Month 8 and my watoto wasiosikia

School is FINALLY back in session. Sort of. By that I mean my kids have slowly started to arrive. Thank goodness though.

After Camp GLOW at the beginning of month 8 (which is how we refer to August in sign and how I now think of it in my head) I came back to Kilifi for a little bit before I headed for Nairobi again to help work out the plans for the training of the new Education group coming next month. Eeek! Nairobi is nice because I always seem to get a lot of work done at the Peace Corps office, but also because the Ethiopian food is phenomenal. Also I can find Herbal Essences hair products. So other than shopping and eating way too much ethnic chakula, we did end up hashing out the up-coming PST, after and amidst what seemed like a lot of unfortunate arguing. Turns out the effects of all the financial crises in the US are also felt all the way over in East Africa. But I think that's mostly because I'm technically employed but the US government. Or something. Anyways, with budget cuts abounding we had to do a lot of finagling with a lot of different things for PST, but awesome as we are here in Kenya, we made it work. Tim Gunn would be proud. A lot of things will be different from my PST a year ago, but I'm sure it will still be fine (fingers crossed). It's just hard to do stuff when you don't have any money to do it with. Below is a view of the conference room at the office where we pasted calendar after calendar onto the walls to get everything in order. Fun huh?

So we are getting a group that I think will be a little smaller than mine was when we started, AND we're getting two new Secondary Deaf Ed Volunteers! Hooray! Let's just hope they're as cool and Amanda and I (*cough cough*). And with the new budget cuts I won't be able to help out with as much of the PST as I had hoped, but Amanda and I signed up to work Model School, the culminating second-to-last week of PST when all the trainees practice teaching in Kenya for the first time. This time the Sec. Deaf Ed's will be in Machakos for the majority of PST, instead of Loitokitok, so that's where their Model School will be. The new group gets to country on October 5th, and they swear in as PCVs on December 14th. Karibu Kenya new dudes!

After Nairobi I took the night train back with some other PCVs on their way to holiday in Lamu and spent a little more time in Kilifi before I left again for Bamburi, and town just north of Mombasa that's basically only on the map for the multitudes of fancy beach-side resorts. Lucky enough for me, I got to stay at one! August was the month for a workshop called Cross-Sector. Here in PC-Kenya we spend a lot of time with our own sector. Education with education, public health with public health, and business with business. This is for obvious reasons since our job descriptions are so vastly different a lot of the time. Cross-Sector was cool though because I got to spend the week with lots of Public Health and Business PCVs I'd never met before, who, by the way, are pretty fun. Cross-Sector is sponsored by PEPFAR, the same peeps who also funded Camp GLOW. Since they're whole thing is about Aids Relief that's what we spent the week talking about. But relief can't just come from mzungus who are in country for a brief two years, it's gotta come from within! (Does that sound corny?) Anywho, the point is each attending PCV had to bring two Kenyan counterparts for the week. I brought two teachers from my school: Mr Mwamuye, who I think has been teaching for a while and is really funny when you sit down and talk to him, and Jamal, who is not quite 22, completely deaf, fresh out of secondary school, and other than the title of "teacher" is essentially one of my kids. Now the hotel we stayed was called Severin Sea Lodge, and I'm sure there's a big fancy website if you google it. The rooms were beautiful, there were two pools with slides and stuff, ample hanging-around space, and unlimited gourmet food you wouldn't believe. The salad bar was obvi my favorite part, and as long as I read the labels on the other things, I knew what everything was. Jamal on the other hand, had never seen most of that kind of food before. He spent the first few days wondering where all the ugali was. He also made some fast friends with some German boys who were there on holiday. Ages 10 and 12, Patrick and Max go to a special school in Germany and ended up teaching us the German Sign Language alphabet and a couple other words in German. Talk about cross-cultural huh? Here's Jamal with Patrick:

Cross-Sector ended and I happily came back to Kilifi anxiously awaiting the start of school. Break months are ok, as long as I'm busy and traveling and stuff. If I'm stuck at home with no where to be and nothing to do, I might as well be dead. It sucks. The compound here does not seem right without my kids, and I don't feel right without them either. It's like 68 different parts of me are missing. I hate saying goodbye to them, because I know at some point the goodbye will be for real, but for now I know they'll come back when school opens. So when I got back to Kilifi, school was supposed to open, my 68 missing pieces were supposed to fall back into place, and the world was supposed to be set right again. BUT thanks to the Kenyan government, all the teachers in Kenya went on strike - something about the current teachers wanting 28,000 new teachers to be hired, but the Ministry of Education not being able to because the money was given to the Department of Defense to raise the salaries of the military. So teachers refused to teach, which means schools refused to open. Including mine. So I had a really long week of waiting, walking around town, and watching WAY too much How I Met Your Mother. Even though they said the strike might last a month or more, it was over in a week, and finally FINALLY my kids have started coming back. Whew. I'm whole again.

