Birthday Traditions

We went to a birthday celebration for one of the other missionaries we know in town, (he doesn't know when his actual birthday is, so we just picked a random date. Lol.) and we learned a few things about birthdays in Kenya.

1) Apparently, it is tradition to dump buckets and buckets of water on the birthday person.

2) In some of the tribes, your birthday is not nearly as important as your naming day.

3) In the Masai tribe (the tribe our friend is from) babies don't get names until they are at least year old, and sometimes not until they are four.

4) The same tribe announces the birth of a baby by someone standing outside of the house and yelling "We have had a baby." three times, loud enough for the whole village to hear.

5) It's the birthday person's job to feed everyone present a bite of the cake -- literally, they come around with a fork and stick a piece in each person's mouth.

We also learned one other random fact:

In Kenyan culture, it is considered embarrassing to compliment someone, especially in public. Oops! Lol.

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Long Overdue Pics

So, as some of you know, my school did a thing last May as part of our Suffering Church class that was designed as a simulation of the persecuted church. It only lasted 36 hours, but it was incredibly intense, and it meant enough to people that my team has already talked about it several times since we've been here.

-- Much to the confusion of our site supervisors.

They will start us singing a song, and one of us will comment with something along the lines of, "Do you remember when we sang this in prison?" or, "This song always makes me think of being in jail." Needless to say, they were a little confused the first couple times, "Uh, guys, is there something we should know?" Lol.

Anyhow, I finally got a hold of some pictures of the event, so now you get to see them too.

Prison. Cell number 108.The middle of one of our "sleep - no sleep" cycles on the second night in the prison, where they would wake you up repeatedly in the middle of the night just after your body finally starts to fall back asleep. As you can tell by the looks on our faces, we were all mucho alert by this point -- or not.Elizabeth in prison.The "prison warden" doling out punishment.

Prison cells 104 and 105.In prison doing something. I think this might have been when they woke us up at 3:00 in the morning to go out to the tennis courts for push ups and sit ups, trying the bait the people in the peace camp to try and free us even though we had made a pledge not to run away even if we were rescued.Noses against the wall in prison. This was a favorite way to pass the time, almost as popular as making us lay on our backs and stare at the ceiling in the silence without falling asleep or closing our eyes. (Katelyn and Emily)

The "general." If we wanted out, all we had to do was pledge allegiance to him and to his "glorious republic, which was all that was, and is, and ever will be," denying the "cult" that we were part of. Noel and one of the interns trying to get some sleep in the peace camp.

Will trying to get some sleep in the peace camp on one of the only non pine needle covered surfaces.

Because it was a simulation, most of what was going on had to be fueled by our imaginations, so pictures don't really do justice to what the event was like. They might give you a little bit of an idea though, and they're fun for me to look back and see what parts of the event might have looked like from the outside, so, enjoy.

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Classes, classes, and more classes

If I haven't put up many updates about the things we've been doing lately, there's a reason for that.

We plain haven't been doing a whole lot recently.

Every day this week has been five or six hours of language classes, plus time studying in between classes.

It's been really good -- we've learned a ton -- but sitting in the same class for that many hours a day is a little exhausting.

On Tuesday we had class from 8:00 to 12:30 in the morning, from 4:00 to 5:00 in the afternoon, and then again from 7:00 to 8:00 that evening. There was barely time to get out of the house to try and do anything before we had to be back for the next round of class. It was kind of intense, but things are supposed to get a little calmer next week -- we'll only have class in the morning -- so we should start being able to get back to doing things in the afternoon like we used to.

(Used to being a relative term when we've only been in the country for about a month. Lol.)

African Squirrels

This is a mongoose.



This is a family of mongoose (mongeese?).



They're pretty much the African version of squirrels, but way cooler (as evidenced by the fact that Riki Tiki Tavi does things that no squirrel could ever do).

We also think that they might be what it living in our ceiling.

It's either that or a rat, but it jumps way more than most rats do -- I think it has dance parties up there some nights... Lol.

Whoot!

I learned how to make a sentence today!

Yeah, I know, it doesn't sound very impressive, but it was very exciting.

