Four down, two to go.

Almost done with the fourth term in Kenya. Yikes! That means only two left, and they're quite a bit shorter than this last one. Egads!

It's exam week right now, and I'm duty, so I'm spending lots of time at school grading tests, and hanging with my kids. I always think, jeez, a break will really be nice and relaxing and I start looking forward to it. And then the second my kids leave I miss them. Lord help me come COS time.

So what's been going on? Let's see... as always it's the same old crap for me, but I guess not necessarily for everyone else. So I'll crank out a few relatively boring (for me) stories.

My head boy, Francis Buya, got sick again a few weeks ago, a recurrence of this weird ongoing chronic thing he's had since he started walking. He couldn't keep down food for a few days, had a blinding pain in his abdomen, and looked -and I'm sure felt- absolutely miserable.  Our medical treatment here at school happens like this: after assembly the kids who are sick or think they are sick line up to wait for one of three things - Panadol (a pain killer like Ibuprofen), year-and-a-half-old green cough syrup, or they get sent to Kilifi District Hospital where nobody knows sign language and since it's a public hospital, it's not as well equipped as it needs to be. Pain killers and cough syrup were obviously not going to help Buya; he had something much more serious and definitely needed more than a little attention. He had gone to the hospital already, where they did a rapid test for malaria, which had come back negative, so they sent him back to school. I was tired of seeing Buya suffer so much so frequently, and though it was a hard decision because it's not really a precedent I wanted to be setting, I decided to take him somewhere private, and cover whatever costs, just as long as he got better. I was worried he'd need a colonoscopy or surgery or something so I initially wanted to take him to the private hospital in Mombasa (of which there are three). Kate convinced me it was a better idea just to try the private doctor in Kilifi first, then go to Mombasa later if need be, so that's what we did. So I took him to the Dr. Njeri, where they did a blood and stool test and lo and behold, poor Buya had maralia and amoebiasis. I guess he had had these bugs in his GI tract since he was a baby (the reason it was chronic) so - as Mom keeps telling me, and I keep telling him - it's gonna take a while for his gut to heal itself. He spares no details though when I ask how it is when he goes to the choo (toilet). I spent a lot of pesa on the right meds this time from the private doctor, and now a few weeks later he's feeling almost totally himself again. Here he is just about 100% better, and happily watering the plants in his shamba (garden).

Buya has this uncanny ability to mimic people's walks and behaviors (in fact almost all deaf kids do, it seems - they can't hear anything so they see EVERYTHING). Without fail Buya makes me laugh so hard I cry, every time. He spent the afternoon on Tuesday doing impressions of as many people (teachers and students) as he could, and it was hilarious. His impression of Sarah is with her bag on her shoulder, her skirt flipping in the breeze, and her legs kicked up behind her as she walks. Hopefully I don't actually look as silly as Buya makes it seem, but either way it's one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

A couple weekends ago I spent all of Saturday and Sunday visiting some friends who were down from Nairobi and had decided a while ago that when they came back to Kilifi they would rent out the houseboat down at the boatyard. I think the Boatyard officially calls it "The Floating House," but we all just called it the boathouse. Look!

 

It's pretty expensive (for Peace Corps standards) but costs nothing if you already know someone staying on it and just want to play around and jump off the deck into the creek! It's gorgeous inside and out and just all-around fun. So we drank a lot of beers, had a lot of free oysters at the Boatyard, and spent the weekend just relaxing and swimming and enjoying being with each other. It was fabulous.

So it's exam week now, which means that the term is almost over, which means I'm that much closer to having to say goodbye to my kids forever. Still not sure how I'll ever manage it. I'm dreading my last day here like it's the day of my own funeral or something. Ugh.

