Outreach Weekend!!!!

                Outreach weekend was one of the most spectacular few days of my life. At the same time it was one of the saddest and emotionally draining experiences I have ever had. That is why I am splitting this entry into two completely separate entities, even though the weekend did not happen in a vacuum and the pure and unfiltered joy seemed to overcome adversity and hardship at times. The experience was a rollercoaster, never stopping for a second, exciting throughout and almost impossible to wrap your mind around once it was over. I’ll give you the good first then the bad, then the really bad, and try to help you see the positive throughout. Ready? I’m not even sure I am, but lets go:

                A 6:30 am Matatu ride (14 person van that crams in 22+ Africans—and in this case one mzungu) from Ngong to Nairobi starts the outreach experience as Kenyan as you can get. A matatu is a tiny little van with a “conductor” who hangs out of the open door while moving, recruiting people to cram in as much as they can. The more people they fit in, the more money they make. They are notorious for pickpocketing, driving people to the wrong place and shady business of all sorts, but the bus wasn’t running at 6:30 to “Junction”, which is a prominent mzungu gathering spot, so I had no other option. The matatus are not dangerous, but you should have your wits about you and you should have an understanding of how they work. I imagined my first ride being with friends, but at this point I wasn’t going to swallow the outreach weekend fee because I was scared of a matatu. I sat next to a masai man (made me feel a little safer), and made it to my destination, right on time… American time that is. African time, you have to understand is a much different beast. We left about an hour and a half after scheduled, which I have found is pretty prompt in comparison to a lot of things in Kenya. Anyone who knows the way that I use time, knows that African time is the way that I have been living my life for the last 23 years (reason number 245645 that I now believe I was African in some other life).  When all of my friends from orientation showed up, we were hugging and laughing and talking about our placements as if we were family. We had actually spent 2 days of our lives together. It is amaaazzzzing how comforting any familiar face is when you are halfway across the world!  Our first stop was in the town of Navaisha, 2+ hours outside of Nairobi at KCC, a slum where a school was started by former short term IVHQ volunteers. It was to show us how even a short term volunteer can make a huge difference with enough initiative (and it didn’t hurt that a few of them have stayed for a few years now). But KCC walks the tightrope of the positive emotion and the negative emotion balance, so I will save it for later.

                We then departed for Hell’s Gate Park. This is the highlight of the trip… We rented bikes and biked through the park, riding alongside zebras, baboons, wild boar, impala, and giraffe (not Ali) in their natural, undisturbed habitat. After stopping in the road to let zebras cross, we were told to stop at about the halfway point. Our fearless leaders, Kush and Chomlee (fadhili community staff that took us on outreach) showed us a huge rock coming out towards the road that came to a point and then dropped off. This is Pride Rock. Yes, the Lion King. This is where the drawings for the Lion King were based off of, it was way too much to resist signing “ahhhh kuupennnyaaa” and pretending to hold a baby simba above our heads. 

                                                               

                1)Pride Rock  

2)Wildebeest, Wild Boar and Impala in front of Pride Rock, gathering for a lion’s birth??

After our bike ride we gathered in front of Hell’s Gate Gorge and took an “off the map” hiking tour of the waterfall that formed below in the canyon. The water in the falls was warm… the first warm water I had felt in a week! If I could have bathed in it without fear of typhoid and other nastiness I would have lived under the falls. 

 

View from the Hike  

       Monkey Mom and Baby, Post-Hike

After Hell’s Gate we headed to our “5-star” hotel, which turned out to be a tiny run down bar with a hotel sign on it that was located above a butchery in the middle of nowhere outside of Navaisha… T.I.A… This is Africa. After a few Tuskers (the only half way decent Kenyan produced beer) and some African dance music to get the juices flowing, the hotel bar couldn’t handle the rowdy group of volunteers, so Chomlee and Kush took us to a local dance bar. If there is anything that has ever been up my alley, it is a dance bar—in Africa—playing only reggae, dancehall and hip hop—with a group of people that are trying to get as goofy as possible in a place that we don’t yet understand… needless to say it was a good time! With Chomlee, Kush and our driver on patrol to make sure we didn’t do anything reckless or get ourselves in trouble, the mzungu crew took rural Navaisha by storm, leading a bar-wide dance-off and riding the African rhythms until the wee hours of the morning. A good time was had by all.

