For me this has meant spending a lot of time with the toddlers, especially as we have had some nanny turnover and are currently down a few... The toddlers are at a great age for playing, games, singing silly Western nursery songs to the nannies great amusement, and my latest favorite thing... dance parties! Those babies know how to dance and I have been learning a lot of new moves although recently the older boys have been borrowing our radio to my dismay...
Last Wednesday I even got to go into Nairobi as a proxy nanny with Madam. Two of the little babies needed to go in for injections, so I got to visit the rather impressive Jomo Kenyatta Hospital, and be utterly embarrassed when her three three year olds decided to make a great escape and I proceeded to chase them, or follow them as I was holding one of the babies, all around the hospital compound to try and get them back to our waiting room... While I love the babies and toddlers, I don't know if I could really be a nanny... It is hard work!
These past weeks have also held some lovely opportunities for cross-cultural exchange and for sharing life together outside of the routine. I got to help with my mzungu friend in the kitchen on two different occasions; the first sorting rocks out of the next days beans(no small feat when those beans feed two hundred people... we did a good job, but often you do find rocks in your food...), and then another day washing up the lunch dishes and amusing everyone by my attempts to mop the kitchen floor like a Kenyan(at that particular moment in addition to the kitchen boys, several of the nannies were in getting hot water, so the amusement was widespread...). Helping in the kitchen was fun too just for the sake of laughter, as the kitchen boys liked to teach, and test, our knowledge of Kiswahili and tease us for not understanding... and teach us Kenyan sheng(slang). Even if so often the joke really is on me, I love laughter and laughing at myself with those around me and how laughter can unite.
On another occasion, I 'helped' fix the driveway, or more accurately watched the kids fix the driveway while hanging out with some of the teachers and talking about how things are the same, and different... In Kenya, time is told based on the sun, and as the sun rises and sets pretty much the same time the whole year round, this works. So seven in the morning is saa moja, one o'clock, and you count from there with seven in the evening being saa moja again. It works... but I was explaining to two of the teachers how we don't tell time like that in America because the days change... getting long in the summer months and short in the winter months. I even gave the example of Alaska where in the summer it is daylight and the winter it is night. They were baffled and said if a Kenyan went to Alaska without knowing that, they would think the world was ending!
Then, for the Good Friday/Easter weekend, we celebrated Good Friday here and it was lovely fun and good feasting. I also got to witness a massive butchering operation of the twelve chickens which served as the highlight of our feast, and yes, twelve chickens can serve 200 people... as an addition to rice and beans. With the chickens, at least twenty of the primary boys were helping; plucking the chickens by placing them in boiling water, removing their organs and even the food the chickens had eaten that morning, and then cutting them into smaller pieces using a machete... Apparently we eat everything... the heads, the feet, and a good part of the organs... I told them that I had never seen a chicken be butchered before because generally if you are buying a chicken to eat in America, you buy it dead, but here, even if you are going to eat a chicken that you bought, you buy it live in the marketplace, butcher it yourself and eat it fresh...
Anyways, that is the news from my life in Kenya... I have been here in Kenya eight months this past week with three remaining... the days seems to be racing now, and I feel very blessed for how with time, the relationships get better and better and there are more and more opportunities to share life together in more and more ways. With both the good and the challenging, so much of life here feels like family life with its ups and downs. Like so much of the world these days, our budget is not all what might be hoped and the secondary school which should have been completed months ago creeps on towards completion... If you pray, pray for that, as when it is finally done, I think everyone will sigh a sigh of relief and most especially our Madam.
School opens again on May 3 and hopefully that all starts up smoothly and I am allowed to continue on with my classes. The children really have been having a lovely break and after a few days of just sitting in their classrooms they were rescued by the pastor into the sunshine for Bible study and even the other day had a singing lesson from a visiting teacher and for just general times of playing and relaxation. On several occasions when we had brought the toddlers outside, the children were free and played with them and that is always so fun to watch and oversee. It truly is family life here.
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