’m looking forward to doing on my upcoming visit home. To summarize; I’m like a 7-year-old counting down the days on the calendar in the kitchen to the box that has “Disney World” written in bright red sharpie.

                Then we have the other hand, the one that is shaking with nervousness. Yea, I’m nervous about the MCAT. People keep telling me not to be, that I’m smart and I’ll do fine. Of course everyone who says these things has never actually taken the MCAT… and the few people I know who have, have told me to study my ass off, as though that thought hadn’t already (and with growing frequency and intensity) occurred to me. I am studying and I am smart but the MCAT is a big deal. It is an especially big deal for someone like me who doesn’t have the squeaky clean, polished, prepped and 10 years in the making, application that so many medical school applicants have. I like to think that my sub-average (and let’s be honest, sub-par) GPA, lack of research experience and my dropping out of college makes my application more colorful… certainly it stands out against a slew of applications highlighting 3.9 GPAs, years spent hunched over a microscope, weekends volunteering at the local hospital, positions as secretaries, treasurers and presidents of various clubs, organizations and committees. But does it stand out in a good way… well, I guess that depends at how you look at what qualities might make for a good doctor.

                I could continue on a long, drawn-out diatribe about the entire process of becoming a doctor in the United States but the goal of this blog was to not bore you. So, I will simply say this; my MCAT score needs to be impressive. It needs to be high enough that an admissions board (hell, a computer algorithm if were talking about the early stages of consideration) takes the time to look past the numerous short comings on my application to see the little things that I think actually make me a stronger applicant than all the cookie-cutter-pre-meds out there. Like the fact that I am in Peace Corps or that I double majored in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature in college, two things that I think make me a bit more worldly and well-rounded than someone who spent all their time playing with petri dishes. And maybe I didn’t volunteer for years in a hospital. Instead I grew up working in the service industry where I learned how to deal with a kind of stress only my fellow waitresses, bartenders and baristas can truly appreciate.

                Anyway, getting back to the point; I am nervous about my MCAT. I need a solid score and my narcissistic pride concerning my intellect makes me want an absurdly high score. So, while I want the days to fly by in a blur that leaves me home, wrapped in the familiar sights, sounds and comforts of everything that “home” “family” and “friends” has come to mean to my lonely and love starved brain, I also want time to pause so I can cram an impossibly large amount of information into that brain.

                Nonetheless, as it tends to do, time marches right on along. And the thing is, as long as were on the subject of passing time, I’ve realized that the older I get the faster time seems to go, a paradigm that seems unfair to say the least. After all, I am only 25 years old, if time already feels as though its rushing by how will I feel ten years from now, twenty, thirty? I remember as a child thinking that the time between Thanksgiving and Christmas break felt like an eternity and if I didn’t get something I’d wanted for my birthday the thought of having to wait a whole year to ask for it again felt like I might as well chalk it up to a lost cause. When I was 12 I thought 13, being a teenager, was a lofty milestone. Then it was 16 when I could drive a car, followed by 18 when I could legally see an R-rated movie, buy a pack of cigarettes or exert my political will by voting for whichever candidate seemed like the least asshole-ish of the bunch. Then of course I was just holding my breath for 21 when I could walk into a bar or a liquor store and spend my hard earned money to legally abuse the detoxifying abilities of my liver and make an ass out of myself at the same time. That was 4 years ago. Now, at 25 I feel a little bit let down when I look back on those milestones. Was I really so excited to be a teenager, to have my first legal sip of alcohol or to drive a car? It seems to me that with each milestone I passed life only got more confusing, offered me more chances to screw everything up for myself.

                My teen years were hell for my parents. I was not a nice person during that time, something I will forever feel as though I need to make up to my parents (though I do figure someday I’ll have kids and if there is any validity to the notion of karma I’m in for some epic fights with my future offspring). Being able to drive was awesome; I was finally free! Turns out what I was free to do was purchase a POS car whose only reliable feature was its ability to break down on a frequent and costly basis. Then came 18 and the fact that I was now legally an adult. What a ridiculous notion if there ever were one. Though I felt tough, mature and grown-up at 18 I now realize what a child I truly was. Hell, most days I still feel like a child, like I’m learning as I go, stumbling my way through the world half blind, teetering here and there, constantly in danger of losing my balance and finding myself flat on my ass.

                As I sit here in Africa, hunched over my laptop screen listening to the deafening sound of the rain on the tin roof of my house, I think about where the pre-teen version of myself imagined I would be at 25. I can tell you one thing; never in a million years would I have guessed I’d be in Kenya right now. Nope, at twelve I’m pretty sure I imagined that the 25-year-old version of me would be married to a 6’3” blonde haired, blue eyed man who was the perfect mix of smart, witty and athletic. We’d have had a summer wedding on the beach when I was 23 and he was 24 or 25 and shortly after we’d move into our first house, complete with manicured lawn and a wrap-around porch with a wooden swing near the front door where I could curl up with a blanket, a book and a cup of coffee. Of course I’d be a successful veterinarian by then (I didn’t move on to wanting to practice medicine on people until I was 14 or 15) and me and my perfect husband would be well on our way to moving out west and opening a horse ranch that catered to riding lessons and horse camps for the mentally disabled (if you’ve seen “Dear John” or read the book, I had the idea long before that book was ever a gleam in Nicholas Sparks’ eye). Somewhere in those plans was the idea of children too, I always saw myself becoming a mother at the age of 27 though, who knows, I still have a year and a half to make that prediction happen!