I've learned all sorts of Swahili vocab over the last couple weeks -- pages and pages and pages of vocab -- but we hadn't learned how to make the verbs work the way they need to to form sentences. (We were doing the Tarzan thing. Lol. "Want cookie." "You bring water." "Kill bug." etc)

Mimi nina viatu mbili.

Translation: "I have two shoes." Yep. First sentence I wrote. Lol.

Nina nanasi nne na ana nanasi na nazi.
"I have four pineapples and she has a pineapple and a coconut."

Try saying that ten times fast.

More Pics

Video Blog #2

Episode Two:

Cooking Advenures

Pictures!

There are pictures of our time so far up here and here.

Links

Just a heads up. The internet here is a little iffy (ie. We haven’t got it to work for more than three hours straight, and it’s been down for the last twenty-four hours), so, if I ever seem to fall off the grid for a while or a don’t reply to something you send me, it might just be that I haven’t been able to get online.

My team is trying to do a video blog of sorts, though. The first segment, covering our week in Nairobi, is up here.

We have more videos made, it is just a matter of getting internet for long enough to get them uploaded, so, keep an eye out for new ones.

Imagination

We went to go visit a primary school on Tuesday afternoon to take our "official" tour -- we had already been their briefly during our second Amazing Race. It was a lot of fun, but, at the same time, very frustrating.

The school we visited is a primary (elementary and middle) school near here that some of our friends are very involved with. Because of the many different factors in this community that drive different groups of people apart, the kids are required to wear uniforms during school hours. Three quarters of the students are Muslim, so their time at school is the only time that these girls are without their head coverings. A couple of them we have met in town on other occasions -- fully covered then -- and they look so much happier at school, where they have a chance to exist on the same level as the boys they are in class with. Everywhere else they go, they are considered second class citizens, almost the property of their fathers and brothers.

In court here, a woman's testimony is worth half that of a man. The blood price for accidentally killing a man in an auto accident among the more rural tribes is 70 camels. The blood price for killing a woman in the same situation is 1 camel.

Outside of the culture that surrounds the school though, there were so many things about the school system itself that frustrated me.

Nothing in the Kenyan school system encourages creativity. There are class eight girls (eighth graders) who struggle to even color in a line drawing that we make for them, simply because they have never been exposed to art. It's not that their teachers aren't teaching them because they don't want to, their teachers simply don't know how either. Most of the teachers do not have the creative or spatial reasoning skills to put together a nine piece puzzle, so their is no way for them to encourage imagination in their kids.

Anybody that has been exposed to the classes that I taught at CHECK this last semester -- or has ever had a conversation with me regarding fantasy, or any other type of fiction -- knows how much of a big deal I think that it is for learning and creativity to be integrated completely.

The kids are incredibly smart, but everything about their education is rote memorization. I would love to get my hands on a class of them -- or a class of their teachers -- and see what I could do with them.

I wouldn't be very hesitant to say that a good portion of this country's problems -- including the grip of poverty -- stem from the fact that its people simply do not have the imagination to fathom that the world could be any different than what it is now. A generation that could be taught both to dream and to put their dreams into reality could do amazing things for this culture. But, in a public school system where primary school class sizes can reach 100 students per teacher, I can't see that happening any time in the near future.

If you want to pray for the people of this area, pray for eyes to be opened to the truth of Jesus and pray for dreamers who can see this place with what Shane Claiborne refers to as a "prophetic imagination," an imagination lit by the things of Christ.

Syrup Making 101

Lunch on Saturday didn’t end up being until about 4:30 in the afternoon. By the time we got back into town after a missionaries’ fellowship that was held not far from here, everybody was way ready for food and no one felt like going to a hotel, so we made pancakes and syrup.

The first batch of syrup decided to turn back into sugar at the last moment – not really sure why – so that was a fail, but the second batch turned out really well.

(You boil three parts sugar and two parts water together for about ten minutes, and then, so long as you keep it warm and covered, you have syrup. If you let it solidify, you get some seriously sticky caramel corn coating. Lol.)

While we were making the syrup at our house, Esther went over to the boys’ house so that Jamie could show her how to make pancakes on a chapatti (kind of like a cross between a tortilla and a chalupa) plate. The recipe doesn’t use any eggs, so those were some seriously, heavy pancakes.

