One of my favorite phrases that Kenyans are prone to saying is, "I am just here." I have heard this (or "We are just here," or "You are just here") over a hundred times over the past seven weeks that I've been in Kenya. I've heard it in so many situations - such as when Ben takes a seat on the sofa in Welliminah's living room after being welcomed in ("So David, I am just here"), or running into our driver Okwemba while walking in the Luanda marketplace ("So, we are just here"). The statement is always accompanied by a large, satisfied smile and direct, prolonged eye contact - I suppose, in order to savor the moment that the person is "just here" in.
The first time hearing this expression - like I imagine Americans reading this right now - I found it a bit funny. When I would hear the phrase, I would think to myself, "Yes clearly, I can see you." Yet, it seems to have grown on me. I have begun finding myself echoing the expression in return to my Kenyan counterparts ("Yes, we are here"). Despite the fact that the phrase is a statement of the obvious, there's some beauty in the acknowledgment of the moment at hand - the space that is being occupied, the people occupying it, and the simple joy in being "here," wherever that may be. It makes me realize how seldom I stop to appreciate each unique moment in time in my daily life in the United States (and how much our culture seems to discourage it).
I haven't really used this blog to reflect on my personal thoughts, so I wanted to briefly share how I have fared in Kenya, and to share some reflections on what I have personally gained over the past seven weeks. Over the first twenty-plus years of my life, I have come to understand that I have a strong tendency to constantly look forward. I'm always looking ahead (what's next? where am I going? what's happening tomorrow?). This is my fourth trip abroad in my life, and each time, I have found myself constantly thinking about what I would do when I get back to the States and back to "normal life." Each time, I would get back and reflect on my trip and often find myself wishing I had appreciated my time overseas more, and not spent so much time thinking about what I would do when I got home.
This trip has been different though. Perhaps my past regrets of not staying "in the moment" has caused me to be more conscious about it this time around. But I also think I have matured and become a wiser person since the last time I traveled abroad. I seem to be appreciating each moment more. For instance, I believe the work I'm doing for Kijana is important, but I would also have to say that many seemingly mundane moments from the past seven weeks have been equally important. Moments like lying on the grass under the shade of an avocado tree with Juliette's baby Vincent sitting on my stomach for an hour at a time. Moments like walking with Ben at sunset - soft, warm sunlight from the horizon, beautiful lush green plants in every direction, the smell of smoke in the air as families cook dinner - as I come to the realization that I feel more alive than I have ever felt in my life.
That feeling of being alive is what being a human is supposed to feel like. I believe that that feeling is the fulfillment of the human spirit's highest potential. It's the feeling of having a warm heart - spread to me like a contagious virus by the smiles and genuine spirit of virtually every person I have met here. I have been infected by the warmest hearts I have ever encountered, and I intend to bring it home with me.
I have three more weeks of staying in the moment here in Es'saba village. I am truly going to miss my Kenyan family - Welliminah, Juliette, Ann, Sam, Ben, Divo, Moraa, Vincent, and others - and I am truly going to miss the beauty and peacefulness that permeates throughout this paradise. This is sincerely the happiest I have been in my life. I could stay here forever.
But let me stop myself from looking too far into the future, lest I forget: I am just here.
The picture to the right is what a typical dinner looks like for Patrick and me every night here. The house-help cooks breakfast, lunch, and dinner for us every day - we are seriously spoiled. The food is brought out in the containers that you see in the picture. It's a surprise every night to open up the lids and see what's inside them. We can usually count on a few things: rice or spaghetti, beef or chicken, a broth made from the meat, some form of potatoes, greens called sukuma wiki (which literally translates as "push the week," because the dish is a cheap way to fill up a week's worth of meals), and a cornbread-ish side dish called ugali, which is an East African staple for every lunch and dinner (Kenyans say it's not a meal unless you have ugali).