                Oddly enough, I know a guy now that pretty much fits that description (he’s 6’4” instead of 6’3”, go figure) but knowing him is about the only thing I can say for the predictions of my 12-year-old self. Instead, I’m painfully single, living in a tiny two room house that looks more like a concrete nuclear war bunker than a home. I make just over 200 bucks a month, most of my day-to-day conversation is with a bi-polar cat and I’m crossing my fingers and all ten toes hoping I get into medical school. Yet, I’m a lot happier in my current life than I think I would have been in my imaginary one. The great part is I still feel like I have most of those things to look forward to; the guy, the wedding on the beach, the kids and especially the porch with the wooden swing. J

                I’m not exactly sure where I was going with that train of thought. I picked the writing up again having finally fallen back asleep around 6am and now, I can’t quite remember where my insomniac brain was taking that little gem of a story. Sooooo, let me move on to fill you in on some of the things that have been going on here.

                I went to Uganda earlier this month with a bunch of my fellow Peace Corps Volunteers. It was a trip I didn’t decide I wanted to go on until about 2 weeks before when I got the full list of people attending and the phrases “white-water rafting”, “bungee jumping” and “Nile River” made their way into the conversation. As you can probably surmise, I was sold. Plus, there was bound to be drama (because I knew I was incapable of being around the included group without some shenanigans going down) and alcohol which, when (as aforementioned) the majority of your conversation takes place with a cat, all adds up to sound like my idea of a pretty solid vacation plan.

                So, here are some stories and pictures from my Uganda adventure!

A baboon we saw on the side of the road on our drive in from
the Kenya/Uganda border



Me in front of the Adrift sign (the place we stayed at).

View of the Nile River from the patio of Adrift.

    We spent Friday night drinking and I got my fair share of drama, tears and alcohol induced foolishness... exactly the kind that made me miss Boo, my trusty feline side-kick who never makes me cry and doesn't judge me when I go on overly emotional tirades about how the guy I was kinda-sorta-dating is now dating someone else.  Saturday we rafted all day, me with a pretty terrible hangover the entire morning that felt a little bit like that whole karma bit kicking in from my antics the night before. Luckily I ended up in a raft with 6 other awesome girls and our guide, a New Zealander named Cam with exactly the tan and body you would expect of a guy who’d been guiding white water rafting trips all over the world for the last ten years. There’s nothing like listening to a cute guy with a sexy accent talk about all the stupid shit he’s seen tourists (and his co-workers) do over the years to mellow out the kind of hangover that can only come from drinking copious amounts of the cheapest booze one can get their hands on.





The group before we left for rafting.

My boat going over the first rapids... yea, its a waterfall.
I'm the one on the left in the front row.





Aaand one more rafting pic...

My boat (I'm front row, the person closer to the camera) again

By lunch time, which marked the halfway point in our rafting day, I was feeling a lot better and by the end of the day I was even ready to get back on the horse and had a celebratory beer with the rest of the group.

Celebratory beer after our day rafting on the Nile

Sunday we had the day to do whatever we wanted. Available activities included 4-wheeling, bungee jumping, massages, mani-pedis, lounging by the pool complete with a swim-up bar and an evening boat ride to the source of the Nile (Lake Victoria). Since I grew up on 4-wheelers I didn’t think it was worth the 50-something bucks an hour they wanted. After hemming and hawing over the 70 bucks it cost to bungee jump I finally gave in (I swear I could hear my bank card weeping as I pulled it out of my wallet) and signed up. It was something I always wanted to do but I can still hear my father telling me how it’s a let-down if you’ve been skydiving, which, given my father’s profession, you can bet your ass I have been. Anyway, I decided that I was probably never going to have the chance to bungee jump in Africa over the Nile River again and that I should ignore the dwindling digits in my checking account and, as Nike says “just do it”.

The view of the bungee platform from the patio of the Adrift bar.

The bungee jumping group... mostly...

There were 10 or so of the group of 20 that wanted to bungee and after taking care of the necessary steps (paying, signing away our lives and much to my chagrin, being publicly weighed) we all hiked up the tower and got in line to jump. The coveted (or dreaded, depending on your personality) “first” spot had been taken a long time ago so, since I’m not one to do something without some remarkable position and since no one else wanted to do it, I volunteered to go last. In retrospect its probably the best decision I made on that trip. We all stood and cheered (both from the walkway to the platform where the rest of the jumpers were lined up and the bar patio which overlooked the Nile) as Joy took the first leap off the bungee platform. With each successive leap the cheering grew quieter and quieter as people eventually got bored. Even watching people fling themselves off a 140-foot tower gets old the fifth or sixth time you’ve seen it.

Everyone was admittedly at least a little nervous, especially when they got their toes right up to the edge of the platform and it was time to actually put your money where your mouth was, so to speak. However, the majority of us got up there, heard the countdown from the bungee-instructor guy behind them and jumped… a few people did more of a bungee fall rather than a jump. One girl bent her knees as if to take a great big leap but then kind of waivered at the last moment and ended up sort of tipping over the edge still in a squat. The two guys that went, Henry and John, both showed impressive form. Henry’s swan dive was flawless and surprisingly graceful for a guy. John’s backward, James Bond inspired swan dive made me downright jealous. I’d told him to make it look good and he didn’t let me down.