Out of everyone who had pancakes for lunch, I don’t think more than one or two managed to eat anything more for dinner than maybe a few bites of the chapatti that Jamie and Mama Injero were teaching us how to make. That’s how massive the pancakes were.

Here's the Scoop

Since I never really explained the situation here in town – we had no clue until we got here – here’s the deal.

There are Christians here (about twenty-seven little churches in a population of about 60,000), but they are almost all down-countries, people from tribes in Western Kenyan that received the gospel a hundred years ago or more.

Churches in Western Kenya here about the need here, and send a missionary to start a church. They do, and they get converts, but they are all down-country people.

It’s not that down-countries don’t need to hear the gospel, but the effect is kind of like sending a missionary up to the Rez to minister to the Yakama people and then having him plant a church that is full of white people or full of Latin migrant workers. People would be getting saved, but the Yakama Nation would be no more reached.

Out of the twenty-seven churches in town, there are only two that are making any real effort to reach out to the Somali people who are the majority tribe here.

In this immediate area, there are six tribes that are still classified as unreached – all of them Muslim.

Those are the people we are here to reach out to and to encourage the church here to reach out to.

Although we’re not the only Christians here, we are more or less the only white people here.

There are several NGOs in town (Unicef, World Food Program, etc), but, really, the only other white people here outside of our group are with “Civilian Affairs,” meaning that they are affiliated with a foreign military and are here doing relief and development work. They only come for short stints – a month to seven months – and, when they’re not working, they pretty much hole up in the only western style hotel in town.

The NGOs don’t really want anything to do with them, since, even though most of the Civilian Affairs guys actually are civilians, they are still affiliated with the military. But, a few of them are aware – in vague terms – of what we’re here for, and they have offered their help if we’re ever working a project that they could assist with.

(A few months of either being stared at or shunned by everyone in town makes it pretty exciting when someone is willing to talk about working with you – even when those somebodies are a group of nineteen to twenty-something college kids who just got into town…lol.)

Prayer Focus

Quick prayer request.

December was supposed to have been the rainy season here (even though it’s more humid than the Tri-Cities, it sounds like they get right about the same amount of rain), but the rain never came in the amounts that it was supposed to – thus, this part of the country is entering another food crises.

One of our neighbors, who is Muslim and knows very well that we are Christians, has asked us to pray for rain.

She has known the old intern team since they got here and has already become a good friend to us. I would love to see God honor her request and use that to reveal Himself to her.

So, if you want something to pray about, pray for rain

Poverty

So, I was remembering today the “speech” that you always give kids during Sunday school when you want them to bring stuff for shoeboxes or donate their allowance to build a school in another country. You know, the one about how, if they have more than one toilet in their house, or a car in their garage, or plenty of food to eat, they are richer than most of the world.

Poverty, though, is far more than not having enough stuff. Poverty is the state of having no options. In the West, “going green” is a huge deal right now, being gentle with the environment, living “sustainably,” and, with a few rare exceptions, everyone, regardless of their proximity to the poverty line, is able to make “green” choices.

You can try to create less trash, you can collect your recyclables, and you can hope that your municipal trash collectors are responsible in their creation of land fills. You don’t have to live in a filthy neighborhood. There are ways to clean it up.

In the town we’re living in, though, no amount of money can give you the option of living “green.” The only way to dispose of trash here is to pile it in your yard, and, when the pile becomes too large, or too smelly, you light a match to it. Every bit of it, the plastic, the metal, the Styrofoam, it all has to be burned.

There are constantly piles sputtering smoke and noxious chemicals into the air. And there is no choice but to breathe it in. The plastic bottles that litter every piece of dirt that isn’t a yard are left where they are, because you have two options. Either you leave it where it is, knowing that, eventually, the sand will cover it and it will be forgotten until it finally starts to disintegrate and seeps into the ground water, or you gather it up and you burn it, releasing clouds of stomach churning pollutants into the air (literally, they make you sick to your stomach).

You can poison the town now, or you can poison it in the future.

Poverty isn’t so much about your stuff as it is about what you are or aren’t able to do with your stuff.

