The California (Africa!) Initiative: Sarah: Camp counselor, committee member, and raw chicken.

It was Tuesday and almost midnight when I started writing this post. I was doing this while simultaneously wasting precious megabytes and doing everything I possibly could to find the season 2 finale of Glee. I just got back from Nairobi, where I met up with a bunch of other volunteers to plan for a huge event we have in August, and aside from just being generally awesome, the other PCVs also bring me stuff like Glee. I was THRILLED until I realized the last episode, that oh-so-exciting season finale, is only half there. I might as well ET and come back to America. I mean, this is just absurd. I can't live like this. Well, if Peace Corps is teaching me one thing, it's patience. Humph.

Anyways, as horrible as the 12 hour trip to Nairobi was, it's always refreshing to see other volunteers again, and have meetings on time, and actually get things done. The event we have going on in August is called Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World). Peace Corps Washington has different committees that they fund in each Peace Corps country, and I'm not sure about the rest of the world, but the three committees we have in Kenya are DPS (Diversity and Peer Support), VAC (Volunteer Advisory Committee), and GAD (Gender and Development). GAD is primarily funded by PEPFAR (US President's Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief), and one of the things that Peace Corps/PEPFAR puts on is Camp GLOW. It's essentially a girls' empowerment camp, no boys allowed (except for PCV counselors and staff), and we cover everything from job opportunities and self-confidence to sex, pregnancy, abortion, family planning, poverty, self-defense and everything anyone would ever want to know about HIV and AIDS. We'll take the girls on a field trip, we'll have a disco night, a movie night, a bonfire, talent show, and all the games they can possibly handle. It's gonna be awesome.

In April, this past school break, there was a Camp GLOW that was actually here in Kilifi! BUT due to some unfortunate circumstances with the Embassy or something, interpreters couldn't be hired, so deaf girls were not allowed to go. This time however, Peace Corps is def making up for it, and half of August's camp is going to be deaf. Hooray! I applied earlier this term to be a camp counselor for August, and Peace Corps apparently likes me enough so I get to go too :) I'm bringing four of my girls from Kilifi, two from Form 2 and two from Form 3, and also shepherding a bunch of other deaf girls from up and down the coast. It's going to be a two day trip to the camp's new location, Kisumu, which is all the way out in Nyanza province on Lake Victoria, close to Uganda, but I definitely won't be alone. When all of us counselors met in Nairobi to plan logistics we found out that Alli (another PCV on the coast) and I will be taking 13 deaf to Kisumu with us. We ended up joking about my numerous baby ducklings that will be following me west. Oh well. The more the merrier :)

So Camp GLOW meetings finished and I thought I'd go home on Sunday. Not quite. Remember how I said Peace Corps Kenya has three different committees funded by Washington? Well Kenya is also the only Peace Corps country in the whole world that has a Deaf Education program. Sometimes us Deaf Ed-ers feel a little bit pushed to the wayside in all the craziness that is the Education sector, and I won't even go into how forgotten the Secondary Deaf Ed-ers are. I love Peace Corps, and I love Peace Corps Kenya, but we decided back in April at IST that we needed to help them out a bit. So we've started another committee just for Deaf Ed. There's 5 people on this new committee, including yours truly, so that I can make sure they don't forget about Secondary Deaf Ed. We're still working on a name for the committee and on making everything official so we can get funding and start doing stuff. We want to make a centralized location, whether online or in an office somewhere, where all the Deaf Ed volunteers can go for classroom resources. These resources might have come from Peace Corps itself, or from past volunteers. There's a wealth of information and ideas on how to best teach our wonderful deaf kids, we just need a way to access it. We also want to get in contact with different deaf/education-related organizations, either Kenyan or international, and see what they can help us with, e.g. KNAD (Kenya National Association of the Deaf), KIE (Kenya Institute of Education), DeafAid (from Sweden), and Deaf Child WorldWide. And we also want to just be a support network for Deaf Ed PCVs. We get a lot of support from PC Kenya, for sure, but we are a unique sub-sector, and because of that, very close-knit. It will be nice to have an official, centralized group that everyone can turn to if we need anything. So, wish us luck in getting things off the ground! We know we can only do so much in two years, but this will hopefully be a very good jumping-off point for future generations of volunteers to take over and continue working on. Yay Deaf Ed!

So things are going ok in Kilifi. It's getting cold since the rains have come, and by cold I mean 72. Anything below 80 and my kids have to wear 3 sweaters. It's pretty funny. I'm actually getting so adjusted to the weather here that I have to heat my bath water in the morning. 72 is chilly. I'm gonna die when I come home at Christmastime. Things are perpetually busy as well. I've realized that I stand so much during the day that when I go home for good in the evening, the muscles in the back of my knees actually hurt to sit down. Heh. And I'm always so exhausted and go to bed so late that I'm usually asleep before I can even finish tucking my mosquito net in. This recently may have been because I was watching Glee till all hours of the night, but hey, I HAVE to watch it right? And speaking of my mental health, some days I just get so frustrated I want to punch walls, and possibly people, and just go back to America. Things are SO much easier there. But then I look at my kids and realize I could never do that to them. I told them I'd be here for two years and I could never let them down. They mean way too much to me. I mean, who would they laugh at if I left?

Exhibit A:

Yesterday my Form 3's interrupted Math lesson to tell me that I looked like a chicken that's been plucked but not cooked. Cute. Not only are these kids teaching me unbelievable amounts of patience because of what they have to go through on a daily basis, they're also teaching me a lot more personal acceptance, and to not be easily offended. They don't mean any harm when they tell me I was much prettier in America, or that I looked fatter when I got back from Nairobi, they're simply making observations. Osman was the one who brought up the chicken thing. He is so goofy and he never tries to be, but he also knows exactly how to pull my chain, and he tries that all the time. Sometimes he'll get in fights with me about gender equality or about corruption and stuff. When he noticed that I was the slightest bit miffed by the chicken statement, he played on it as much as he could, and pretended to drool when he saw me, and take bites out of my arm. "We can't focus in class Sarah because looking at you just makes us hungry," he says. So to keep the play-fight going I proceeded to pack up my bag and walk out. Gona saw I was about to leave and ran to the door to lock me in. I tried to counter the argument by telling them it's hard to teach them because all I think about when I look at them is chocolate. I ended up sitting in a corner and laughing so hard I cried. Everyone got a giant kick out of it, and math had to resume later on. Normal day :)

Alright, hope everything is good back stateside. Miss you all bunches and bunches. As always, here's some random pictures from the recent weeks in Kenya.

Here’s two of my boys with two of my other babies. The one on the right is that lovable trouble-maker Osman. He's also holding a pretty lovable trouble-maker.