                Now let’s go back in time a little bit. Back to the KCC slum and school. The Outreach program broke us in gently as we descended towards the hellish reality that awaited us. KCC is a slum in rural Kenya. A few IVHQ (International Volunteer Headquarters) volunteers visited and recognized the need for help. They decided to stay and set up a small and rudimentary school within a 5 minute walk from the heart of the small slum. As time passed and more volunteers filtered through the program, the school grew and now it encompasses most of the school aged children who are living in the slum. When our group came in it was utter chaos with children running around screaming “teacha teacha!! How are yoooouuu!?” I was mobbed by kids and did my best to pick them all up over my head, swing them around and swing their arms until I was physically unable. A soccer game broke out and I am way too immature to not join right in! It was amazing! A child scored a goal and I started screaming “goooooaaaaalllll!!! Didier Drogba does it again!” and I lifted him up onto my shoulders and ran around the field and I swear the smile on his face didn’t leave the entire time we were there! We took a walk through the slum and almost everyone there went out of their way to say hello and greet us. After our visit we went back to the school and served lunch to the kids. They were so polite and appreciative. These kids come from NOTHING and still found a way to have fun, be smiling, laughing and playing. They were able to overcome turbulence at home, incredible odds and horrible poverty and still found a way to make it to school in the morning, with a positive attitude nonetheless. It was a humbling experience to say the least (this was a BRIEF description of our time here, but the IDP and Garbage slum that we visited later were even more difficult and left a HUGE impression).

                The next stop after our night out in Navaisha (if you are still keeping track of chronology) was the IDP camp. IDP stands for Internally Displaced Person. These are people who had lives, jobs, businesses, houses and were hardworking, well educated people who, because of political and tribal violence in 2007 and 2008 were forced off their land and out of their houses with nowhere to go. The UN, US and Kenyan government set up refugee-camp-like-areas to house these people. It is incredibly easy to distance yourself from their stories when you read about them in a blog or even see a picture of them on tv. It is much more difficult to distance yourself when a woman invites you into her house and you enter with 5 other people, no room for you all to stand, let alone sit, in the 115 degree “house” which is actually a 6 foot by 10 foot tent made of tree branches holding up a tarp which make up the walls and roof. She looks you in the eyes, with a smile and tells you that she has been blessed by God to have a roof over her head. She tells you that she is grateful for all that she has. You look around her “house” and realize that all she has is the tarp over her head, a few sticks that make up her oven, a bucket of rain water (remember I said it rained for the first times in months, that bucket is NOT always full) and a blanket which she uses to as pillow, bed and cover. Then she tells you that 7 people live in that “house”.  That blanket is a bed for seven? On the ground? She apologizes over and over for not having any tea for you to have and looks disgraced when she says she cannot give you a slice of toast because she doesn’t have any. She tells you she used to have a job and has an education. Put yourself in her shoes….