Language Lesson Mbili

The culture here is so totally different, that every encounter with another human being is another time of learning something new, of realizing something else that you don’t yet understand. There is a certain exhilaration to having to sponge up information so quickly, but there is also a certain frustration to never quite having all of the tools that you need.

In the States, I can teach Sunday school or have a class at CHECK and just communicate. Here, even English has to be relearned. People from most of the tribes have a hard time understanding American accents, so in order to communicate well, you have to accent your speech and use different word choices than you would when talking to another American or a Canadian.

We’re learning Swahili (among other languages), but we’re also learning how to speak English like Kenyans.

I kind of intense. Lol.

Ice Cream!!

We had ice cream on Saturday!! Al Fatah (the grocery store in town) just got in a shipment of ice cream, so, after me and Ashley and Heath finished the rest of the errands we had to run in town, we stopped in and picked up two tubs (tubs of ice cream here are tiny). By the time we walked back to our house – it’s probably three or four kilometers, but I have no idea how many miles that is – it was just starting to melt, but still frozen enough to be amazing.

Very few things here are cold, unless you buy a pop from the duka, and there are very few dairy products, so ice cream is pretty much a miracle.

It’s kind of odd how quickly things here are becoming normal, that I wouldn’t have thought would become normal so quickly.

The power going out randomly is normal. The trash on the roads is starting to be normal – literally, there are some places in the market where the ground looks like the Mexican garbage dump room of the REAL Life exhibit. Not looking upcountry men in the eye or responding when they greet you is slowly becoming normal – although not easy or enjoyable.

I’m really bad at the whole existing as a female in a heavily male dominated culture thing. Even safety things like not going into the market or to the ATM without a guy, and no going anywhere unless there are at least two girls drive me nuts more often than not, but Muslim guys aren’t supposed to greet women outside of their families – conversation is okay, but greeting is bad…idk – even mzungu girls who they think don’t know any better.

Ninjas?

Dude! I live in town with ninjas!

Okay, not really. Lol. But, yes.

Apparently, some people here refer to the Somali ladies who wear the black veil over their faces (it ties on over the head covering and leaves just a rectangle uncovered over the eyes) as ninjas and the ladies who wear everything except for the veil (just their faces are uncovered) as samurai.

I’m not really sure why they call them that, but it makes me happy that I can say that I live in a town where there are ninjas wandering around in the market…

That's a What?

Well, two days of language classes down. Our site supervisor just came to the house and nailed up a whiteboard on our wall (a Kenyan whiteboard is apparently a white, high gloss piece of metal with the edges pounded under, so that they aren’t sharp) so now we can keep track of some of the bazillion new words we are learning.

I have pages and pages of words that I have been told the meaning of, but it takes a few times of actually hearing them in context before they actually stick.

Pronunciation is pretty easy, except for the fact that they combine consonants far more frequently than we do in English. For instance, the word that means “clever” or “witty” is spelled mjanje, and it is pronounced in two syllables, “mja-nje.”

With the exception of the “v” (it sounds like an American “v”), everything is pronounced just the same as it is in Spanish



We’re slowly starting to meet people, mainly down-countries who know the old intern team, but a few Somalis who live in our neighborhood as well. Most of the Somalis have very traditional Muslim names (Muhammad, Hassan, Fautma, etc), but, among certain of the down-country tribes, it seems like everyone and their uncle has a female relative named Jessica.

It’s kind of funny (maybe Jessica is just one of those names that is common all over the world) and it makes it way easier to introduce myself.

Several of the tribes don’t have a distinction between the “l” and “r” sounds (or just plain don’t have those sounds), so Laura and Warren have a really hard time getting their names across sometimes.

Normal?

It doesn’t feel like there s as much to write about the last couple of days, but that is mainly because life is starting to settle in and feel normal.

Melissa is out back right now picking dry branches off the bushes so she has enough tinder to start the charcoal cooker and boil water, so that it will be cool enough to pour into the filter by the time we need it. The kitchen shelves are stocked with raw foods that Esther picked up at the market. Everyone finished their laundry for the moment, so the basin is sitting, empty, in the corner, and the last of the clothes are drying on the line.