Put it all together, add a Coke, and you've got a delicious meal! As a side comment, a few things about our meals here:
1. Patrick and I eat alone. One-on-one, two men, talking about men stuff at the end of each long day of public service.
2. The women all eat in the kitchen, which is located in the small hut in the back of the house. I've asked them if we can all eat together, but they don't seem too "in to it." I think they like being separate from us (I can hear them laughing and having a good ol' time back there every night). I asked them if they usually eat inside at the dining table where Patrick and I eat when they don't have visitors, and they said no. They always eat at the kitchen table. This makes sense to me, as Americans often simply eat at the kitchen table instead of the more formal dining table on an average night. It's just easier and more comfortable, right?
3. Patrick and I have good conversations nonetheless though.
4. Toothpicks or floss are essential after each meal...I'll explain why a little later.
Tasty food is all well and good, but as someone who knows me, you may be aware that earlier this year I became an organic/local/ethical food disciple after seeing the documentary Food Inc. (which has led me to become a Whole Foods shopper under the tutelage of David Monteith, and to reject fast food from my diet - a pretty big shift from a year ago when I worked at McDonald's headquarters and ate their food everyday!). So much like Food Inc. takes you behind the scenes of the food we eat in the U.S., this blog post, "Food Inc.redible!" aims to give you a behind the scenes look at where this amazing food that winds up on my plate every night comes from. Hint: You don't have to look far.
Let's start with the staple food: corn, or as Kenyans call it, maize. Walking around the village here, it is easy to notice that corn is grown on every plot of land (as I pass by the tall, leafy green stalks, I keep on half-expecting Shoeless Joe Jackson to appear, or at least a Kenyan version of him, but it hasn't happened yet...). Kenyans plant (and harvest) their crops twice a year - in March and September. It's currently harvest time in Es'saba, hence the picture to your right. I walked out of the house one day and came upon this sight - hundreds of cobs of corn sprawled out on the ground of the compound. I was utterly confused and intrigued. I hadn't seen anyone put the corn there, so it was unexpected. I found out that this was the first step in a whole process for cultivating each maize harvest. After removing each cob from the stalk, Welliminah hired some help to spread out all the corn on the ground in order to dry all the kernels out. After a few days of this, they started removing all of the kernels from the cobs, putting them in sacks and continuing to let them dry out every afternoon under the sun. Finally, they will take the sacks of dried kernels up to the marketplace to have them ground into flour, or maize/cornmeal called unga or posho. This flour is the stuff that ugali is made from, and served at every meal (I've seen ugali being made - it's basically identical to how you make instant mashed potatoes - you boil water and start stirring the flour in until it starts absorbing the moisture and firms up).
I've been told that all the corn (and the posho it produces) you see in these pictures will last Welliminah six months, which happens to be exactly when the next harvest comes in. Not a bad system, eh? However, apparently not everybody's harvest turns out as well as Welliminah's. In addition to practicing good crop rotation and soil tilling, she's also able to afford some good fertilizer. Ben has pointed out several less successful harvests on our walks.
Lastly - the best part: This corn is for human consumption only!!! No cows, chickens, goats, or terrible turkeys get their paws or hooves or claws on this good stuff. They eat fresh, delicious green napier grass. And they love it. Speaking of cows...
Unlike the misleading cartoon drawings of smiling cows grazing green pastures that you see on American food packaging, these cows really are happy. Trust me - I hung out with them for like fifteen minutes one day in their shed in the back of the house...they have a good time back there, and they really enjoy having their picture taken. Cows in Kenya typically live a decently long life, and they are able to grow naturally with out any funky hormones. Welliminah gets fresh milk everyday from the cows, straight from her backyard. Patrick and I had originally taken the milk in our tea the first week we were here, but we soon switched to consumer-packaged milk after we had stomach problems from it. It may not be pasteurized, but it works for Welliminah and her family.
Now, on the issue of turning cows into "beef" (or "nyama"), to put it euphemistically. Typically, when the cow reaches old age and has reached the end of its usefulness in producing milk (or when it's time for a special celebration!), the owner will take the cow to the butcher to be slaughtered. Apparently, this consists of cutting off the cow's neck (hopefully with something sharp). Yeah, slaughter is never fun, but at least here I know that the cow is happy and has lived a natural life free from hormones that make it produce way more milk than is possibly safe. And most importantly what we call "grass-fed beef" in the U.S. is just called "beef" here. That's good.