Slowly but surely the line dwindled down to the last 3 of us: Sam, Robin and me. Sam had been expressing nerves for awhile and Robin and I kept telling her she’d be fine. The entire time Robin, one of those annoying women who always seems to be eating and yet still fits into size 2 jeans, couldn’t stop talking about how hungry she was, how as soon as she jumped she was going to go order a cheeseburger from the bar. And me, I kept talking about how un-nervous I was, which was the truth. By that point I was getting bored; we’d been standing there for about an hour waiting for everyone in front of us to jump. Plus, growing up around the extreme sports industry you get a knack for thinking about things in terms of statistical odds of injury or death. So, the entire time I’m telling people that the motorcycle rides we took to get to Adrift were significantly more dangerous than the bungee jump. In fact, for me, someone who feels like climbing (helmetless) onto the back of a motorcycle with a driver you’ve never met and whose skill level could be that of a 16-year-old with their first crotch-rocket is a little bit like playing Russian roulette, the motorcycle ride in was a hell of a lot more scary than the bungee jump. Even so, I’d gotten a little adrenaline rush from nerves when we’d first climbed up the bungee tower and looked over the railing to see the drop we’d be taking, but it had worn off approximately 3 minutes after watching Joy jump.

                So, with the three of us left Sam nervously sat in the bungee throne-chair and got strapped in, all the while throwing nervous glances our way. Robin and I are standing on the walkway talking about food and how this was a lot more exciting an hour ago. Sam bunny hops her way to the edge of the platform with a look of sheer terror on her face. The instructor does the count-down… Sam bends her knees… and proceeds to fall on her ass muttering “I can’t, I can’t, I’m sorry” as she falls. Robin and I, who were previously distracted by our conversation about boredom and food, are now trying to console Sam from afar and cheer her on at the same time. She gets up, tries and fails again. At this point I’m intrigued for a number of reasons. For one thing, watching someone do something they’re terrified of is a whole lot more entertaining than watching someone who’s fearless. The fearless people, they just go for it, no drama, no look of absolute terror, no shaking knees or sweating palms or falling flat on your ass instead of jumping. Fearless people are boring. Watching someone overcome fear, that’s much cooler. Another reason I’m interested; for the last 45 minutes I’ve been wondering what the bungee guys would do if someone didn’t want to jump. How many people get up there and don’t go? - a question I’d been wondering since boredom set in a half dozen jumpers ago.

                After a minute or two of soothing, cajoling and general words of support, Sam gets up and shuffles her way to the edge of the platform for the third time. At this point she near hyperventilating, visibly shaking; basically looking terrified in pretty much every way possible. However, she also has this look on her face, one of sheer determination a look that can only come from years of stubbornness. Having worn this very expression for years, I know it well and, at this point I am pretty sure Sam’s stubborn streak is going to win out over her fear. She edges her toes up to the ledge again. This time the instructor tells her to just close her eyes and they are going to “lean her forward”.

                “And then you’re going to let me go…?” Sam asks, her voice trembling. The instructor tells her yes, if its okay. She slowly nods and they start the countdown again. I’m thinking this “let go” is going to look a lot more like a shove to the back… but hey, the result is the same... right? So he counts down and as he’s doing it we can tell he’s kind of using the palm of his hand between her shoulder blades to push her further and further forward and Sam’s countering this by sticking her ass out, doing what I like to call “the duck butt” when people do it while preforming push-ups or planks. Then, just when she’s about to get to the point of no return and I’m expecting all kinds of arm flailing and ear-shattering screaming, Sam tells them to stop and they pull her back again.

                She keeps apologizing and the instructor is telling her its ok, to take a step by and she can just sit and catch her breath for a few minutes. They start to bunny-hop her away from the edge when all of a sudden that stubborn look is back on her face with a renewed ferocity. “No,” she says and begins to hop back to the edge, “I’m doing this.” She puts her toes over the edge, the instructor says, “three, two one… bungee” and she does, she jumps all on her own, no push, no hesitation this time. She screams bloody murder the whole way down and ends up with two black eyes from hitting the water face first (rather than having her hands out above her head) but is nonetheless, happy she did it.

                Robin goes next, still talking right up until the moment she leaps from the platform about how she can’t wait to get a burger at the bar when she’s done. And then it’s my turn.  I sit in the chair and make small chat as they start to strap up my legs. I comment on how simple the system is: literally a towel wrapped around your ankles with a nylon tow-strap wrapped around that and connected to a giant rubber band. I ask them how long they’ve been doing this for and tell them how my parents met skydiving, that I have jumps as a fetus and I think they should revoke the policy that says pregnant women can’t bungee since it seems like I turned out okay. All the while I’m telling them how I’m not nervous and not to tell me not to look down like they told everyone before me because looking down is the best part.

                It’s time. I stand up from the chair and hop my way over to the platform feeling ridiclious with my feet tied together. I creep up to the edge and put my hands on the bar over my head and look down past my pretty blue toenails to the Nile River, over 140 feet below...

Look at that dopey looking smile on my face!

                The instructor comes up behind me and tells me to bring my hands down from the bar. I do. He tells me to wave to my friends at the bar across the way. I do. He does not tell me to wave at my “mates” back on the bungee tower walkway like he told everyone before me… I’m the last one; I have no mates to look over at and wave to. He asks me how I’m feeling and I tell him I’m more nervous than I was about 8 seconds ago when I was running my mouth off about how un-scared I was. It’s true. I was all cavalier talking about statistics and previous in utero extreme sports experience as I was sitting a safe distance from a 140 foot fall… now that I’m staring it in the face my heart is doing little flips in my chest. It feels really awkward to stand there with my feet tied together; I want to plant them shoulder width apart to keep my balance, to feel less like I’m going to fall off the platform rather than jump. But, pride’s on the line. After all my chatter I can’t very well stand there and hem-and-haw about an awkward center of gravity and whether or not I’m going to jump. Plus, I gotta make the parents proud. I was literally born to do this kind of thing.

The instructor is counting down behind me now. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, think about trying to do a pretty swan dive and, as the instructor is saying “bungee”, I bend my knees and throw myself off the ledge...

Look Ma, I can fly!