Another woman (through translation of Kush) tells you that her daughter was scheduled to have a baby. When she went to the hospital, the baby did not make it and due to the complications the woman had to stay in the hospital an extra three days. When she was cleared to be released, the family learned that they could not pay the hospital fee. She is essentially being held captive in the hospital. The worst part; the hospital charges a fee every day that she is forced to stay in the hospital past her scheduled release date. Try to imagine your daughter (or sister, or anyone that you hold close to you) being held against her will because you cannot pay a fee. You find out that the total fee is less than $200. This is the type of poverty that is being faced. This is the type of money that can make a direct impact if you know where to put it. But remarkably, the IDP camp was not all negative. The men were making a toilet for the children at the school that had been recently set up. One of the men said “mzungu, would you like to help?”. I OBVIOUSLY did not say no. After about an hour of the hardest work I have ever done (breaking down massive stones into smooth, rectangular ones using an ice pick, a machete and a blunt hammer) the Africans were laughing at this mzungu who was working so hard while they made a swift, smooth swing and broke the stone with the precision of a surgeon. Hands blistered, sunburned and admitting defeat, but having gained a few friends (and in my disillusioned mind, some respect) I walked over to the school just in time for the feeding program. The others who were not working on the toilet had made porridge and were passing it out to the children. Kids were singing, dancing, laughing and playing while the adults looked on with smiles beaming across their faces. These impossible smiles were one of the most inspiring demonstrations I have ever seen. ALL of these people have stories that would make a grown man weep. ALL of these people had seen things that I would not wish upon anyone in this world. ALL of these people had been through the fires of hell and they still managed to smile, to joke, to live their life and to find the small positive things, however miniscule, and give thanks for them instead of wallowing in self-pity. You see this with your own eyes. There are 15 volunteers on this outreach trip. Unanimously, almost without communication, every single one of us puts in $15-20. You get lunch with that money. If you misplace that money, you are disappointed, but I doubt it even ruins your day. Shit, you can pay that amount of money for a drink in the right (or wrong, depending on how you look at it) bar in Chicago. We give that money to the woman whose daughter is trapped in the hospital and are met with tears of joy. She is without expectation and she weeps openly and hugs every single one of us, giving each of us our own individual blessing. You feel briefly self-satisfied and then you think about all the people in this camp, in Kenya, in Africa, in the world that are in need. You’ve now seen it with your own eyes. Try to keep them dry.

                The next, and last stop, was the garbage slum. It is a community of over 600 people, 47% of whom are infected with HIV, who live in a garbage dump, picking through the garbage for food and materials. This is the lowest of the low. The smell is completely indescribable. It absolutely haunts me almost a week later. As we drove through the slum we are numb. This can’t be real. We get out of the van at the top and meet the volunteers who pledge their time daily to teach in the one school that slum has. At first I did not want to take pictures. I don’t want to make this place a spectacle. It feels almost like a zoo. White people come in and take pictures of their way of life, gawk at the kids picking garbage and then leave and go on living their privileged lives. But I decide to take pictures for two reasons. The first and biggest reason is that the kids in the school are FREAKING OUT and all want to have their picture taken… it makes their day to see themselves in screen of the camera, and the second reason is because words can’t describe this place. I don’t want it to be a spectacle, but I want people to know that it exists. I want people to see the condition that some people are living in and take from it what they will. It is not a zoo, it is a reality and I never want to forget (not that I could if I tried). The pictures do not even begin to do this place justice. But it is a start, and I feel like that is all that my trip is, a start.

               

 I will never take for granted what I have, no matter how small. I look back at all the things that have gotten me down, have made me upset or has caused me to complain and I almost laugh at how petty those things seem as I watch a child come out of a house that is the size of a closet and walk through trash to get to his school. There are huge birds and massive, angry pigs that compete for the prime garbage with the people. Two weeks before we arrived in the slum, an unattended baby was eaten by a pig. Re-read that sentence. Let that marinate. A pig ate a child. There are so many conclusions you can draw about the slum just from that sentence. I will not go further into it, but I promise you it is 100% truth. I went into a woman’s house with my friend Joe. She told us her life story as we sat in her living room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom all at once. Her house was the size of an SUV with the seats ripped out. She has been living in the garbage slum for 14 years with her family. Her and 16 others share the space that they have claimed. Talk about zero privacy. After a tour of the slum and an hour of playing with the kids at the school (cutest kids ever, they all wanted to flex for the camera and take pictures and play tag and run around, smiling and screaming the entire time!) we headed back to the van. There is so much more to this place and I will gladly talk more about it, but for the purpose of this blog, I will leave it at that. The bus ride leaving the slum was silent. Although the kids had been laughing and playing with us, happier than most children that lead the most fortunate lives in any suburb of any American city, the reality began to sink in. We leave, they stay. We get back to our lives, they eat dinner found in the garbage dump which is cooked on burning garbage. They go to sleep and wake up in the same place we left them. They have been there for years and could be there for years to come. It was (is) heartbreaking. It was an incredibly sobering and life-changing experience.

So there it is, the AMAZING, the bad and the ugly. The most incredible and difficult weekend of my entire life. I will never forget any of it. I hope that it translated, at least a tiny bit, into this blog. I know that it couldn’t have fully translated, partially because I can’t even wrap my mind around both the negatives of the slums and poverty and the positives of biking with giraffes, but at least I tried. Next blog post (or cluster of posts) we can settle into the next few months and hopefully catch a rhythm with the stories of my everyday African life. Every day is an adventure here. I look forward to it!