Finally, cows are a bit of a status symbol here. They are an indication of wealth. Welliminah has three. A lot of people seem to have two, some only have one. Ben had an excellent analogy: Cows are like savings accounts. If you ever run low on money, you just take your cow up to the market, have it slaughtered, and sell the meat to the butcher. Fast, easy, good money. Check out that delicious slab of meat hanging out of the butcher shop in the Luanda marketplace in the photo to the left. Mmmm....(and right next to the clothing boutique shop - convenient location!). This is where the beef that Patrick and I eat comes from - obviously, they're not slaughtering cows for us (YET...I wouldn't put it past their hospitality). KSh200 ($2.67) per kilogram (1kg = 2.2lbs).
Now as for the original white meat: chicken (appropriately enough called "kuku" in Swahili; yes that's pronounced "cuckoo"). Chicken might be the food that we eat here most that is easiest to stay aware of, because we literally walk amongst the chickens that we eat everyday. They stay in a coop at night, but they roam around the compound during the day, pecking mindlessly at grass and interesting bugs all afternoon. Check out the picture to the right - 7am alarm clock today, delicious kuku tomorrow night!
The house-help, Juliette kills the chickens and then prepares them for us. Perhaps contributing to my reputation as a "soft man," I have not been willing to investigate this sight in person yet, even after they invited me to slit a chicken's neck myself (but Patrick hasn't either, so I feel justified). You'd think that we'd start noticing the chicken population around the compound begin to diminish, but apparently they keep on purchasing new chickens from the marketplace. I haven't seen any baby chicks yet, so I'm thinking that the roosters need to step up their game a little bit. I suppose we have been eating homegrown eggs for breakfast though, so maybe that's why.
Biting into a piece of chicken here, you are acutely aware that you aren't in America. This is the reason we need toothpicks after each meal. Because the meat is tougher here - the chickens and cows actually walk around and use their muscles. In fact, unlike in America, the chickens here are actually able to walk around all day with out falling down every three steps. I'm thinking I should shoot some video to take back and show to Tyson, since I'm sure they have forgotten what a walking chicken looks like. Really though, it's not hard to get used to the toughness. It's not that bad, and the chicken is still as tasty as ever.
Another interesting thing about chicken consumption here: they eat it all. Divo loves chicken feet (which I've heard of eating before), and Moraa loves eating the chicken head (which I have not heard of before, and which quite frankly really grosses me out - that's the chicken's brain, folks; sans eyeball and beak). Thankfully, they only give us the normal stuff - legs, thighs, wings...although I don't think we've ever been served the breast...the women must keep it for themselves since it's the best part!
All there is to say about the bananas here is that they are unbelievably delicious. These are real organic bananas, friends - and you can taste the difference. It's almost like you've never tasted a real banana before eating these.
I hope you enjoyed "Food Inc.redible!" and weren't too shocked by the behind-the-scenes look at food in Kenya. I know it's pretty astonishing, especially if you're used to Supermarket life in the U.S.A. Yet, this doesn't have to be completely foreign or shocking to Americans. If you are willing to go out on a limb and try shopping at your local farmer's market this weekend, you might find that it's not so different after all. The keyword is local.
Inspired by my "Life is Good," water bottle that I drink out of, here are some pictures of the good life from the last four weeks here in Es'saba Village.
Crossing a stream on a walk with Ben
Patrick and Ben crossing the bridge
This was on the first day of the World Cup, June 11th. We went on a walk with Ben just before the first game between South Africa and Mexico, and brought a soccer ball along with us. As we were walking, these kids saw our soccer ball and came out of nowhere, sprinting towards us. So we stopped and played with them for about 30 minutes. They were reluctant to see us finally move on.
A scene of the Kenyan countryside while walking with Ben.
At home with Moraa, little Vincent, Divo, and neighbor Musa.