One of the senior girls is coming over in about an hour, and we’re going to walk to town to visit the ATM, pick up some phone and internet credit, and stop by the market to pick up dresses from the fundi.

The Mama at the duka knows our faces if not our names. We’re getting better at the whole mosquito net thing. Nobody’s surprised any more when the power goes out and doesn’t come back for twelve hours or more, and, yeah. This is slowly just becoming life.

The Quest for Food

Well, we survived our first night of cooking for ourselves – if only barely.

The old team and our supervisors left us entirely to our own resources the first Sunday night in Garissa, and it was…an adventure.

There had been no chance to go to town, so we only had what we had bought in the Nakumatt in Nairobi and brought with us (one pan, some plastic cups, a butcher knife, no silver ware, ramen noodles, and two cans of tuna that had somehow found their way to our house after the Amazing Race instead of being eaten for lunch). We also had no light in the kitchen because there was no bulb in the socket.

We told the boys that we would feed them dinner, on the condition that they put the bulb in. (Warren is ridiculously tall and the only one who could reach.)

It turns out that neither end of the deal was as easily done as said.

We have a two burner gas stove, but one of the legs is a little melted, so it sits crooked on the counter top. Esther was boiling ramen noodles in our skillet to make kind of a tuna noodle casserole, and she had just put down the butcher knife that she was using to stir it all, when the entire skillet tipped over and spilled boiling water all over her hand…and the kitchen.

While me and Laura swept all the noodles out the kitchen door and into the garden (there was one of those little, grass hand brooms in the house when we got here but no dustpan) and then tried to wipe down the floor, Ashley took care of Esther’s hand, and Warren took his first shot at putting in the light bulb.

Turns out there was the base of an old light bulb stuck in the socket, and the entire socket ended up breaking. No problem. Right? We had an extra socket coming out of the wall in the bedroom that was perfectly good and should have been easy enough to remove.

…Except for the fact that there are seven different light switches in the bedroom and only one working bulb. They all got turned off, except for the one leading to that socket (Jason showed us the next day where the circuit box is…)

After electrocuting his thumb, Warren got the socket off and proceeded to try and wire it into the kitchen – by flashlight, by now, because is was getting to be dusk, and the kitchen gets darker far faster than the rest of the house.

Unfortunately, the remaining wire was of less than stellar quality, and, every time it finally looked like the socket was in, the twisted wires would break, and the entire process had to be restarted – all while Esther was trying to remake dinner with a new batch of noodles.

The only break in the pattern was when Warren’s knife slipped and he sliced open the thumb that hadn’t been electrocuted.

Shortly after we got his second thumb patched up, the power went out, so, after a few more minutes by flashlight, we called it quits and settled for eating dinner, which was an adventure in itself.

Esther had scooped the casserole into plastic cups, (The idea was to pour it out onto your slice of bread and kind of slurp it from there – very sophisticated, we know) but, there’s this thing with ramen noodles when you make then into a casserole. They tend to kind of stick together.

So, every time you dumped some out, you ended up with a cup shaped mass of wiggly dinner staring up at you from a piece of sliced white bread.

Maybe we were just tired, and, maybe, after so many “incidents” in the span of less than an hour, we would have found anything amusing, but the jello like properties of the casserole provided for quite the meal time entertainment.

Language Lesson Moja

Sunday was church.

We woke up in the morning and realized that we didn’t have anything in the house to eat for breakfast, so, a couple of the girls, who were already dressed and ready, went around the corner to the duka (a little store) that our landlady runs and bought a loaf of bread to go with the peanut butter and jelly that we had brought with us from the Nakumatt (kind of like WalMart) in Nairobi.

Getting in and out of the mosquito nets is still an adventure every time, but, hey, I guess we’ll get better at it, right?

I went to the same church here that I attended in Nairobi last week, when I was waiting for the rest of my team to arrive – well, a branch of the same church. Service was good, but long, almost three and a half hours type of long.

I learned a new word though, well, a lot of new words, but that’s kind of how it works when you don’t know the language. 

A funzi is a disciple or a learner, someone training to become a fundi, a skilled worker. As a disciple, a funzi, of Christ, then, we are to study to show ourselves approved, show ourselves to be a fundi, fully capable of handling the word of God.