Settling In...

                The first night was only a few short hours and day 1 was hectic. So was day 2, but at least you will get to meet the cast of characters and get a little taste for what my life has become. The life that is polar opposite to the one that I knew only a week ago, and the life that I have already come to love (if you cant tell, the first few posts are written in retrospect, as a catch-up). I promise 3 things in this blog: I will try my hardest not to be preachy, you all know that Africa is poverty stricken and I refuse to act holier than thou because I realize that being here is a drop of water in an ocean. My stories may not all be happy, but they are not meant to be depressing, they are just experiences that I think are important.  2) I will try to tell the truth without exaggerating (as my dad says, divide what I say by pi and you will get the truth, but my African stories need no exaggeration, that is for sure) ANND 3) you will be entertained. I am a storyteller in a country of storytellers, a place that is boiling over with culture, rhythm and flavor. It’s going to be a wild ride and I’m excited to share it… assuming anyone is still reading!

                Day 2 started off as an orientation and ended with the introduction to my new family, friends and town.

Orientation was a blast. We met the Fadhili Community staff and they sang us a song in Swahili (look for the link on facebook, I didn’t record it but someone did and they said they would tag everyone). Needless to say, it was AWESOME! We talked about our placements and ran through all of the guidelines to a safe and productive Kenya trip (which strangely enough was a lot more extensive than the one that we got in London study abroad when Mary Hall told us we all were going to die in London, so just accept it). We talked about the different trips available. Safari to Maasai Mara and Lake Nakuru, day trips to Kazuri (bead and pottery market made by local women), Nairobi National Park and Animal Orphanage (views of wildlife with the backdrop of Nairobi’s sky scrapers) and my personal favorite, the monkey park aptly named “den of thieves”. We also talked about the Outreach program (much more on that shortly). Last, but definitely not least we talked about the different placements throughout Kenya, in Nairobi, Mombasa and Maasai. I came to Kenya planning on spending about a month and a half in Nairobi and a month and a half in Mombasa, but after hearing the stories from the Maasai placement I think I am going to change my trip around. The Maasai are a tribe in southern and central Kenya, and the placement is in the middle of the wild, living the life of a maasai tribesman (no water, electricity etc etc etc) and teaching in a local school there. There are no worries about muggings, violence and pickpocketing in the Maasai, but your biggest worry at night are the hyenas and lions that have been known to prowl the Maasai territories… Sounds like a ridiculous time and an absolute adventure, how can I turn that down? One of the few things that I know about Maasai men is that to become a man (this practice is still used in some of the more traditional tribesman) they have to go out on their own and kill a lion using only a spear and a knife. They are also known to be the most peaceful and accepting tribe in Kenya…. Good to know, I definitely want the lion killer on my side if a fight breaks out… We got our placements, I was placed as a teacher in Ngong (a town just outside the city) and found out that I was going to be living with a woman named Naomi, other than that, the placement remained a mystery. We then got a short tea and food break and some time to stretch and relax.

                Then I went to the bathroom…

                                            Not the best, not the worst toilet I’ve used in Kenya…

My placement, Town, Family and Friends:

