My weekends begin on Friday because I do not have class! This time I stayed on campus, but instead of studying all day as I should have a played some games! After lunch Alyssa and I played scrabble with my friend George, a Kenyan 1st year, second semester student, and his friend Richard. It was a pretty intense game, Alyssa and I battled it out good. You could tell we both really wanted to win! At the end of the game I ran out of letters first and got the extra points but lost to her by 1 point! It was pretty close, but the boys were still quite far below us! I figured that maybe if we played it in Kiswahili they would have done better…haha!
For dinner I went to the Matthews with the other Americans and a couple Kenyan guys. We had a vegetable soup and I actually ate and really enjoyed it! I know…it is weird! Potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and more! We had soda bread to go along with it and it was delicious! I love going there! Alice, Mrs. Matthews, let me choose dessert since it had just been my birthday. After deliberation I decided I would try pineapple upside down cake! It was a semi-disaster! It tasted amazing but it pretty much exploded all over the oven. We all played Taboo that evening and I’m pretty sure my team ended up winning!
Ok, I will try to get to the good stuff, I suppose you don’t want the details of my every day but would just like to hear about the whole Kenyan experience!
On Saturday I went to a Children’s home. It was a house run by two “mamas” with about 15 children between the ages 3 and 15. Monica, Lora, and I spent a few hours playing with the kids, and letting them do our hair! Kenyans seem to love American hair! The kids were all very smart and got along so well together. The home belongs to the church and you can tell that the kids are in love with Christ. My favorite part of the day was when the girls decided they would sing us a song. They began with one and then pretty quickly all of the kids stopped what they were doing and joined in. Within minutes everyone was singing and dancing, the three year old even knew the words and sang along! The singing went on for at least 20 if not 30 minutes, all of the songs were from church. The older girls had to leave for some type of church meeting and Lawrence, a boy about 10 led the rest of us in prayer. There were about 10 kids left and they all listened to him, sat down, folded their hands, bowed their heads, and prayed. Everyone had a turn to pray what they wanted to pray and he would even translate into English if they wanted to pray in Kiswahili. Most of the little ones prayers consisted of, we pray for --, we pray for --, we pray for --, and so on until everyone had been named. The children were amazing and the Mamas fed us lunch and told us they hoped we would come again. I would love to go back soon, I cannot imagine meeting better behaved kids anywhere else!
We spent the evening at Sylvia’s. I think I have mentioned her before, she is the person at Daystar who coordinates all of my activities. We didn’t really do much, just watched tv until dinner, and during dinner. I found it so interesting that we ate on the couches and watched the television as often will happen at home. I asked her about it and she said that was the usual. For dinner she served multiple types of meat, rice, and chapatti! Like all of the other Kenyans she insisted we eat more! We got ice cream and cake for dessert!
Sleeping arrangements were strange, Lora, had to sleep outside in what I believe was the “servants quarters” with someone who I believe was a nanny or house help. She got bombarded with bugs all night and had to share a twin bed! Monica and I shared a full size bed upstairs and had a decent mosquito net to cover us up and slept fairly well!
Breakfast was similar to school breakfast, the main dish being bread, plain old sandwich bread! I find it so weird that they eat this everyday without even toasting it! We also had sausages, bananas, hard-boiled eggs, biscuits, and some more of that cake!
For church we went to House of Grace. I have no idea what denomination it was but it was very interesting…The service began with many praise and worship songs. They had projectors for the words and a huge worship team on the altar. After a lot of singing there were announcements…the weirdest I have ever seen! They played what looked like a segment of the nightly news advertising everything going on at the church and welcoming guests! It lasted well over 5 minutes and I felt weird watching tv during church. The sermon was long, very long, compared to the 12 minutes I am used to! We got out of there about 2 hours after coming in and there wasn’t even communion!
The rest of the day was spent walking around Nairobi. We were dropped in the city center where I saw a restaurant called Taco Club. What was so funny about it was that it had the “bell” logo from taco bell, exactly the same one! Inside looked nothing like a Taco Bell though! We walked from the city center back up towards school and went to a fruit market where they sell decent sized fruit salads for 70 shillings, about 80 cents! That was delicious! We ran errands and made it back to campus to catch the 5 o’clock bus back to campus!
That night I made dinner with my roommates! I taught them how to make tacos, which didn’t turn out as good as home, and they refreshed me on how to make chapatti! We had a little party. I think they sort of enjoyed the tacos, they said they did but I am not really sure! It was a fun night anyways!
The days have been better, the homesickness is fading away but it is definitely around. I am beginning to really enjoy and cherish my time here but am still longing for the familiar faces home brings. Hope all is well with everyone back in Minnesota!
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