Then I’m flying… or not, I’m falling… and because I didn’t give myself the time to freak out before I jumped, as I’m falling, faster and faster, I have a brief and sudden explosion of adrenaline and fear. I’m getting closer and closer to the water, which looks a lot like solid ground from this vantage point. Seventy feet to go, fifty, forty… I should feel like I’m slowing down but I don’t; the water is still coming at me faster than my adrenaline soaked brain can comprehend.  Thirty feet, twenty, I close my eyes. The fear has vanished just as fast as it came. I feel an overwhelming sense of calm of serenity, acceptance, complete peace… and then I hit the water. This causes me, against all rationality, to open my eyes.

Now this would pretty much suck no matter who you were, opening your eyes while being plunged head-first into a river is never really a good or comfortable thing… but I wear contact lenses. Of course I’m only underwater for a fraction of a second before the bungee contracts and yanks me skyward but by that point the only thing I can think about is that I’ve just lost both my contact lenses. I proceed to follow my beautiful swan-dive with a “flopping fish” routine as I bounce around with my hands over my face trying to figure out if, by some miracle, either one of my contacts has survived my Nile-River-eye-flush worthy of any chemistry lab emergency eye wash station.

So, I spent the rest of my bungee, not reveling in the scenery as I bounced over the Nile River but furiously blinking and rubbing my palms into my eye sockets. Finally, my vision cleared and I realized I had not one but both contacts! Halleluiah… now only if I could go back in time and not open my eyes underwater the rest of the bungee would have been so much more enjoyable. When I got back down my friend Hannah told me I got the prize for the quietest bungee and the least hesitant jump from the platform. Apparently, I hopped right up to the edge and almost immediately jumped off, not making a single sound the entire time.  I hope, if not making mom and dad proud of my slightly off-kilter free fall form, they can at least know that I didn’t scream like a girl on the way down.

Thus, concludes the bungee experience. I’m glad I did it and I’d probably do it again… maybe some time down the line when I’m all grown up and not quite so strapped for cash.

After the bungee jump I got a massage at the super fancy resort next-door. It was my first ever massage and it’s probably something I won’t do again. On the upside, it was like 7 bucks for 40 minutes, which is pretty hard to beat.  

Later that evening a few of the other girls and I went on a boat tour to the source of the Nile, which is Lake Victoria in case you weren’t paying attention during African geography. It was cheap (15 bucks) and was a good opportunity to do some less extreme sightseeing than rafting had offered. So, here are some pictures from our boat tour:

Me on the "Source of the Nile" boat ride.
 I bought those giant aviator sunglasses here for about 2 bucks. Score!

Some sort of African bird... sorry I wasn't paying enough attention to remember what it's called

Love birds :-)

At the source of the Nile sign. Jinja is the city were in.

Behold the source of the longest river in the world!!!

It looks like a Super-Sized Blue-Jay... pretty sure that's not the taxonomic name...

Lake Victoria

Sunset over the river.

That’s pretty much the highlights of my trip to Uganda. Even with the drama on Friday night I had a great time. Nonetheless, I was happy to get back to my site and Boo, who had been home alone for almost 4 days, was ecstatic to see me.

Since I got back home I’ve been doing a lot of the same stuff I was doing before I left (gardening, painting, beading, working at the clinic and studying) only in slightly different proportions. In the last few weeks my impending date with the MCAT has me studying at all hours of the day and night. When I walk into town I carry my notecards with me and quiz myself as I walk. I’ve yet to trip but I’m just waiting for it to happen.

My garden is slowly growing, both in the literal sense that the crops themselves are growing and also in popularity and square footage. Every time I’m out there working I get a couple dozen people coming up to me and asking me what different things are and what benefits those foods have. In some ways I love this; I feel like I’m sort of doing “passive diffusion-education” – I’m teaching without really having to do much teaching. The people who are interested stop and ask questions, the people that don’t care keep walking. What’s even better is I over hear the Kenyans who I’ve talked to about the different crops correcting the other Kenyans when they misidentify a plant or as questions amongst themselves. On the other hand, after I’ve had the same conversation 18 times in the last 3 hours (and sometimes for the past 3 days in a row), it’s all I can do not to scream at people or ignore them all together. It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t literally the same few conversations over and over and over. One of them goes something like this:

Kenyan: Your skuma is soooo smart! (translation: your kale plants look very good)

Me: It isn’t skuma, it’s called broccoli. Do you know it?

Kenyan: (looking shocked) It’s not skuma?

Me: No, it is a different vegetable called broccoli, it looks kind of like cauliflower (which they have usually seen before) but green.

Kenyan: Why can’t you prune it? (translation: it has a lot of really big leaves that look like kale, why aren’t you eating them?)

Me: The leaves are not the part of the plant that you eat (though I’ve read they are edible). If you pull too many of the leaves the plant won’t make the vegetable, which is the part you want.

Kenyan: Help me with one of them. (translation: give me one of the plants)

Me: They aren’t ready to eat yet and I only have 5. You can buy the seeds in town if you want to grow your own.

Then the Kenyan either moves on to the next typical conversation I’ve had a million times or walks away looking slightly dissatisfied and still eyeing the giant leaves on my broccoli plants. I’ve been told dozens of times that I should find a man to do the digging for me. People ask me for crops almost every day. And my most favorite thing of all; they stand there and stare at me. Sometimes it’s women, but usually its men and children that will stand ten feet from me and just stare. They don’t ask questions, they don’t try to make conversation, they just stand there, sometimes for an hour or more, and watch me dig/weed/plant/harvest/water. I think even if I lived in Kenya the rest of my life I would never, never get used to the staring.

