You Know....

You know you have been on the Kenya internship for a while when:

- You show up at school and are immediately put to work at a table that has just recently been cleared of the books that your parents brought*, books that are now sitting on a shelf in the corner, with the memory verse posters that the other girls on your team have made

- Your team mate has perfected the art of skillet cookie making

- You tell kids that you are going back to your house, and they look at you with huge, worried eyes, asking if you are going on an airplane

- People don't believe you when you tell them that you can't draw, so they put you to work drawing posters anyhow**

- You realize that you have been wearing the same single pair of flip flops and the same two black skirts for thirteen consecutive months

- All of your conversations about "when we go back to America" center around food

- You have conversations about "when we go back to America"

- You hesitate every time over the words color/colour and airplane/aeroplane

- You find yourself telling someone that their keyboard cover, "will keep the ants from crawling into their computer," as if that were the normal reason for purchasing such an item

- The kids at "your" school use your name as a general term for white, brown haired, females

- You follow a cow to school until right before the village, where it shies off into the "forest" by the river, and the only odd part is how fat the cow was

- You answer to "white person" and "teacher" just as often as you answer to your name

- It feels like it can't possibly have been an entire year since last Lent, until you realize that you are thinking of Ramadan, not Lent

- Random men ask you to watch their donkeys***

*(books at school)

**(clothing poster)

***Melissa was standing outside of a shop, near one of the primary schools that we have been involved with, waiting for a matatu (public transportation van), so that she could get back to our house, when a man came up and asked her to watch his donkey and cart while he went in to buy a bottle of pop.

So, she did...a random American, standing by the side of the road, holding the lead rope for a donkey cart, that belonged to some random, skirt wearing man, who was inside drinking a bottle of pop.

Sometimes, I think that we don't realize how strange our life is.

(not the donkey or cart involved in the story...)