But before that happens, there's still a lot to do! My mom is coming next weekend, and the closer it gets to her arrival, the more filled up our schedule is getting while she's here. She flies in on the 7th, to Mombasa, where a friend (actually a huge donor for school) has offered to pick her up at the airport with me, in exchange for us coming to lunch at his house. Pretty good deal I'd say! We'll spend that evening at school, hanging out with my kids who have not gone home yet. I think actually having them see Mom in person is going to blow their minds. I keep telling them they'll finally realize why I'm so short. Then Sunday we've planned a big Easter dinner at another friend's house on the plantation, where Mom will meet the other side of my life here - the ex-pats that I spend all my time outside of school with. Then the kids will go to Deaf Games in Mtwapa (might be changed to Mombasa) and Mom and I will go see them for a day or two there, probably mixed in with some shopping in Mombasa as well. At some point we want to go back to Loitokitok and see my host family there, which I've been dying to do for ages, but haven't had the time, and maybe hit a game park on the way back to the coast (Amboseli or Tsavo) for a day or two of safari. Then I'm probably gonna have to go back to Nairobi for the new education group's IST (for Deaf committee stuff and other deaf ed related things) for which Mom will happily (hopefully) tag along. Whatever time we have left in the middle of all this other stuff we'll spend relaxing on the coast - having pizza at Makuti Villas, oysters and burgers at the Boatyard, chapati and kachumbare at Members, snorkeling, swimming, Mnarani club, and whatever else we can think of. It's supposed to be a relaxing trip, but we'll see if that actually pans out or not. 

Last weekend Kate, Kelvin, another PCV Jennifer, and I all went to a really cool eco-camp up towards Malindi called Mida Creek. It was pretty awesome, and though I missed my fan for the night, we still had a really good time. They have phenomenal food and REALLY cold beer and lots of super expensive Giriama culture things that we didn't take part in because we're not actually tourists (I'm happy to say). 

Here's Kel and his Auntie Sarah :)

So I've wasted a lot of time and megabytes recently uploading all the videos I can to youtube. Hit this link to check out my kids :) http://www.youtube.com/user/sarahchubbard?feature=mhee. Most of the videos I could just watch over and over again, they make me laugh so hard. My kids here are the best thing ever. 

Alright, I feel like I started writing this post ages ago. It's now Friday evening and after a great night out and some really good rooftop BBQ, I have never been more excited to sleep in on Saturday morning. The boys have a football match with the hearing school next door, and that will happily be followed by movie night and then another night to sleep in on Sunday morning. Hooray!

So happy end of March to everyone, wherever you are, and cheers to anyone who has ever read this dumb ol' blog!

~ Shub :)

The house that built me

After 23 years and more memories than I could write about in one million blog posts, my parents are finally selling the house. I knew this was coming for a while, I guess; heck I figured for the longest time that they'd sell as soon I left for college. But they told me they were talking to realtors last month and it's finally hit me this past week. This means it will be sold and gone before I get back, that Christmas was the last time I'll be in it, and to be all dumb and sappy, it means I never said a proper goodbye.

I know I've written a lot of posts about how home can change and its not about the place but about the people instead, and all those cliche things about home being where the heart is. This is now a true test of how I can own up to what I've written. However, tough exterior or not (wishful thinking on my part), a piece of my heart will always be in that house somewhere.

We moved to Gaithersburg from Seattle where I was born just before I turned one, and from what mom tells me, she was not happy about leaving Seattle. I obviously don't remember any of that because I was a baby, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions ever, as far as I'm concerned. I don't really remember what the house looked like then, but I can see it in pictures and home videos from when I was little. Over the years dad has put so much work into it that parts of it you wouldn't even recognize as the same house. I'm going to miss my bedroom and that fabulously renovated kitchen, and the sunporch and the loft. And I'm not just going to miss the house parts of the house, but also the cul-de-sac, and the woods and the pond and the stream and the neighborhood and...

I guess it's safe to say there's not much I won't miss about 11804 Cherry Grove Dr.