Divo now knows that "it's great to be a Florida Gator"
And he looks cool with it backwards too. (Also notice the mis-spellings on his shirt)
In the car with Okwemba. Patrick in the front seat.
That jerry can sitting on top of the chair is full of rain water. It's the water Patrick and I use to wash our hands, brush our teeth, and do other things of the sort.
Welliminah's beautiful home at sunset.
A freshly filled can of rainwater.
Neighborhood friends in the back of the house.
Peter (prounounced "Pita"), Divo, Boga.
Big little men at dusk.
Apparently the Terrible Turkey likes to hang out on top of the water tank sometimes. Little Vincent below.
Sitting in the front yard about to begin reading the final chapter of Three Cups of Tea. What an amazing book. So inspiring. One of the best written books I've ever read, as well.
Kitties in the house at the end of the day. Kenyans don't name their cats, so Patrick has named them "Lucky" (on the left, because she looks like his childhood cat, also named Lucky), and "Monkey" (on the right, for the annoying, monkey-like meow she makes). Lucky is Monkey's mother.
Back in the blogging business! It’s been about a week since Patrick and I have settled in here in Kenya. Here’s a recap of what’s been keeping us busy.
Coming Home
Our flight from Cairo arrived in Nairobi at 3:45AM on Saturday, May 29th. After passing through customs, we picked up our bags and said goodbye to Ryan, who was picked up by his clients/roommates. Patrick and I weren’t scheduled to fly from Nairobi to Kisumu until 5:00PM that evening, so we clearly had a lot of time on our hands. Our main job during that time was to make our way into the city and purchase a cell phone for the summer.
So we found a table and some chairs to sit in and sleep on at the Mall the taxi driver dropped us off at in Nairobi, and we ended up sleeping for a good 2-3 hours with our heads hunched over on the table. I think the table was supposed to be for customers of a nearby restaurant, because a waitress bugged us a couple of times asking if we were going to order. We told her we would, so once we woke up around noon, we finally ordered and ate lunch. The food was delicious, but we were still incredibly tired. After eating it, we got a taxi back to airport to wait for our flight to Kisumu.
But since we had arrived at the airport so early, we just sat around the check-in area to sleep. We figured we would get up around 3pm to check-in, since that would be the normal time to do so. But when we did finally get in line to check-in, the employee for Kenya Airways told us that the flight had been cancelled earlier in the day, and that we should have received a call informing us (of course, if they did call it was probably to our American phone numbers, so there was no way we could have known). Originally, they told us that we would have to wait until the next morning to fly out to Kisumu, and that they would put us up in a hotel room in Nairobi for the evening. But as we waited around for someone to give us more information, they told us that they would be able to purchase us a ticket to fly to Kisumu on another airline called Jetlink at 7pm. So we called our hosts in Kisumu and gave them our updated arrival time, and then checked in with Jetlink to await our flight. The Jetlink flight ended up being delayed though, so it ended up taking off at 7:30, which pushed our arrival time in Kisumu back to 8:30. We were dying of tiredness, and could barely handle anymore waiting around.
When we finally arrived in Kisumu, we found the ground wet from a recent rain, and we soon spotted Susan Jacktone Okola, Kijana’s program officer, waiting for us in her “Cookout for Kenya” t-shirt (Cookout for Kenya is Kijana’s annual fundraiser held every December in Florida). She and a taxi driver named Absalom had been waiting for two and a half hours for us (apparently she didn’t get the updated arrival time). We got in the car and drove off into the darkness on the road to our host home in Es’saba Village. On the way there, we stopped in the Luanda market area and purchased 5-liter bottled drinking water.
From Luanda, we took a right turn off the poorly paved road on to a stretch of red-clay dirt road to get to our village. We descended down the bumpy path, the outside view pitch-black save our car’s headlights and some shadowy outlines of huts and trees against the night sky, a few mangy dogs scampering out of the way every so often. Although I had been down this road before and I knew where we were being taken, there was still the feeling of mystery and uncertainty as it became increasingly apparent that we were entering a place of utter rural-ness and underdevelopment, an environment so different than anything I have been exposed to in the United States. The realization that these would be my surroundings for the next ten weeks began to sink in.
