Two down, four to go.

Sittin' here eating some cold leftover stir fry and wondering how on earth I just made it through the longest and hardest 9 months of my life, and why on earth those long months went by so fast. Hmm.

My school is officially closed. We were informed a few days ago that Kibarani (the primary school where I live, and where the kids eat and spend all other time outside the classroom) doesn't have enough money to keep feeding my secondary kids for the rest of the week. Luckily, exams are finished, so closing early is not a big deal. I spent yesterday finishing my marking and compiling grades, and attempting to talk to a BUNCH of my kids parents.

Since my kids (all but 3) can't hear a darn thing, they have to have to have someone else talk with their parents. Round about the time school is closing the kids all start realizing they have no money to get home. Kenya has this wonderful thing called m-pesa, which is essentially banking through your phone; you can send money back and forth, buy airtime for your phone or for internet, and even do all that stuff to someone else's phone from yours, and it's totally free to use. It's pretty genius. I just got an m-pesa account this term, and I'm not sure why I didn't get one sooner. BUT now that I have it, my phone gets passed around school like it's its job. First the kids will come up to me and ask me to call their parents. The first question I ask is whether or not they need money. If the answer is yes, the next question I ask is whether or not their parents know English. Some of the parents I know have decent enough English because I've spoken to them before, but most I have no idea. My kids say "Yeah! They know English!" Fine. So I call. Annnnnnd I get nowhere, because all I hear on the other line is Kiswahili. If I greet them in Kisawhili (which I've totally got down after 9 months), they start rambling. The conversation usually goes nowhere, because they don't know English, and my Kiswahili is so limited (kidogo sana!), so we hang up and I realize I probably shouldn't have believed the DEAF kid about which languages their parents speak. How would they know? The next thing I do is get one of my half-ers. I have three boys who are fluent in Kiswahili and their mothertongue and all that stuff, and can hear fairly well out of at least one ear. Emmanuel is Form 2, and Alii and Francis are Form 3. Francis is my fellow interpreter when we have outside people come in for Guidance and Counseling sessions, Alii is my head boy, and Emmanuel is my at-site Kiswahili teacher. They're wonderful. So they begrudgingly use my phone to call other kids' parents and ask for money. The money is sent to my phone through m-pesa, I use it for internet, and I give my kids cash out of my pocket. It's a pretty hilarious process, but it works.

So Saturday I head to Nairobi with four of my girls, one of my teachers, and 10 other people (deaf girls, teachers, and other PCV's) from the coast. We'll spend Saturday night in Nairobes and then we have private shuttles from our hotel in NRB to the center outside Kisumu where we'll have camp for the week. Camp GLOW is going to be jam-packed with life lessons and meeting new people, and I'm pretty sure my girls have NO idea how much they are going to enjoy themselves. Only a fraction of my kids have even been off the coast before, so this will be an awesome experience for them.

I, on the other hand, am quite nervous. As a camp counselor (which is no big deal) I have to teach a couple lessons during camp (also no big deal). BUT I realize more and more that 85 - 90% of the signs I use in normal conversation now I learned here, in Kilifi, at school. There was so much I didn't know when I get here, because the signing I learned in training was not the signing that exists on the coast. Seven months into it, talking to my kids and teaching them is not an issue, but that's with MY kids. I'm only going to have four of my kids there; the rest will be Deaf from all over Kenya, and probably won't understand a thing I say. Sadly, though, these kids are taught from an early age (especially the deaf ones) to never speak up if they don't understand, to just sit quietly and take it. Rote memorization is the name of the game, and participatory interactive activities are far and few between.

(Side note: One of my girls in Form 2, who I'm coincidentally taking to camp, asked me the other day if I had ever seen a Deaf teacher walk into a hearing classroom and starting teaching in sign language to a bunch of hearing kids who don't understand sign language. That's absurd right? She phrased it differently and I wasn't quite sure where she was going with it at first, but she asked again and I figured it out. These kids want so bad to understand and are so hungry for information. There is so much they don't know, because it has never been properly explained to them. And in a few short years time they have to take the most important exam of their lives. But how are they supposed to do that when all their teachers do is talk at them?)