I live in Ngong (pronounced most similarly to “gong” with a little throat action that does not translate well into English… or blog writing for that matter). It is about a 20 minute matatu or bus ride to the Nairobi city center. It is incredibly bustling and a source of non-stop excitement, especially being one of probably 10 mzungu in the entire huge community! It is indescribably poor, American ghettos and poverty couldn’t even begin to describe the houses, filth and dangerousness of the area (especially post sundown). I live in the middle of the community, in a small apartment building sandwiched between the major market and the slum. Once the sun goes down, if you are not taking a taxi somewhere, it is not the best decision to be outside of the apartment, so I have most definitely gone through a lifestyle makeover since arriving in Ngong. I would love to post pictures of the neighborhood to give you all a better idea of where I am living, but I can’t really bring my camera out without making myself a target (and reasonably so, if I had nothing and didn’t know where my next meal was coming from and saw someone photographing my neighborhood, I would probably rob him), but I plan on taking pictures of Ngong soon, so I will post them as soon as I can. My apartment is very safe, with locks to enter the front, locks to get to the stairs, a lock on each floor and if you manage to make it through all that, deadbolts on the doors. So don’t worry about me… I wouldn’t have even felt the need to say all that, but I think I painted an unnecessarily dramatic picture of my neighborhood and wanted to ease the tension for grandma and papa (Hi grandma and papa!) My apartment is owned by a woman named Naomi. She is my house mother, a PHENOMENAL cook, who is an absolute sweetheart and incredibly easy to get along with. She LOVES soap operas and a lot of nights, we sit as a “family” and watch Spanish soap operas, translated into English (padway and andy, you guys thought we had it bad last semester!) In Ngong everyone is super friendly. Almost everyday after work I walk into the same juice shop, talk to my new friend Phillip who runs the place and get a new combination of fruit juice and stop at either the butcher for a beef samosa, or get grilled corn and chopped sugar cane from the street vendor on my block. Either way, the drink and the meal usually run me between 40 and 45 shillings (50 cents American).  Naomi has a nephew named Isaac, he is 20 and he stays at Naomi’s house 2-3 times a week and he lives and goes to school in Nairobi the other days. I’ve gotten pretty close with him and he is a really goofy guy. He is the nicest kid ever, who was recruited to play soccer in England, but because he has no birth certificate he cannot apply for a visa. He plays for his university and in a Kenyan league and has shown me around Ngong, and taken me out in Nairobi and even found a pickup basketball game for us to play near the city center. I think that he is a good kid to know in this area because he is an incredibly nice and trustworthy kid, but he seems to know EVERYONE when you walk down the street with him and it seems like he is really well respected, in Ngong and also in the parts of Nairobi that I have been with him. The other volunteers that I live with are great. Jack, from London, is my roommate, and then there is Nikki and Tarin from Canada, and Daniella from Colombia. I have gotten really close with the three girls right off the bat, and me and Jack get along really well, but he is rarely around and seems to do his own thing a lot, which is cool as well. Tarin leaves next week for Tanzania and Daniella is changing her placement to another part of Kenya next Tuesday, so I think that I will get new roommates, which is sad because I am perfectly happy with the ones that I have!

I arrived in Ngong thinking that I was doing a teaching program at the Sidai Academy in the Slums of Ngong, but due to unforeseen circumstances, Sidai Academy was forced to relocate and I was stranded in Ngong with no placement! I had heard that the programs through my organization were unorganized, but I was a little shaky when I found out that my placement didn’t exist anymore. Luckily, Nikki and Tarin took me to their placement, an HIV positive women’s center called “living positive”. It has a daycare and a school as a sister program located in the heart of the Ngong slum. Daniella, took me to her placement the following day as well. It is called the Faraja Children’s Home, just outside Ngong, about a 20 minute walk from our apartment. The Faraja Children’s home is an orphanage that supports 34 children from all over Kenya. Now (this is still a catch up portion) I work a few days a week at Living Positive and a few days a week at Faraja Children’s home and I am planning on starting my own initiative with the time that I have here. I will get into both of the placements in wayyyy more detail in a minute, I’m just trying to get you oriented to the way that my life is working now before I throw you off the deep end of information without water wings…

                My first day of placement (Living Positive Woman's Center):

On my first full day in Ngong, I woke up early (everything starts a little earlier in Nairobi because a lot of business shut down for the evening once the sun starts to set) and followed Tarin and Nikki to the Living Positive Center. I had no idea what to expect while we were weaving through the backstreets of Ngong on our way to the center. Living Positive is a center specifically for HIV infected women to learn skills such as making jewelry, hangbags, wallets etc so that they could make crafts and sell them to support themselves and their families. I was blown away when we got there. It’s a small little center with about 15-20 women working on all sorts all of crafts, all of whom are constantly laughing and joking. We sat with them and I tried my best not to mess anything up on my first day. We walked over to the day care center (located in the middle of the slum) and played with the kids for a short while. We walked into the classroom and immediately the children started singing “how are you!?, how are you!? How are you?!”  which is the first English they learn, if you respond by saying anything other than “fine” you will get a very confused look and a few giggles. More to come on the women’s shelter and day care (including pictures) soon!