Here are only some of the MANY memories:

• At least two of my childhood beds were made by dad. One had a little heart shape cut out of the headboard that matched the comforter mom made, and the other one was a bunkbed with a desk underneath. Although I never used that desk very much, I still loved that it was there. 
• When people ask about the house, I learned to always say "It's just shaped like a square donut." The atrium in the middle of the house was a constant entertainment factor for me and Morgan, a perpetual reptile/amphibian house for the multitude of pets we kept, and an all around 'my house is cooler than your house' argument. It was awesome. We had various different ponds throughout the years, all of which were home to tadpoles at some point, that I caught from the stream down back. We had turtles that laid eggs and ate people food and a family of yellow-spotted salamanders under the stairs. And the tree growing up out of the middle, that was the only thing with lights on it that you could see from the street at Christmas-time. The atrium later turned into the loft, which, although not a part of my "childhood" per say has still given me it's fair share of memories over the years. 
• There was an old clock that used to hang outside Morgan and I's bathroom at the end of the hallway that never worked, at least not that I remember. I don't know where it came from or where it's gone to now, but I will always remember the noise it made when someone was running in the house or when a door slammed. 
• The house was always such a good "party house" too. One of the reasons is because of the bonfire pit. For years the pit was surrounded by a wooden decking that I assume dad built but don't remember when. Then we had so many fires they started to eat away at the decking, so we changed it to stone. Either way, it's been a constant source of party-gathering, along with the patio and the sunporch. When I was in high school, we would have homecoming meetings and then hang out around the bonfire before going to ding dong ditch around the neighborhood. Good times. 
• And speaking of homecoming meetings, boy were those a blast. Thankfully dad never cared too much that we got every color paint all over the driveway and yard. Grass regrows and he would just re-surface the driveway when homecoming season was finally over. The carport housed all of our crap from August to October, meetings always turned into barbeques, and high school wouldn't have been the same without them. There's still the remnants of my green hand print on the maple tree in the front yard from a homecoming meeting. 
• Another party favorite for years on end was the tire swing. While Morgan and I were little it hung from a tree closer to the sunporch. Dad built a little platform that we could use to swing off from, and he'd push us until we couldn't go any higher. We used to rake the leaves from the woods into a huge pile under the far end of the swing and jump off into the pile. One time when I was six I landed wrong on my hand, and though mom didn't believe there was anything wrong with me, I cried for three days until she finally took me to the hospital. And HA, it actually was fractured. (She also didn't believe I had mono when I had mono, but that's another story.) The tire swing tree eventually got hit by lightning in a big storm one year, and the swing had to be moved to a different tree - still swung pretty high though. 
• In true weird-Hubbard fashion, we had a pet cemetery in the woods behind the house. Other than Emmylou, who is buried under my window, every other pet we ever owned and cared even the slightest bit for ended up in the cemetery; mice, hamsters, gerbils, rats, snakes, turtles, parakeets, ferrets, fish, and probably more. Dad would always make a little wooden cross for whoever died, and  we made sure to put their name on it too. 
• When Morgan and I were little and we would get a heavy snow, we'd take the sleds out back and start from the top of the hill by the bonfire pit and sled all the way down into the woods until it flattened out at the stream. Of course, this was before the woods had grown up a lot so the trees were smaller and easier to dodge. In the summer we'd use cardboard and slide down the hill on the side of the house. 
• There was a tree outside the sewing room that grew right next to the house, that I used to use to climb onto the roof. That is until dad found out I was climbing on the roof and cut down, but told me he was worried about it growing into the foundation or something. I know why you really cut it down dad :)

So again, as I keep telling mom, I'll get over it at some point, but definitely not just yet. I know I live in Kenya right now and there will be a new house to look forward too, or a new boat or whatever, but that house is where I grew up, and the thought of somebody else living in it just makes me super sad. It's weird to think I might be sort of a different person if I grew up in a different house. It is just a house, but it's the home that made me who I am now, the house that built me (thanks for that awesome song Miranda Lambert).

Ok ok, back to Kenya. My house here is still standing (surprisingly), as is my determination to see this Peace Corps thing through. This weekend has actually been half-term break, so I've been catching up on a LOT of sleep, which I SO needed, and taking extra time to clean and hang out with my kids and go swimming and just relax. It's been great. Although last night I sneezed about 20 times, couldn't breathe through my nose for 2 hours, took WAY too many antihistamines to kick it, and woke up at 11 am this morning feeling like I just got hit by a semi. I'm allergic to something out here, just not sure what. Oh well. 

