Ack!
I'm currently in Nairobi sitting in the lovely resource room at the Peace Corps office, typing this post with the available free internet :) Hooray! It's been a crazy month off, and only getting crazier by the minute.
We closed school early which means it's been even longer since I've seen my kids. Thankfully, though, the month is almost over, which means school opening, and my last term in Kenya, is right around the corner. I spent the first part of the month in Kilifi, doing a lot of sitting around on beaches and boats, lots of cooking and bbq-ing, and a lot of relaxing. Usually the months off are the times when volunteers want to get out of their site (the village!) and go travel and do stuff. I, on the other hand, live in a vacation spot, so I don't need to go anywhere to do all those fun vacation-y things. Everyone just comes to me :) I do get sort of bogged down in the laid-back lifetsyle of the Kenyan coast, so I'm glad to be up and out and feeling useful again.
I've been in Nairobi since Monday, and will be here until the weekend. Myself and the three other volunteers who are secondary deaf-ed have come here to the main PC office to work on our KSL technical signs project. Kenyan Sign Language is a very new language, and being so young, there are not signs for a lot of words that come up in the subjects we teach, namely Physics, Math, Bio, and Chem. So we (the four of us) and some of the Peace Corps language trainers spent some time this past term working with our students to develop signs for words like "square root" and "factorize" and "electron" and "mitochondria." We've come to Nairobi this week to compile the videos and pictures we've taken of our kids doing the signs so that we can eventually make more of a standardized lanugage for the math and science subjects. It's been a slow and tedious process, but it at least seems like we're getting things done, so we're just going to focus on that.
After doing some more serious shopping and other errands around Nairobi, most importantly buying cat crates and seeing the vet here, I head out Sunday to meet up with some other volunteers in my group in Naivasha. We are going to go to Hell's Gate (a game park) and bike/hike around on Monday and hopefully see some really cool animals. I still to this day have not been on safari in Kenya, which is a little embarrassing. How can I return from two years in the Peace Corps in Kenya and not have been on safari here? I have been on a wonderful safari in South Africa, but not in my own country yet. I plan to remedy that this weekend. Since the Hell's Gate game park is super close to where we will be staying for our Close Of Service conference, we will just head straight from safari to our hotel in Naivasha, and meet up with the rest of our group there.
Crazy to think that the last time we were all together as a group was IST, last April of 2011. Eek! I can't wait to see everyone again. Even though I've made so many wonderful friends in Kilifi over the past two years, my Peace Corps peeps were my initial coming-to-Kenya crew and they'll always have a place in my heart :) I love my PC group so much and I can't wait until we're all together one last time, before we all head our separate ways after Kenya.
After COS conference we head back to Nairobi in groups for our final doctor and dentist appointments while we're here. Then next weekend I'm supposed to head back to the coast. Though right now there are lots of crazy things going on in Mombasa so I don't know if I'll have to take a bus back, or if they will fly me. Fingers crossed! Either way I should be back in school next week sometime, though it's still up in the air whether school will officially open or not anways. We've had issues at school last term, that may or may not carry over to this term, AND all the teachers in Kenya are sayng they are going to go on strike at the beginning of this term too. Ack! So much craziness.
I'll leave you with some pics of the Kilifi part of my August holiday, and will post more from Hell's Gate after we finish all our stuff here and I get back to Kilifi.
Karaoke night at Members!
Private beach down on the plantation
Getting ready to head to Watamu for the night!
Kinyonga Adventure Camp at Kivukoni School :)
Sundowners on Ross's boat.. typical Kilifi evening.
Mark the water sports instructor doing what he does best.
G'night Kilifi sun! See you kesho.
Path down to George's beach on Sunday morning
Katembo (dorm father at school) and his family at their home.
Sometimes it's nice to get away from town every once in a while..
Festus, Oliver, and Jessica- cutest kids ever.
And then back home to MY family. They clearly miss me when I'm gone.
Ok e'erbody. As always, it's now a few days after I began writing this post. So now we gotta head out to the Peace Corps office one last time today and finish up the work for the week.
Much love and hugs to everyone.
~ Shub out :)
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