So CLEARLY I’m laxing in my commitment to blogging (and journaling) which is a shame, but you understand. I believe that last entry was at least three weeks back, when I returned from Mount Kenya? So let’s start there.
That following week, I spent some time at friend’s houses in the evenings, mostly cooking dinners. In particular, I made the best guacamole of my life one night for Mexican food Thursday. It was incredible. I used to not even like the stuff, but this was seriously one of the better things I’ve tasted since abroad. (Go figure). Which brings me to a new discovery, I LIKE COOKING. I knew that I wanted to learn about a year ago, but with the gift of a cookbook for my birthday and the subsequent moving in with the Sister, cooking did not happen. Why should it when you have a passionate veggie chef at your fingertips? But Kiley and my deal will not last much longer, because when I get back to Minneapolis, I shall cook. So that’s exciting news. The following night we went to a neighbor’s house for a dinner, to which she invited about 20 young people, which was awesome. We all sat around for five hours drinking wine and eating the most plentiful Kenyan meal I’ve had to date. It was really good to meet a bunch of teenagers and twenty-somethings, who later invited us to an event the following night. THE SIX A.M. PARTY.
So the Six A.M. party is a monthly dance party held at various outdoor locations around Nairobi that has a theme (and a fat cover charge). Long story short, its basically just a rave that goes until the sun comes up. This one was themed Kikoy culture, which is a linen like sarong that can be wrapped or worn in about a thousan different ways by men and women alike. Upon hearing this, the 7 or 8 girls that were left in the city for the weekend, committed ourselves to this crazy party and all got Kikoys the following day. It turned out to be such a fun night and we danced until six, as promised.
The next week was our last week of school, which included surprise Swahili exams, earlier and more thorough than we had been informed. After the initial shock of having to do an oral interview the following day, it seems my class all did pretty well. We haven’t gotten scores from that or the written portion yet, but that rounded out our academic classroom portion of the semester. My friend Mwende and I got tattoos that week, and that too was a bit of an impromptu decision. I was just going to be there for moral support, since it was her first and she wanted someone with tattoo history to be there to check that everything was kosher. But, as you may know, once you are inked, its kind of addicting. So as I sat there, I decided to get one too, but a tiny simple one at that. It says Amani, which is my Kenyan name, which means peace. Its about an inch long on my right side ribs (super painful) but only took about five minutes and was real cheap. And regardless of the doubt about getting a tattoo in a foreign country, the artist had been working for 12 years, and I inspected the new needles, ink and sharps container, and looked as his work before agreeing. It was a bit of a risk for all those paranoid people back home, but I felt good about it, even with my tattoo skeptic hat on. It’s all healed up now, and really petite and hidden, and I like it a lot. There’s a picture in the recently uploaded Facebook album if you’d like to check it out.
On the last day of classes, we were taken out to lunch by our director and wonderful professor, Doctor Jama, to this fancy schmancy Indian restaurant in Westlands. Holy buckets, so good. It seems this blog post is going to be filled with all of these ‘best meals ever!’ comments, but I promise you, they all really felt that way. We were so spoiled that day. He is the bomb. Then the following night, almost all of my classmates and I met up at a bar in Langatta that we had been to before with an outdoor patio, to party for our last night in town. It was so good to be with everyone as we all celebrated being down with school and danced out our nerves of moving and separation. They also had a big screen, which was playing sketchy music videos all night, that was hooked up to some sort of text message song request system to the DJ. So needless to say, as we got a little tipsy, the odd text messages and shoutouts kept finding their way onto the screen. We had so much fun, and reveled in our last night as a group.
My new friend Ashley, and my friend Laura and I treated ourselves to really awesome lunch and coffee and ice cream on our last day in the city. The food was a bit of a splurge ($7) but totally worth it. Then we found an awesome café called River Café in this lush green valley in Gigire, and I got my legs waxed for the first time. Thought I might as well try it sometime, and if I’m going to try it I’d rather pay eight dollars than 80 in the States. And my friend Robin goes there every months so it was a good referral.
The next morning, we were all off to our meeting points for the departure to our prospective new towns. Nine of us to the Coast, with two other groups heading toward Mount Kenya and Lake Victoria, around Kisumu. The bus ride to Mombasa was a nervous one, during which I read my new favorite book, The Brothers K, almost the whole time. Then when my friend Embe (Ava) suddenly got off the bus, it really hit us that we were pulling into town and she was off with her new family. We all alighted in town, and met up with our Mamas there. My mother, Kate, was so enthusiastic to see me, I could tell immediately that we would click. She is so warm and has a really good sense of humor, and its nice to be with a younger family. Something about the fact that we are only ten years apart in age changes the whole vibe. SO Kate’s awesome.
Then I have two little sisters who are around two years old, and an eight year old brother named Eddy. The transition to having younger siblings has been an interesting one, especially since growing up I was always the youngest child. But I have my own room with two beds and a big wardrobe so I feel pretty spoiled here. My house help, Salome, doesn’t speak any English, and I can hardly understand her Kiswahili so we don’t communicate much. But the girls are a joy, and I’m surround by a constant sing-song chant of a-TI, a-TI, a-TI, which is what they call me. Kate and I were joking earlier tonight, about how I have to be careful about picking up Swahili words from them, since they are barely two and their pronunciation or the words themselves are usually very off. But I’ve gotten used to being peed on, or getting a little barf shower during dinner, which is a necessary preparation for me to make as I approach the childbearing decade myself.
My internship has been the most challenging and frustrating part of my stay in Mombasa so far. There is no work for me to do, and I spent my entire first week wasting time and asking for remedial tasks to do. I am just really bummed that I am wasting so much of my time, and they don’t really have any project going on that they need assistance with. I think I was just poorly placed, so I am in the process of meeting with a few other organizations in the area to see if I can be better utilized. I don’t want to be a brat, because I know its not uncommon for Kenyans to read the newspaper or take tea during the day for hours instead of working but on Thursday I just wanted to scream ‘IM WAY OVERQUALIFIED TO BE TYPING RIGHT NOW’. It’s just kind of a bummer, since we only have six weeks on the coast.
I had a wonderful weekend at the beach with my friends, and lots of plans for the week to come. The water is so warm here, its incredible. White sand beaches, and not too far from where I work. I can take a matatu to the beach for about 50 cents anyday. So I think I might be making it a regular stop on days that I ditch work early for lack of things to do. Remind me to tell ya’ll about the accident in the next post, but my computer is going to die soon. That’s all for now! Love from Mombasa.
-amani
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