A few weeks ago I took 15 of my kids to Mombasa, to the church in Ziwani that accommodates the deaf every so often. It was a whole big shindig weekend with a wedding on Saturday and a huge service on Sunday. There were even some deaf guys from the States who were there visiting or doing NGO or ministry work or something. Thankfully I didn't have to shepherd my kids to the wedding so we just went to church on Sunday instead. Me telling the kids the matatu would come at 6am, and they needed to eat their porridge by 5:30 turned into them rubbing their eyes and sauntering to school around 6:15. Luckily the matatu didn't come until 6:30 anyways, so it was all good. We made it to Mombasa before 8 (since the traffic was light and we didn't have to stop every 10 meters to let people on and off: 16 people = private shuttle direct to destination) and hung around the church until things started happening around 9 or so. Christ Episcopal Church in Rockville, Maryland, the church I have always known, normally has three services, 7:45, 9:00, and 11:00. It starts at the assigned time, and everyone usually has their coffee and donuts and can be home before noon or 1:00. Not so in Kenya. We sat in the pews from about 9:30 to 2 (thankfully I had experienced this before so I brought a secret stash of cookies for me and the kids) listening to testimonial after testimonial and song after song. When they have deaf day, there has to be an interpreter on the alter for all the deaf people in the congregation, of which there are A LOT, which means that even though everything is in Kiswahili, I still can watch the sign and understand what's going on. Cool huh? I can't imagine having to translate from Kiswahili to coast-KSL and back again. Anywho, when the deaf guy from States got up to preach, the whole congregation turned to me to interpret, assuming I also know ASL. I got out of it by telling them I don't know ASL, only KSL, I've never worked with deaf people in America, and I would really be terrible at it (all of which is true). Fortunately the guy also could voice pretty well, so he did that into the microphone and it all worked out. So we adjourned at 2:00 to go upstairs and eat, (the room for the deaf was PACKED) and reconvened in church around 3:00. Why you ask? For more church of course! My kids finally got a chance to do some of the songs they had practiced, and we sat around for a few more hours until I decided we needed to head home or we'd never make it back in time for ugali. It was a long day but we made it home by 6:30 pm and since I called our cook from the matatu and told him we were going to be chelewa for chakula we all got our ugali and the day ended reasonably well. Whew! Here's evidence:

My girls loving meal time (don't blame them one bit)

Emmanuel giving his testimonial about when he moved to a deaf school. 

Nothing else cah-razy has been going on here, so I'll just finish up with some more pictures of boring-old life and short stories to go along with them. 

Alii - This boy cannot for the life of him stay awake in my class. He says it's not me, it's just math that makes him tired, but either way, he's always asleep. Most of the time I give him wet-willies or make him run around the room to keep him awake, but before I do I take pictures of him and then embarrass him by putting them on the big screen before movie night on Saturday. Wake up Alii!

This is Maureen. She's an interpreter for Peace Corps, and a pretty fabulous one at that. I don't see her often, only when we have big training events where deaf people (either PCVs or Kenyans) also come, but every time I see her I tell her how much she would love my kids. So we'd been planning for a while for her to come and visit and do a Life Skills lesson or something. Time ran short and traffic was bad coming from Mombasa so it didn't happen at the prearranged time, but after dinner last Tuesday we did manage to meet quickly and have Maureen tell the kids a bible story. They loved it and she loved them and it was a good evening all around :)

After Maureen's storytime, it was about 7:45 and definitely dark, so I walked her to the main road to get a piki to a matatu. The road from my school to the main road, though not long, is EXTREMELY bumpy and hilly and just plain horrible. Plus it was dark, and I was talking with my hands and not looking down and I ended up falling. Funny thing is, a few days earlier, one of my Form 3's, Jumaa, fell while he was playing football, and scraped up his knee pretty badly. The days before I fell I was just taking care of his knee. The days after I fell, we were sharing the antibiotic ointment and bandaids. The running joke now is that he did some witchcraft (mojo) on me so that I would fall too. Scar twins!

Alright, nothing else interesting to report (not to say any of this was the least bit interesting either). Props to you if you made it all the way here to the end :)

Happy March!

~ Shub :)