                Second day (faraja orphanage)

                My Second day in Ngong, I accompanied Daniella (Columbian roommate) to the Faraja Children’s Home. I spent the morning on my hands and knees scrubbing the walls of the orphanage with a washcloth, bucket and soap. Then I washed the dishes in a bucket with a bar of soap, using rainwater that had filled a huge plastic reservoir which was used for the tap water at the orphanage. The orphanage is one of the most run down looking buildings in a run-down part, of a run-down town, in a run-down country. In any part of America, this building would have been condemned twice. But here, it is a household for 35 people. The labor was backbreaking in the morning when the kids went off to school. That is all of the kids except Kefa. This was one of the pivotal points of the trip, no, my life. Kefa, is a one and a half year old boy who I am convinced is the cutest child on the face of the earth. He is one of the most curious, intelligent and charismatic one year olds ever. He speaks Swahili, and picks up on English and Spanish (thanks to one and a half months of tutoring from Daniella). Only one problem; he is deathly afraid of mzungus, especially those who look like ghosts (not me, obviously). I said “hi” to him and he ran scared into a different room. Good thing that is the response that I get from most girls when I first meet them, which has made me incredibly difficult to deter.  He became my project. By the end of the day he wouldn’t leave my side. All of the kids came home at around 1:30 and the house became utter chaos! I played with as many kids as I could, forgetting names as soon as I was corrected on the pronunciation of them for the third time.  It was such a fun time! A ten year old boy named Isaac started cooking dinner for his mom and 33 brothers and sisters while the other children bathed each other, took care of each other’s laundry and found time to kick a soccer ball and play all around the house before getting to their homework (there is no electricity so it is hard to study post sundown). Amazing. These kids were more responsible than I am. 10 years old, after a full day of school and they had to come home to a house and take care of adult business. Puts things in perspective. I almost asked one of the 14 year olds to work on my applications for grad school… I felt like she might have a better idea of what to do than I did. As the day wound down Daniella and I got up to leave. Right before I left for the day Kefa yelled “mzungu!” (I’ll respond to it for now, but damn it, he WILL learn my name!) and I turned around. He came running (waddling) over and gave me a kiss on the cheek. As I said, cutest kid ever. That was my first day at Faraja Children’s Home. MUCH more to come in later posts about the history of the place, the present state and of course, pictures!

                          

                                                                

 Alright. Enough of my best friend in Africa, Kefa… I’m sure there will be PLENTY more of him…

          On a completely unrelated note: one of the coolest things about Africa that I cannot get over, is the clothes. People have the coolest gear here and don’t even realize it. It has been just long enough that a lot of the clothes donated by Americans and other countries have come back in style-- I see more cool clothes in Nairobi that I am jealous of than anywhere I have been in the States. People are wearing Bulls clothes from the 90’s, worn in hats with retro baseball teams  (some of which don’t exist anymore), Starter Jackets (if you don’t remember these, then look them up on google) with Larry Johnson, Alonzo Mourning and Muggsy Bogues on the Charlotte Hornets. The coolest gear ever! As a mzungu walking down the street, almost every person at least gives me a glance and more likely shamelessly stares at me. If they don’t say “mzungu, how are you!?” they at least mumble “jambo”, “mambo”, “habari gani”, “moreaga” “poa, poa”  or another of the million Swahili or native tongue greetings there are in Kenya. When things get awkward is when they catch me gawking at them as hard as they are gawking at me, except I am looking at the University of Wisconsin Rose Bowl hat from the early 1990’s… But I digress… 

Until next time…

And so it begins....

Have you ever felt that the stars have aligned and in a strange way you are precisely where you are supposed to be at that moment? A place where given the choice, you wouldn’t choose to be anywhere else in the world at that given millisecond in time? I have been fortunate enough to have this feeling a few times in my life, possibly only those who have felt it can understand, but it is the only way that I can put words to my initial feelings for Kenya. Well, maybe not INITIAL feelings. Let me start from the VERY beginning before I get too far ahead of myself. After a 20+ hour travel day I finally arrived in Nairobi with a mixture of emotions that I don’t dare attempt to describe. Half expecting no one to be at the airport to pick me up after a miserable travel day, I practically hugged Benjamin (strong African name, right?) when I saw him holding the sign for Fadhili Community at the baggage claim.