However, being stared at isn't my biggest gardening woe. For that, I turn to the mice that have moved in and are systematically destroying my crops. At first it was just my cucumbers which were disappearing. I honestly thought it was a person taking them and let me tell ya, I was pissed. Three months I watered those stupid things almost every day and was so excited to finally be able to eat them only to have someone steal them! Then, a couple days later (after I had talked to the night guards and the clinic staff about the cucumber thief) I found this in the garden…

            Ah, rats! Literally – Ah. Rats. Turns out it isn’t humans stealing my cucumbers but rats. Which actually seemed like more of a problem than if it was a person; how the hell do you get rid of rats in the great outdoors? I hadn’t seen rat traps for sale anywhere but surely there must be some way to deal with the little bastards… After talking to Peter (the same Peter from my previous blogs who, by the way, is doing extremely well these days) he told me to go purchase some rat poison in town and he would help me set it out the next day. I drummed my fingers together like a cartoon villain and said “watakufa” (they will die) to Peter as I walked away.  He may have missed the irony in my sheer delight at the thought of killing animals.

I walked to town the next morning and found said rat poison for about 40 cents. I bought 2, just to be on the safe side; I wanted them DEAD, not just sickly. I read the directions before joining Peter in my garden and was delighted to read the following statement: “bodies often mummify therefore no odour” and also discovered that the poison worked as an anticoagulant… basically I would killing these animals in the same way as Ebola would, by making them bleed to death from the inside out. *Insert malevolent laughter here* I figured it served them right for eating my cucumbers. You mess with the garden, you get Ebola; seemed like a fair trade. And best of all, there was the possibility that I’d be finding mummified rat corpses around my crops in the near future – how would that not brighten your day?

                Fast forward two weeks… I still have no cucumbers because the little rat bastards have continued to eat them all. Where are they coming from you ask? Well, let me show you. Here is the housing that has been erected for them (thanks to a building that was knocked down months ago and people who keep telling me they are going to come remove the bricks but have yet to show up…):

 So, now feeling as though I’m at war with them, I decided to erect a fortress for the cucumbers. Twenty bucks of chicken wire, three days, one sunburn and two scratched up arms later I ended up with this…

You would think the saga ended there, wouldn’t you? Well, you’re wrong but don’t worry, I thought that would be the end of it too. Clearly we underestimated the capability of the mice to adapt their preferred diet. Their next target: my string beans. In under a week my beans went from a beautiful flowing viney forest, climbing up the trestle that I spent an entire day constructing to a row of vine stumps. The mice ate the beans, the flowers, the leaves and the vines. So, since my cucumber plants were shriveling up and dying despite their being fenced (I have no idea why, maybe the heavy rains are too much water for them?), I decided to re-plant my beans in the cucumber fortress.

 

That was on Monday. Thursday I went into the garden and found this that the rats had actually started to dig my carrots out of the ground and eat them. They are also eating the sugar snap peas now... not the pods mind you, just the peas. The tiny little ass-holes are actually shelling the damn peas!

So, the saga continues. At this point I’m exasperated. I’ve asked a dozen times for the people who want the bricks to come get them and they’ve yet to do it. Again Thursday they told me they were coming in the afternoon… but if I’m honest I fully expect to go into worknext week and see that giant pile of bricks in the same place I left them last week. I’ll probably buy more poison in town this week, but until their luxury resort gets moved, I think it’s just going to be a frustrating, uphill battle.

So, that’s the happenings with the garden. It’s getting there but I still have a lot left that I’d like to do. At some point I would love to make signs for each vegetable. That way when I’m not in the garden people can educate themselves. If the number of people that stop to talk when I am there is any indication, the signs would get read a lot. Believe it or not I also still have some land left to dig and some crops (melon) left to plant. I built a miniature compost pit in the corner and I’d like to keep expanding that as necessary. Ultimately, the garden is just one big extended experiment. I’m learning what works as I go and tackling problems as they come along (and eat everything in sight).

The community resource center is still mostly just a big empty room with one really colorful wall. Here's what the progress looks like so far:

 It’s taking an obnoxious amount of time, which is pretty typical of “Lindsay Projects” which usually end months after I think they will, if ever.  Considering that wall is going to be painted like that for probably the next decade, I figure it’s better to take my time, do a good job and make it look nice for the people that will be staring at it long after I leave. Besides, I don’t have any resources to put in the resource center yet (still trying to figure out funding) so doing a hurry-up job on the walls to open a room with nothing in it would be pretty silly. That said, my lovely mother is working on getting some kids books together for me to bring back from America with me in June, so I’ll at least have something in the foreseeable future.

Besides gardening, painting and studying I’m still working on new jewelry pieces. I’ll be bringing a bunch home and I’m hoping some of you wonderful and generous people will help me out and buy some. The proceeds will go to starting my women’s group (who I want to start training in July) and to buying books for the resource center.

Alright well, there is, as always, lots of other stuff I could tell you about and about a dozen more pictures I wanted to upload. However, my internet/computer/electricity have all been extremely aggravating lately (even as I type this I’m knocking fervently on my wooden coffee table) which puts the total time spent trying to get this blog written and posted at somewhere around 20 hours of work. Yea, seriously. Considering there’s probably about 10 people who actually take the time to read this thing on a regular basis, I probably could have hand-written all of you individual letters and been done a lot faster.

The good news; two weeks from now I’ll be home and I will (hopefully) be able to see all of your lovely smiling faces and share my stories and pictures with you in person. Looking forward to it more than any of you can possibly know!

PS: sorry if the formatting on this one got a little weird - I was just trying to get the damn thing posted before everything crapped out on me again!

I think the only appropriate way to start this blog entry is with my run in with a public transportation vehicle. Literally, it ran into me.