We zeroed in on the house, taking a left turn off the dirt road onto an even less developed path that really is made more for pedestrians than for automobiles, but this is Kenya, so a lot of my American sense of what is practical and what is not is often irrelevant. As we headed down the muddy path with brush on either side of it, just wide enough to accommodate a car, the Swahili-language radio station we had been listening to finally began playing something I could understand – “Precious Lord, Take Me Home,” the classic gospel song being sung by Elvis Presley. With the driver slowly and carefully negotiating the muddy path, just a few hundred feet away from the house now, the lyrics floated out of the car stereo…
“Precious Lord, take my hand
Lead me on, let me stand
I’m tired, I’m weak, I’m lone
Through the storm, through the night
Lead me on to the light
Take my hand, precious Lord, lead me home.”
Less than 24 hours earlier, Ryan, Patrick, and I sat in the Cairo airport at a Burger King discussing what it means to be living in Kenya for the summer. I mentioned how I recently heard a story of a wealthy white American philanthropist (I want to say it was Bill Gates, but I don’t remember for sure) who upon visiting Kenya for the first time said, “I finally feel like I have come home.” Indeed, Kenya is home. For all of humanity.
The car soon pulled up and we unloaded our luggage and were greeted by our host, Welliminah at the front door, who welcomed us into her home with a great big hug and her ever-present smile. We found our rooms and placed our luggage down, and I went out to talk with Susan about paying the taxi driver, but she quickly said, “We’ll talk about that tomorrow, let us now pray.” So Welliminah, Patrick, and I bowed our heads and closed our eyes as Susan said a prayer thanking God for safely bringing us all together.
We then said goodbye to Susan as she left us with Welliminah and went back to her home. Welliminah had prepared a late supper for us, so we quickly ate and were soon in bed, finally getting our long-awaited sleep.
Settling in
We woke up that next morning (Sunday the 29th) at 11am after a long sleep. When we woke up, Welliminah said she was getting worried about us and was about to go check on us (everyone I’ve talked to around here wakes up at 6am or earlier, so they’re not used to seeing people sleep until 11).
Welliminah Kutai is an older woman and has a large personality and is very jovial. She is also a widow. Her husband Abel, who I met when I visited Kenya and stayed in their house in 2007, passed away May 8, 2008 (he is now buried in the front yard of their compound with a gravestone marking his name and a bible passage from 2nd Timothy). Abel was a secondary school teacher and became good friends with Kijana’s director (and my high school teacher) Jim Cummings when he was a World Teach volunteer between 1987-1989. Abel and Jim both taught at a high school in the area called Ebusiloli, which Kijana now assists. Welleminah is also a teacher – she teaches at Es’saba primary school, which is a five minute walk from her home.
One thing that is extraordinarily clear is that the Kutai household is very well-off in comparison to the average family in Es’saba village, or even throughout the Western Province. Patrick and I have been taken all around the area by Ben Asembo a neighbor and good friend of the Kutai family. Ben is incredibly nice and loves to show Patrick and I all around his home village and surrounding areas. He is an older man (roughly 50-60, I would guess), and he has lived in Es’saba his whole life. He also is intent on teaching us Kinyore, the local Luhya tribal language, which he says is dying off, as younger married couples don’t use it as much, and students are taught in just Swahili and English in schools, a fact he laments. On the course of any walk we take with Ben, Patrick and I are given offers to come visit the home of at least three different people that we happen upon on our trek. From time to time, the house has been so close that it would be rude for us to not enter and visit for a while, so we’ve entered a few other houses in the area.
