Happy New Years from Kenya! Maybe I am a bit on the late end of wishing that as we are already a week into 2011, but the year still feels pretty new to me. Probably because while school was allegedly supposed to start this past week, it got pushed to this coming Monday because of some dorm repairs and the children are not all returned(as the girls do not have their full dorm to sleep in). Currently, the twelve girls who would be sleeping in the dorm are sleeping in the room next to mine, and they honestly make pretty fun neighbors... I will be sorry to see them go, and as the other volunteer leaves on the 14th, things are going to feel pretty quiet in my wing of the dorm. I think we are all very excited for the rest of the children to return tomorrow and Sunday though. It feels much too quiet around here, and I think the students are very much ready to start school again. Me too, although I am hoping somebody tells me what I am teaching before the day of... I might ask, but I figure if they haven't told me, they haven't actually written the timetable yet...
This past Tuesday I hit my four month mark of being here at Hope. Things definitely get easier with time, which is why I wanted to come for a year. Relationships take time... I have even seen that with the children and the two Kenyan teachers who started the same term I did. Seeing their progress with the children parallel to mine has been rather encouraging as it is pretty similar... I think we all are feeling a better sense of belonging these days.
Life has been a pretty lazy routine of break; work, play, watch tv, meals... There are several projects going on around the compound these days. They are trying to finish the boundary wall, putting cement outside the girls dorm, refinishing the bathrooms in the girls dorm, and then always, looming but rather untouched, the highschool which still is not roofed(I am not sure where exactly the delay lies, but probably finances...) For the students and teachers and myself, that means periodically moving sand or water to mix the cement with, blocks for the wall, or even as the rains really did stop, yesterday we hauled water for the shamba(farm). Play is pretty mellow feeling with so many of the children gone, but a favorite game of this past week has been racing three car tires that showed up from somewhere. It is pretty fun to watch although not a game I feel like actively participating in. Watching TV is probably the children's favorite pastime, and while we watch a lot, they won't once school starts again and their world can be pretty small here. We watch a lot of kung fu bootleg movies which is pretty funny as that is another favorite item of play, kung fu fighting... Meals and mealtime devotions meanwhile take up a good chunk of time too, and put it altogether and it makes a typical day during school break.
Monday I even had the opportunity to go out and see part of the Madam's ministry to IDPs. IDP stands for Internally Displaced Peoples, and here in Kenya even now, three years after the 2007-2008 election violence, a lot of IDPs have yet to be resettled. The work Madam does is community development type and she has a similar vision for microenterprise to what she is doing in Uganda. For Monday, myself and some of the secondary students came along to take part in a brief worship service and then food and blanket distribution to the families. It was pretty interesting although as it was local, the whole thing was in the local language of Kikuyu which I only understand a handful of words in. Still, it is always pretty amazing to see the vision in action.
For me though, probably the best part of the outing was the cabbages...
We took two cars to Kjabini where the IDP work is; Madam going in one with some friends who came for the day, and the students and myself going in the other. On the way there we had passed mounds of cabbages piled along the road, harvests ready for pickup. Our cabbages had a sickness awhile back so for a week all we had eaten was cabbage, but it has been scarce in the diet of late. So on our return, the Madam's car stopped abruptly before us along one such pile and cabbage field where a man was working, and after a minutes negotiation Madam's car left while everyone piled out of the van to help carry cabbages as the farmer, machete in hand, began to harvest afresh for us. Deftly he would cut the heads and then toss them to the waiting hands as they were carried, two by two, nearly a hundred in all, the the back of our van.
I probably wasn't expected to help or even supposed to, but as the nanny, teacher and pastor all were working I had not good excuse not to. My whiteness is not a good excuse, but sometimes if my peers of teachers or nannies are waiting in a situation, I will chose to wait with them, because then it is my pretend authority, not skin color, that excuses me. Helping is always fun though if only for the amusement it brings. I am sure my friends and passer-bys alike were amused to see me emerge from the van and carry my share of cabbages two by two.
On the drive back, 20 km or so, the van smelled like cabbages and as we had left Hope just before breakfast was served, they smelled very good. The drive back should have been uneventful, but twice our back door flew open, spilling stray cabbages behind us and people would have to pile out to chase them(as it was never too many cabbages, this time I stayed in the van). The first time it happened we were on a dirt road, but the second was in the rather bustling town of Engineer and we must have looked a site. It always happened right after somebody had entered or exited the van, so I think the driver had simply forgotten to secure the locks.
Kinangop, which I have learned is a district, not a town or village as I first imagined, always amazes me with its beauty and fertility. It seem whatever is planted grows and grows big at that; corn taller than a man waving in the wind, waist high kale, or sukuma wiki as it is called here, or these cabbages bigger than our head.
Anyways, that is the news from here. As always, I love emails and word from home, for while a year is a good length of time to get to know a place, people and community, it is also a long time to be away from home:) Happy New Years!
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