Idk. Maybe I’m just a linguistics nut, but I thought it was really cool how much closer related the words are in Kiswahili than they are in English.

Amazing Race -- Take Two

The first Saturday in our new town (the morning after we got here), we did another Amazing Race type of thing in order to help us figure out how things here run.

Luckily, this one was only half a day long – and there were no flights of stairs involved. Me, Laura, and Billy (one of the old interns, who was acting as our guide) ended up coming in first, by not even five minutes, so, sometime this week, we get to go out to eat with our site supervisors at one of their favorite restaurants.

Hopefully, it won’t be the one we went to during the race.

One of our stops was to eat a bowl of Matumbo at a local hotel (restaurant). It turns out that matumbo is cow stomach.

It wasn’t too bad – a little chewy and rubbery – but it looked very…odd.

If you can imagine scooping a piece of brown carpet (the type with all of the little tiny loops) out of a bowl of soup and then putting it in your mouth, you’ll get the picture.

(The weather here isn’t bad. It’s been in the mid to high nineties the last couple of weeks – it’s hot season now – and it’s more humid than the Tri-Cities is in the summer. No rain, the air is just stickier.)

Off to Neverland

We were planning to hit up a cyber café Friday morning, but the bus that was coming to pick up our luggage was a little over two hours late because they were fixing the shocks, so, we ended up getting on the bus the same time as our luggage and heading straight out from there. So, you get even more updates all at once than originally planned…

Oh well, karibu Kenya, welcome to Kenya. The culture here isn’t really as concerned about plans and deadlines as we are in the states. In Kenya (like much of the rest of the world) nothing is certain until it’s history.

The bus ride up took about seven hours, and, after a few minutes, we were more than glad that they had taken the time to repair the shocks. For the most part, it wasn’t too bad (so long as you didn’t have any aspirations of drawing a masterpiece or perfecting your handwriting) but, every once in a while, there would be a bump or a pothole of the sort that clacks your teeth together and jostles your brain around in your skull.

While we were still upcountry, several of us were kept busy peering out the windows looking for a good spot for the coffee farm we planned out in our BAM class, and, once we got into the bush upcountry, there were small villages or herds of camels a couple times an hour, so the wuzungu (white people) on the bus were kept more or less entertained.

Our long anticipated arrival was carried out by flashlight and lantern, because none of the three intern houses had power.

The girls from my team have a house, the girls from the old team have a house, and all of the guys are housed together, but all three houses are on the same power grid, so, when one house gets their power turned off because of rationing, all three houses are out of luck.

The city is installing new generators though, to replace the old ones, so, hopefully, they will put out enough power that the electricity rationing will be a thing of the past. We’ll see.

Missionaries's Kids

While we’ve been in Nairobi, I gotten to hang out quite a bit with the kids of one of the missionaries who is going to be supervising us any time we’re in town. His son is twelve and the two girls are nine and four. They’re a lot of fun, and it’s kind of funny to hear them talk about themselves as if they were Kenyan (they’ve lived here since the oldest one was two) even though their passports say that they are American.

The younger two ask us questions about “America” all the time. They go to the States every year in between June and August in order to get away from the cold season here in Nairobi (seasons are backwards in the southern hemisphere from what they are in the US), so, to them, living in America is kind of like living in Hawaii would be to us.

Can you imagine how different your life would be if America was just someplace that you came on vacation, and another country felt like your real home?

Short Sleeves!!!

The first Thursday was devoted to going over technical stuff about internship as well as some basic do’s and don’ts in Kenyan culture. It was all fairly laid back, but we had fun and learned one thing that, to me at least, was really exciting.

Apparently, over the last four or five months (since the last time we heard anything about dress code for Kenya), the girls who are in Garissa right now on internship have reassessed, and, while skirts are still a requirement for pretty much all females in the upcountry, there are certain contexts, while in town, where it is perfectly okay for girls to wear short sleeved t-shirts.
Yep. Jessica is mucho excited.

And I really need to quit using that word. People from Kenya look at me funny every time it pops out of my mouth like, “You were speaking English, but I have no clue what that word was that just came out of your mouth. Are you okay?”