Here’s a picture of Ben, Patrick, and I chewing on some sugar cane that we purchased for ten shillings on a walk around the neighborhood the other day:
The typical compound (Kenyan speak for “property”) in the area consists of one or two mud-constructed houses (made with a wood frame and filled in with mud, topped with a tin roof), an outhouse, a cow, a few chickens, and an farming area for growing corn (called maize here) and cabbage. The interior of a typical house is usually very bare, with a scarce amount of chairs and other furniture and often bare walls, with the exception of a few calendars that I gather are available for free from shops who put their contact information (many of them now have Barack Obama’s picture above the dates), or if the family is lucky, a few framed photos of the family members. Welliminah’s compound, in contrast, is like the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida. From the outside, the house looks sturdier and aesthetically pleasing, with vines (Wrigley Field style) covering much of the mud. The roof frame is painted, as are the interior walls of the house. I haven’t seen a single other house with paint covering its walls, but Welliminah’s house has bright lime green paint in the living room and bedrooms, with a lot of beautiful artwork hung throughout the house – many family photos and traditional Kenyan art hanging. The living room is almost overcrowded with furniture – sofas and coffee tables made by a local woodworker. Welliminah also has electricity in her house – both solar generated and AC power (when I was here in 2007, the electric grid had not yet been extended to Es’saba, so they had used DC power then). In the living room, there is a television and a stereo in which I have been able to plug my iPod into.
Welliminah has two cows, over ten chickens, two turkeys (one of which keeps chasing me around the compound in a menacing fashion), a few ducks and geese, two or three cats, and most surprising to me, two German Shepherds. The German Shepherds weren’t around when I was first here in 2007, and seeing that they’re purpose is to patrol the compound at night (along with a Masai man she has hired to watch over the house at night), their presence might be indicative of how life has changed for Welliminah as a widow now.
The compound feels very secure to me; in addition to the night time security provisions she has established, the property is fenced off neatly on all four sides and the house has plenty of locks. I suppose there is a risk in jealous neighbors trying to steal Welliminah’s livestock or breaking into the house.
Despite Welliminah being a widow, her compound is full of life. In addition to her, Patrick and I, there are a number of others living here:
-Welliminah looks after her grandson, Divo (from her eldest daughter, Faith, whose story I have not yet obtained). Divo is no older than three years old, and speaks no English yet, but is a ball of energy. After initially being reserved around Patrick and I, he has opened up and plays with us every night around the living room. He loves to take all the cushions off the couch and bury himself in them, like a fort.
- Outside the house is a smaller living area/kitchen where a younger woman named Juliette lives. She has a very young son (probably a year old) named Vincent, who also lives with her in the back hut. Although I have not yet gotten the full story on her, Juliette does a lot of work around the house – much of the cooking for us, and a litany of daily chores around the compound involving the livestock. I suspect that she may be an orphan that Welliminah has taken in. There was another orphan here in 2007 who seemed to occupy the same role as Juliette does now, and Jim told me that Welliminah often takes in orphans by giving them a place to live and paying for the school fees in exchange for their work around the house. Juliette, however seems to be in her twenties and would be out of school….so perhaps Welliminah has taken her in as a way to help a young single mother. I’ll see if I can find out the real story.
-Juliette's son is often looked after by a 3rd grade girl name Moraa, who also lives in the back hut. She goes to Es’saba primary (the same place where Welliminah teaches). Juliette told me that Moraa was her cousin, so I assume they all moved in together sometime within the past three years. In any case, Moraa has one of the best smiles I’ve ever seen on any human being. Such a naturally great, beautiful smile. She also plays with us pretty often.
-In a neighboring house (which looks more like the average local villager’s hut), Welliminah’s son Samuel lives. Sam is in his mid twenties and didn’t live here in 2007. He is a mirror image of his late father, and has been helpful to Patrick and I in getting a younger person’s perspective on things, and helping us set up Internet access.
-Welleminah’s daughter Ann was also here the first couple of days we were here, but has since returned to Nairobi, where she is graduating from her university next month. She is 23 and has the same jovial personality as her mother.
-There’s also a cast of other characters who are around the compound on a daily basis – mainly people who Welliminah has hired to carry out daily tasks. A teenager who comes and feeds the cows, and woman who cleans the dishes, etc.