                I was riding my bike to town, something I do at least once a week and it was about 11 am. I was on the main road maybe 2/3 of the way into the 5Km ride to town. I’m riding along the side of the road just like I always do, just like all the Kenyan bike riders always do, when I hear a familiar yet alarmingly different noise behind me. I’m used to the cars passing by at 40 or 50 miles an hour a few feet from my handle bars; that’s just how it is, there are no bike paths in rural Kenya. So the loud ‘hum’ I hear over the sound of my ipod doesn’t really startle me… until I notice that the hum is right behind me and that its turned into the sound of wheels sliding over pavement and gravel rather than rolling.

                In the second or fraction thereof, that I had to get a spare thought in before I got hit I thought: “I’m about to be hit by a car.” Groundbreaking, deep stuff, I know. But, that’s what I thought. I literally only had time to think about the fact that I was about to be hit. I couldn’t see it, I couldn’t feel it, I could just hear the sound of the wheels screeching towards me and knew I was going to get hit. That should say something about the amazing capacity of the human brain to process information.

                I had the vague sensation of moving really fast and the next thing I knew I was on the ground. I never lost consciousness, it just happened that fast. I was sitting there in the dirt with my hand on the ground and the wheel of the vehicle next to me. My ipod was still playing in my ears (“Mr. Know it All” by Kelly Clarkson) and I thought, “I just got hit by a car.” Nothing happened for what felt like a really long time but I’m sure was only a few seconds. I just sat there staring at the dirt not moving a single inch. I don’t even think I was breathing, I was just sitting there kinda leaning over, half supported by the tire of the car that had just hit me and thinking about the fact that nothing really hurt. I had the vague sensation of pain on my left hand, but other than that I felt nothing at all. It wasn’t even the normal sensation of knowing where your limbs are, the spatial awareness of one’s body parts that we call proprioception. I honest to God didn’t feel anything and I was terrified to move, scared that if I moved I might actually realize how hurt I was.

                Like I said, I sat there for what felt like forever before anything happened. Then everyone that was in the vehicle that hit me (maybe 6 or 7 people) climbed out and somebody put their hands under my arm pits to lift me up. I remember saying “wait” I think because I was so in shock, still processing how I wasn’t hurting. But on the second attempt I let them lift me to my feet and they sat me in the front of the vehicle. I asked for my purse and they gave it to me as a couple guys tried to shove my bike in the back of the vehicle. It wouldn’t fit so they put it in another small vehicle (called a tuk-tuk, a glorified motorized tricycle with a passenger cab) and I told them to take it to the clinic where I work since people actually know where that is.

                Somehow my helmet got off my head, I still don’t remember if I took it off or someone helped me, and as we pulled away on our way to the hospital I finally had the presence of mind to look down at myself and cry. I was covered in dust, my left wrist was bloody but nothing more than an abrasion and I couldn’t see blood coming from anywhere else. I still wasn’t hurting anywhere though and that worried me. As I cried silently I took my ear buds out of my ears, turned off my ipod and put it in my purse. Then I got out my phone and called the Peace Corps medical office and told them I’d been in an accident. I’ll tell ya one thing; the PC medical office might suck at sending me seasonal allergy meds when I ask for them, but you call them and open with “I got hit by a car” and those folks are on the ball.

                Long story shortened a bit: I cried, ended up in the ER of the large hospital in town and basically told I was fine sans any examination. Literally the guy looked at me, asked what had happened and said I was fine. I imagined the procedure in an ER in America if a “bicycle versus car” came in and sort of wanted to laugh… but I was still pretty shaken up and could not, for the life of me, get the tears to stop. They sat me on a bench and I waited for 45 minutes to have them pour sterile saline and iodine on the cut on my wrist and they said I was good to go. I insisted on an X-ray just to be safe and they kinda rolled their eyes at me. I mean, I really was just fine but who sends someone whose just been hit by a car home with no questions about loss of consciousness, dizziness or palpating the abdomen for sneaky internal injuries?

                I was pretty sure (98.2%) that my wrist was NOT broken but for the cost of an x-ray (about $3.25) was it really worth the small chance that it was actually broken and by not having it set properly I ended up with chronic pain or reduced range of motion, possibly preventing me from becoming a super-star trauma surgeon…? No; just give me the damn x-ray. So, eventually (after 2 straight days of the electricity in town being out and them not being about to run the x-ray machines) they did give it to me and, as I was hoping and expecting, there was no break.

My $3.25 X-ray.. thankfully break free

                I took away a few things from this experience I would like to share with you. Both of them are going to seem really cliché and for that, I apologize. Nonetheless, the points remain valid so listen up:

1)      Wear your helmet. Below is a picture of the windshield of the car that hit me. Those cracks are from where my helmet impacted the windshield. Can you imagine what would have happened to my head? Not only would they have had to cut off some of my beautiful, long hair to sew up the laceration on the back of my skull, I probably would still be in the hospital with traumatic brain injury or I would be dead.  Not to mention the fact that I’m in the middle of Africa. There’s a hospital in town but there’s no neurosurgery department, no CT scan, no one who is even remotely qualified, nor equipped, to do anything for a traumatic brain injury.

I apologized to the driver for breaking his windshield...
 the sarcasm might have been lost on him.

         Believe me, I hate wearing my helmet just as much as the next guy and I know every excuse because I’ve used it at one point or another. The fact of the matter is safety devices are there for a reason; because they work. So wear your helmet, buckle your safety belt, wear the dorky looking goggles in science class when you’re working with chemicals. Believe me, nothing looks as foolish as ending up majorly injured because you didn’t use a safety device.

         Looking at the picture of the car windshield still makes me shudder. My stupid, white helmet that I feel so dumb wearing was the likely difference between intensive care and walking away with a sprained wrist and a bruised butt.