Shopping Adventures

The first Wednesday here was a shopping day (We’re eleven hours ahead of you guys here, so, if I ever refer to days that you haven’t had yet, that’s why.) Out of my team of eight, there is one person who actually likes shopping, so, devoting an entire day to it was a little rough.

We started out at the open air market, which was actually kind of cool, at least for the first while. Just the day before, we had been to that same spot, (one of the stops in our “amazing race”) but there had been nothing there.

Apparently, the vendors don’t actually have city licenses to be there, so, every once in a while, the city council come by and order the entire market emptied. Any pictures you’ve seen of overseas (especially African and Near Eastern markets) will give you a good idea of what the market looked like. The place was absolutely teaming with vendors and goods for sale, but, the day before, it had been empty. I don’t know how they do it, but it is impressive.

The smells in the market are constantly changing. The shoe stands smell like hot leather and soap, because the vendors are constantly scrubbing off dirt with a brush and warm, soapy water to keep the shoes looking new, even after being tried on and hauled back and forth to market. The sugar cane cart smells faintly sweet, and the scent follows you, clinging to your sticky fingers even after you have sucked out all of the juice and spit the last of the fibrous pulp into the dirt. The pools of water that linger in the shaded ditches between stands give off a slightly sour smell. And the smoke from the charcoal maker’s stands competes with the acrid smoke from the piles of trash that are burning in back corners where someone has decided to clean up a little.

Between the market and the Nakumatt (kind of like the Kenyan version of WalMart or Target) we got everything that we’ll need for the next sixteen months but wont be able to get easily (pillows, mosquito nets, dishes, toilet seats, mirrors, peanut butter, shampoo, etc).

Translation Please

Swang (Swahili English) to American English translation guide

“pounding” means either eating or traveling depending on the context, “pound the road” “pound the pizza”
A “hotel” is a place where you eat food, “the Olive Garden Hotel”
A “paper bag” is the plastic sack that you put your purchases in (what we would call a plastic bag)
Jeans, etc are “trousers” not pants – those are your underwear
A “matatu” is a public transport
A “bob” is a shilling (Kenyan currency is counted in shillings. 75KHS is about one US dollar.)
A “guest house” is what we would call a hotel or a bed and breakfast
“upcountry” is pretty much anything north and east of Nairobi
“downcountry” is Nairobi and anything south or west of it
A “mzungu” is a white person
“Jambo” means hello, but people only great you with it if they think you are a tourist. Normal people say “habari” which kinda means, “What’s up?” or “How are you?”
Your cell phone is your “mobile”
And, you “SMS” (es-em-es) from phone to phone instead of texting

Pole (sorry) that all of these updates are coming at once. We didn’t have internet available in Nairobi – or the time to hit up a cyber café more than once – so you get to be inundated. 

I'm Here

Wow. I’m in Kenya, guys!

I was the first one out of my team to get here, so, I got to spend most of Sunday hanging out with both of my sets of site supervisors (One set lives here in Nairobi and the other set lives in Garissa – the second set are the ones that we are going to be working directly with) and their kids.

My bag got left behind in London, so I smelled like I’d been traveling for three days, but the kids didn’t seem to mind. They were charged with keeping me awake – sleeping in the middle of the day makes it way harder to get over jet lag – so, besides the time we spent at church, we pretty much played all day. I don’t think I’ve ever played that many hours of hide and seek in my life!

We went to go see the rift valley on Monday afternoon. It was foggy, but, really pretty, and really cool to see in person after knowing about it for so long. It’s crazy to think that that giant crack in the ground runs all the way from the top of the continent down to past where we are.

Dinner on Monday night was rice, goat meat, and kale. The goat meat wasn’t bad, a little chewy, but it tasted good (No. It didn’t taste like chicken. It actually tasted a lot like pork.) Kale, on the other hand, although it isn’t bad either, tastes like boiled grass. Literally, if you picked grass from your yard and boiled it until it was soft, it would taste like kale.

Btw. We totally saw a herd of Zebra as we were on the way to the guest house (kind of like a hostel) on Sunday night! I didn’t have my camera though and it was dark, so there
is no proof.