Another sign of the Kutai family’s prosperity is the food Patrick and I are served. With every meal we are served meat – chicken, beef, or sometimes both – which is not common at all for most Kenyans. As Jim has explained to me before, most Kenyans are vegetarians, but not by choice. Lunch or dinner for the average Kenyan would consist of cabbage, prepared with seasoning in a dish called “suku ma wiki” and some bland boiled-down and hardened maize meal called “ugali,” which I can only compare to cornbread, although that still doesn’t capture it exactly. We’re served that and more – including American style stuff like French fries and hotdogs every once and a while, I guess because they figure we’re dying for food like that, which they’re actually pretty correct on. :) However, I guess I should note that Patrick and I have both fallen a little bit ill in the past 48 hours (although now I think we’re both back to nearly 100%). The food was feeling good for the first few days, but I think what happened as the days went on is our stomachs both started saying, “This is the new normal? I don’t think I like this…” So we had some stomach problems, and both of us vomited. I think we’re going to be a little more careful about what we eat moving forward and are going to also start asking Welliminah to cook using only bottled water. That should take care of it.
Lastly, Welliminah has a nice strip of outhouses in the backyard – two to do your business in and two to bathe in. The ones to do your business in consists simply of a hole in the ground that you can squat over, yet they are a lot nicer than most other outhouses I have seen around the area…it’s hard to explain what makes them better though….I guess Welliminah’s crew does a better job of keeping them clean and smelling nice with an air freshener in there. As for bathing, it’s actually kind of fun here. Every morning we can go down there, and they have a container of cold water and a container of hot, boiled water ready for us. Then there is a big bucket sitting atop a knee-high table in the bathing stall. We can take the hot and cold containers and pour them into the bucket at whatever mixture/temperature feels most comfortable to us. From there, you use a small hand-held cup with a handle on it to pour the water from the bucket over your body. So basically, you get your body wet, run soap all over it and shampoo your hair, and then rinse all the suds off. A three-step process. It’s much slower than a traditional shower, but it’s also more enjoyable in many ways. It’s a more sensual experience (I don’t mean that in a creepy way), as it causes you to take more notice of the water as it goes over your body, since there’s less water to make use of, and because you have to be sure that the water is getting everywhere to rinse away all the suds. I think I may try to adapt this bathing practice when I get back to the U.S., as it makes you realize how much water we waste while showering.
Here's a shot of the surrounding village area from a nice viewing spot we found on top of a huge rock while we were walking with Ben:
Playing
Patrick and I have become quite popular with the little kids around Welliminah’s house. Almost every afternoon they show up in the front yard to play after school and we usually come out to join them. We’ve shown them how to play frisbee, and they’ve shown us how to play soccer/football. They’re actually pretty good at frisbee. I’ve never seen kids pick up frisbee so naturally, and they actually gravitate to the forehand throw more than the backhand, which is totally backwards to how I developed my frisbee game. I didn’t get a good handle on my forehand throw until college.
Playing with these kids has been so much fun, and has showed me how much fun you can have when you use your imagination instead of relying on a television or Xbox. In addition to frisbee and football, we’ve also played baseball with a stick we found on the ground and an avocado, and we even spent a while spinning the frisbee on the stick Chinese plate style.
The other day, we also played jump-rope. Here’s a good action shot of Patrick, the jump rope master:
Lastly, here’s a shot of some of the kids we have been playing with, hamming it up for the camera. From left to right; Musa, Peter, Odanga, Nyanje, Moraa, and Vincent:
And lastly, Working
Patrick and I have used this first week to visit Kijana’s partner schools and to meet the faculty and principals and introduce ourselves and our projects. Jim has done a good job of informing each of the principals of our projects and we were pleased to see that many of them were expecting us when we arrived (if this perplexes you, please know that there is no such thing as “appointments” in rural Kenya). We have visited Ebusiloli, Mwituha, Ebukuya, and Essaba primary and secondary schools over the past three days and have introduced our projects and have set plans to come back next week and get started working with students and faculty in carrying out the projects. Not much more to say right now, other than that we’re both feeling good about the next nine weeks and delivering some quality work. This week has been mostly all about getting used to Kenya and our new lifestyles. More to come.