2)      Life is unpredictable. I woke up in the morning and did everything I normally did, only on that day, I happened to occupy the same space as a car wanted to occupy on my way to town. I could have died. That sounds melodramatic and maybe it is but it’s also true. Had I swerved right I might have been pushed into traffic instead of onto the shoulder of the road. Had I not been wearing my helmet I could (and probably would) have cracked open my skull. I could have been hit by a larger vehicle and slid under the car rather than being pushed forward by it. The driver could have never seen me at all and therefore never attempted to slow down and I could have been hit twice or three times as hard. Any number of small changes could have resulted in my death… or never having been hit at all.

       The point is, when I woke up that morning I never imagined that I might die a few hours later. I thought about all the grudges I’d held, the people I’d never told I’d forgiven, the people that might not know how much I loved, missed and appreciated them. I thought about my friend’s babies I’d never meet and that my parents would have to hear over the phone that their daughter was lying in a morgue somewhere in Africa.

         I sat in the ER of the local hospital and couldn’t stop crying because all these things kept running through my head. I missed home more desperately than I have in months. I wanted someone to hug me and say “I’m glad you didn’t die” but all I got was a waiting room full of strangers speaking a foreign language and looking at me strangely.

 I also realized that there was no brilliant “life flashing before your eyes” moment like in ‘Armageddon’ when Bruce Willis blows himself up. Maybe that only comes when you die saving the planet. All I know is that if I’d hit my head and never woken up I’d have never had the chance to think of all the things I’d done in my life. Looking back is for people who are alive to do so. So, look back now, while you have the chance and fix the things that need fixing. Tell your parents you appreciate everything they’ve done for you. Apologize for every mean thing you ever did to your sister and tell her how proud of her you are. Tell that friend that you’ve lost contact with for whatever reason that you still think about them all the time. What would you regret having not done if you died today? Go do it. Carpe diem my friends, carpe diem.

Like I said, I know those things are cliché… but hey, they’re cliché for a reason and it never hurts to be reminded, right? It’s been a couple weeks since I got hit now and I’m mostly all healed up. My wrist is still achy if I use it too much and the bruises on my left butt cheek are still a lovely shade of yellowish grey. More damaging than the physical injuries is my aversion to riding my bike to town.

Eight days after I got hit I climbed back in the saddle, so to speak, and rode to town. It was awful. Every time I heard a car coming down the road behind me my heart raced, I held my breath, gripped the handlebars with white-knuckle ferocity and braced to be hit. I told myself the chances of being hit again were slim, like the people who get attacked by a shark or struck by lightning; once it happens once it seems incredibly rare that the same freak event would happen to the same person again. Of course the flip side of that is what are the chances you’d get hit twice by a car and walk away with only minor injuries both times? Either way, riding my bike to town was a horrible experience and that has made me more mad than anything else.

I used to love riding my bike to town. I’d turn on my ipod to something upbeat, stick an earbud in one ear and lose myself in the rhythm of pedaling, the feel of the wind on my face. I don’t know if I’ll ever have that experience again. The last few times I’ve needed to go to town since then I’ve walked the 5 Km. I’m sure I’ll ride to town again but it’s going to take me awhile to do so without it being an emotionally draining experience.

All right, onto other things!

Because it wouldn’t be a blog entry without a picture of Boo, here’s a couple cute ones…

Posing for a cute kitten calendar

A very dead kitchen sponge, the shrapnel
of which is spread all over my living room.

Her new favorite toys are my kitchen sponges which she steals and then rips to shreds. I guess I can’t be too upset, they’re cheap toys… I just wish she could keep the one and stop trying to climb in my dish bucket to steal the new ones. She’s getting bigger by the day and her spazzy rampages through the house are slightly more destructive each time. Her newest nickname is “tiny psychopath”. I’ve also discovered she will eat a surprising variety of foods. I pretty much let her try anything she wants because cat food here is SUPER expensive on my budget. So far Boo likes: raw carrots, hard-boiled eggs, yogurt, pasta, rice, mangoes, apples, oatmeal, curry, cheese, peanut butter, popcorn, bread, sweet potatoes, black beans and bananas. Oh, and she loves to eat bugs but not before she tortures them for a few hours before she finally kills them. Truly a tiny little psychopath…

Carrots

The dry season is finally coming to a close (hadn’t rained since November) and I could not be happier about it. I live right off a dirt road and the dust was starting to get a little bit ridiculous. Plus, hauling over 50 gallons of water 80 yards to my shamba (garden) every day was getting real old real fast. My little neighbor kids love helping me, which is fantastic… except their idea of appropriate watering technique is a little different than mine. One plant gets a half a gallon and the next gets half a cup. Plus, they can only carry half a gallon at a time (I bought a special tiny bucket for the smallest kid who’s four-years-old) and supervising their watering is almost more trouble than its worth. So, as I said, I’m happy the rains have returned; it saves me from having to water my garden every afternoon and the plants get way more water than they would through hand-watering.

My cucumber plants have started to flower!

Baby mixed greens. They've turned out
to be the hardest to grow, only 1 in 16
grew on the first try... second planting
is just starting to sprout, hoping they
do better otherwise I'm going to have
a VERY smalll salad!

Here’s a few pictures of some of the crops in my shamba. Most of them are growing pretty well. I’m discovering the bugs like to eat certain things and those will need to be sprayed if they’re going to survive. So far I’ve got cucumber, spinach, carrots, broccoli, pumpkin, string beans, snap peas and mixed baby greens planted and growing. My sprained wrist is preventing me from digging out the rest of the ground for the melon patch. Hoping another week of healing will be sufficient to let me dig again. We’ll see.