I always assume the start of the term will be relatively uneventful, and though that's how it is for Kenyans, it's totally not for me. Tuesday was when the kids started coming, and they had a meeting with the parents who came that day as well. Thankfully I've been exempt from this start-of-term meeting from here on out since it HAS to be in Kiswahili and sometimes even Giriama. Fine by me! So Tuesday was a hang-out day and was filled with catching up with my kids. One of the things we caught up on was our ongoing fight about whether witchcraft is real or not. The kids have this sign that for the longest time I could not put a word to. You rub the palm of one hand with the index finger of another, and blow on it. A couple context clues into me first seeing it I was telling the kids it's called "mojo." Someone finally spelled for me "witchcraft" but I still see the sign and "mojo" is what runs through my head. Anyways, just like it's hard to find a non-religious Kenyan, it's also hard to find one that does not believe in witchcraft. My kids will give me example after example after example of how witchcraft/magic/mojo/karma is totally real, and then finish with, "NOW do you believe in it?" And I've tried to explain to them over and over again that I can always ration it out with science or coincidence or something, but they won't have it. Coincidence is not a concept they can/want to grasp, especially with the belief in witchcraft so deeply rooted. Then I try to play the "I'm your teacher and I've been to university" card but that doesn't work either. Nothing does. Then, just to mess with them even more, I ran and got my deck of cards and showed them some very simple, reasonable, easy-to-learn card tricks. This blew them away so much that some of them had to even leave the room. I then proceeded to show them how the trick was done, hoping that would negate some of the witchcraft logic. It didn't. *Sigh*. I tried.

So Tuesday was dedicated to mojo, and today was dedicated to maize. Yay Kenya! The rainy season is coming to a close, and with that, so is the growing of the maize. One entire side of the boys dorms was filled with ears of maize, hundreds and hundreds of them, all that needed to be picked so that the kernels can be ground up for ugali. About half my kids had come by the end of today, and every single one of us spent the entire day picking kernels off the cob. We obviously had numerous kernel-throwing battles, and there was so much of it that I kind of felt like I was sitting in a really lumpy ball pit, but 8 hours later just about every kernel was separated. This gave me another day to sit and chat with my kids, my new favorite Kenyan pastime, and another day to just soak up how wonderful they all are. Not sure how I got so lucky. Osman spent most of today telling me he's absolutely certain he'll make it to America someday. Rock on kid! I still don't have all of them back yet, but hopefully I won't have to wait much longer. The pics below are mid-afternoon, with about half done.

Tomorrow I think we all have a lot of slashing in store. Bring on the blisters! I wonder what Friday will be...

So as always, my life here is revolving around my watoto wasiosikia, my kids who cannot hear. There's no equivalent for the word 'deaf' in Kiswahili so most of the time people call them "mbubu," which means something along the lines of dumb and is very derogatory, or "viziwi" which I don't know the literal translation for but I think is also derogatory. So I have learned how to say "Hawaitwi mbubu au viziwi. Wanaitwa watoto wasiosikia!" which means "Don't call them those stupid ignorant words, ya moron, just called them kids who can't hear." I may or may not have added the 'ya moron' part, but you get the idea.

AAAANNNNNNDD I almost forgot to say that I bought my ticket home for Christmas! YES! I leave Kenya on the 8th of December and get into Dulles mid-afternoon on the 9th. And I think I might need to go straight to Target before actually going home. We'll see. Then I fly out again on the 27th. I wish I could stay through New Year's but I have a limited amount of leave days and I need to save up for when Mom (and maybe Bro!?) comes to visit next April.

I'll leave you with a photo of what the monsters I live with did to some toilet paper while I was out one day. Same thing happened the next day too. Thanks monsters. You're great.

Ok, cheers everyone! Miss you like crazy and can't friggin' WAIT to see you all in December!

~ Shub :)