The scene is Nairobi, a completely foreign and admittedly intimidating city… at midnight. Add a driver I don’t know, exhaustion and only one other volunteer trusting enough of  Benjamin to guide us safely to our unknown destination (relax mom, spoiler alert: I made it alive) and lets just say the adrenaline was pumping . We drive outside of the city for about 20 minutes and turn onto an unpaved road… abandoned. Hayley, the other mzungu volunteer (mzungu-- a coverall word used to beckon, describe, harass… and possibly degrade? white people) and I give each other a look as our driver almost runs the only two people around off the road. He looks back at us and says “you cant slow down in this neighborhood at night if you want to keep your car”… the lack of emotion in his voice must be lost somewhere in the cultural gap, right? We do want to keep the car-- at least we know he is on our team. We pull up to a nondescript gate and one man comes to open it and at that precise moment another man pops out of God knows where. Benjamin, for the first time, flustered, looks around nervously, locks the doors and rolls up my window… I promise you, Benjamin is the third most nervous person in that car. A collective sigh of relief almost fogs the windows inside the car as our unexpected visitor walks past the car, taking what felt like half an hour in reality what was closer to half a second. We enter the gate and Benjamin helps us bring our bags into a house. Our expectations are low. We walk into our house for the night and find it is incredibly nice, in place with most houses in any given North Shore of Chicago suburb. Confused, exhausted, relieved, with adrenaline pumping through every vein, Hayley and I settle into our accommodations. Welcome to Nairobi.

                Day 1:

After a little, and I do mean a LITTLE sleep (it IS “Kenya hot” in Kenya, weird!) I was ready to attack my first African day. I met the other 12 volunteers that were starting at my orientation (amazing kids) and we set out for the 20 minute walk from our house towards the city center. As we left our gated house that looked like it must have been out of a Kenyan House and Home magazine, we faced the neighborhood from the night before, which during the daylight hours was a vibrant (although, “ verrrry rustic”) market. We made our way through and walked down the heavily populated Ngong road. Almost every face we saw was staring right back at us. It was almost as if we stuck out in this neighborhood. As the only Mzungus for what seemed like miles around we walked towards the mall to get all of our needs for the next few days. EVERYONE gave us looks of curiosity as we walked by, but none more than the bus full of older white people who were clearly “slumming it” from the comfort of their safari van in Nairobi for the afternoon. Their looks were more concerned as if to say “look at these poor white children, don’t they know where they are! Is there any room in our van for them?” (again mom, made it…) After a brief shopping excursion we decided to hop on a City Hoppa bus and head out to the giraffe center just outside Nairobi, so that we could get back to the house before dark… good call. We hopped on the “Hoppa” and headed in the exact wrong direction from where we needed to be. After about 20 minutes of bus ride, some lady, bless her soul, realized how confused we were solely based on how we must have looked and asked where we were headed. When we told her she giggled and told us to get off at the next stop and catch the bus in the opposite direction which took us all the way to where we needed to be… simple enough, right? Right…. Well after about 40 minutes we were serrrrriously doubting that this bus even existed.  But finally it did arrive and we got to the giraffe park with about 45 minutes until closing time… ooops. But it was all worth it. We got to meet and greet Ali, a Rothschild giraffe with a serious thing for Giraffe food. It was Valentines day, and me and Ali had really hit it off, so in the spirit of the holiday, I went for the big one. And boy did I get it!

                                        

        My valentine’s day Kiss

Although, I’ve had better kisses in my life (and probably worse), my Valentine’s evening with Ali is one that I will never forget, and in a strange way, I guess a bucketlist item that I get to check off…? (I promise that wasn’t on the list before it happened).  After a major downpour in the night (the first in Nairobi in months… the people were soooo happy), an authentic Kenyan meal of Ugali (cornmeal cooked on an open pot over a fire) with beans and an early evening to bed, I started to settle into my new African life… but little did I know it hadn’t begun.