Baby Spinach - the thing I'm probably MOST excited about
having here.. helloooooo spinach salad!!!

Pumpkin - planted near the fence so it can
 grow up and save on space

What else am I working on? Well, I’m still making jewelry (I’m bringing stuff home with me when I visit in May and you best believe I expect you to buy some!) and getting myself set-up and organized to get the group started. I’m trying to make enough money to cover start-up costs right now for both the women’s group and my other major project, a community resource center.

While it’s nice for me that I live really close to a major town with universities, cyber cafes, a library, places where almost any information you could want is accessible, for about 90% of the people in my community those resources are not realistic. Many of them can’t afford the transport cost to town or are physically not able to walk the 5 plus Km. The kids under 13 or so aren’t really old enough to go to town themselves and wouldn’t have the money to pay for use of the resources even if they did. Additionally, many people don’t even know where to go to get information even if they had the time and means to get it.

Taking all these factors into consideration, I decided to start a community resource center at the clinic. It will basically be a little library except all the materials will stay in the room rather than being able to be “checked-out”. The clinic gave me a room and I got the go-ahead from community elders and the appropriate government offices a couple weeks ago. Right now I’m working on getting the room cleaned up, painted and furnished.

The first thing was cleaning out the room (it was an exam room that was turned into a storage room), scraping off the old posters and re-painting the walls white. There were cracks between the top of the wall and the trim along the ceiling so they bought some plaster. After waiting for over a week for the fundi (they call any kind of carpenter, repairman, mechanic a “fundi” [foo-n-dee]) that they told me was going to do the painting and plastering I got fed up and decided to do it myself. The staff was aghast, “surely you don’t know how to do those things, you better wait for the fundi” but I proceeded anyway. At that point I had my friend coming in two days to help me paint a mural and the white coat needed to be done first. I was sick of waiting for whatever fundi they had supposedly found (and were going to pay) to do something I knew I was completely capable of doing myself. So, I marched into the room and surveyed my equipment.



Before: Part of the world map will extend onto the
left part of this wall

The plaster was a bag of powder that you mix with water. Ooookay, I’d never actually mixed plaster before, but how hard could it really be? I went home and got an old peanut butter jar, a plastic spoon and picked up a few sticks on my way back to the clinic. I mixed the plaster, climbed on top of a stool, perched myself on my tip-toes and used a stick and the spoon to smear plaster into the cracks. I had an amazed audience for about the first twenty minutes; people were skeptical of my skills.

  


Where my future "desk" will be. The space will double
as my office so I can act as a librarian of sorts. The wall on
the right will have the nutrition art work... and of course
the bike won't be there.

Eventually the fundi showed up (he gawked at me too for a few minutes until he’d convinced himself I actually knew what I was doing) and started mixing the paint and preparing the walls. He started painting while I finished plastering and then I helped him paint. The whole afternoon the clinic staff kept wandering in to see our progress. My favorite part was the women and their reaction to me painting. Though the Kenyans like to tell me they have gender equality here, the fact is the gender roles are still very traditional and there is a clear divide between “women’s work” and “men’s work”. I was so totally doing men’s work. They stood there and had a conversation about how they never imagined that they would be able to paint their houses but now that they’d watched me do it and I’d assured them that it really wasn’t that hard and I could show them, they wanted to try it themselves. It’s really rewarding for me to hear the women talk like that.

  


Before: The "World Map" wall

Long story short, we painted (though the second coat still isn’t finished on 3 of the 4 walls) for the afternoon then the fundi left and I continued to paint until 8:30pm. A few days later my friend Hannah came to help me paint a mural on the wall.  We took my $3 world map and used it as a template to create a map the size of the wall. Using a ruler we measured and multiplied everything by five to keep the proportions correct.

  

The door leading into the center
and my little neighbor Kababa

I’ve said, in previous blogs, that I really believe I’m learning as much about myself in being here as I am about other people and this was just another example. I knew I had the tendency to be anal retentive (what, me, noooo) but holy crap. Hannah started with Australia and I started with South America and we worked towards each other. I was taking about four times as long because I was measuring everything while Hannah was free-handing most of it. I didn’t think a lot of it at the time, Hannah is a much better artist than I am, she actually paints pictures that actually resemble human beings.

Don't let the ruler fool you,
Hannah is only pretending to measure!

Anyway, we put some music on and drew away. Two hours later Hannah was on Africa and I was still finishing the middle Americas. Then we took a step back and looked at the map and realized Africa was about 2 inches from South America when it should have been about 20… oops. Hannah’s lack of measuring made her faster than me, but it also made her proportions waaaay off. So, I ended up going back and redrawing basically everything she’d drawn. My anal retention sort of comes in handy some times. On the other hand, I finally finished the drawing portion today... it took a solid 20 hours of work to finish just drawing the map. Adding to that the tracing in black paint, then at least 2 coats of color on each country (they are color coded based on HIV/AIDS prevalence) and the ocean and labeling the countries and adding a scale and a key.… well let’s just say I have a project for a couple weeks.  And that only covers one and a half walls.

One of the other walls will have art work based on nutrition education. I’ll post pictures from that when I get going on it. For now, I've included some before pictures of the room and a few of the progress made so far. I will definitely post more as I complete more of the map!


I'll leave you with some pictures of the work in progress... Until next time,  all my love from Africa!

Me on my super awesome ladder. They had to take it apart to
 get it through the door frame
and then reassemble it on the other side.

Saved the super annoying small countries in Europe for the end... Did a fist pump
 (directly into the ceiling since I was still standing on the ladder...) when I
 finally finished outlining the last country

Oh look, there I am!

Progress as of right now!