OK, back to the story. The point is even if the girls don't understand me, because they come from a different part of Kenya, they will probably still tell me they understand. It's taken most of my kids the better part of two terms to realize if they ask me questions and tell me they don't get it, that I won't get mad. No problem! So I try to explain it a different way. Sometimes it takes twice as long, and I always walk out of the classroom thinking I would need 15 years to teach these kids everything they need to know for that exam, but at least they're understanding something.

What elseee..... Oh! I just got a call from my Peace Corps peeps in Nairobi to ask if I want to be a part of planning the up-coming Pre-Service Training for the new Education group coming to Kenya in October. Hooray! I am thrilled and thoroughly honored that they asked. Right now, out of around 150-ish volunteers in Kenya, three of us are Secondary Deaf-Ed volunteers. The rest of the Education volunteers teach at either secondary hearing schools, or primary deaf schools. BUT we are supposed to have 2 new Secondary Deaf Ed-ers coming in with the next group (YES!). I've also heard, from Peace Corps and even from some of my kids, that there are a bunch of new Secondary Deaf Schools cropping up all over the country. How cool is that? So I head back to Nairobi on the 21st of August to meet up with my awesome Peace Corps staff, and a couple other PCVs to hash out the plans for the upcoming PST. I can't wait. This also means I will once again have access to really good Ethiopian and Thai food, I can buy contact solution, and I can go see Harry Potter :)

On a creepier note, I recently discovered something (or a lot of things) that reminded me once again that I live in Africa. I came home one evening from dinner, and thank GOODNESS I left my outside light on, or I would have walked right into a swarm of thousands and thousands of ants at the base of my front door. My house is essentially just a big cement block and in no way sealed from the outside, and there's only one door, so I felt a little stuck for a minute. They were all different sizes, brown and reddish, and very shiny. There were also these HUGE ones being carried by the smaller one that I later learned are called sausage flies, because their abdomens are giant and wriggling and gross. They were everywhere, and blocking everything just well enough that I had to get close to them to open the door. So I did, terrified. Maybe these are those ants that can eat people or something! So I finally got inside, shut the kittens in my bedroom, put on my rainboots, grabbed the broom, the bottle of insect killer, and got into attack mode. I sprayed and swept for about 10 minutes, because they just kept coming out of the walls. Thankfully it was after dark, and late enough that all my kids had gone to preps, so no one could see how ridiculous I looked. I bet it was pretty ridiculous though. So I finished my killing spree and quickly got on google to figure out what these guys were. I think I typed in "swarm of ants in Africa" or something and the second hit down was an exact picture of my new found friends. Turns out they are called safari ants, driver ants, or siafu in Kiswahili. Check it out here. Apparently, during the rainy season, they leave their hill and migrate to a place where they can find food. They form these giant marching columns, which are easily avoided, if you can move, and if the column doesn't pass through your house. AWESOME. If something does get in their path, they will do everything they can to defend themselves, which really just means they'll eat you. I read other stories online about how people in villages in the Congo actually have to evacuate their homes, or be eaten alive. Any animals inside the house will surely be eaten. So as you can imagine, this made me feel really comfortable. It's not over. The next night I had to go out again, and when I came home, they were back, but this time they had doubled in number. For a split second I thought 'I have GOT to take a picture of this, no one is going to believe me,' then the realization that they were swarming inside the house hit me, and I started panicking; maybe they had eaten the kittens? So I got inside, saw the kittens were still alive, and sprayed and swept all over again, this time for even longer. Two nights was enough for me. The next day I went to town and bought this vermin powder stuff they have and threw a whole bunch in the holes where they were coming from. Thankfully I haven't seen them since, and hopefully never will again. The rainy season is nice because everything cools down, but there certainly are more bugs than I expected.

So two terms down, and four to go. Peace Corps spent a lot of training telling us our first three months at site would be the hardest, and everything else after that is a piece of cake. Strangely, I seem to be doing things backwards. My first term teaching was amazing. This past second term though was a LOT tougher than I expected, but for the weirdest reasons. I definitely cried a lot more in Term 2, and definitely had more thoughts about going home in Term 2, but I promised these kids two years, and I have to deliver. No one said this would be easy right? It just seems so often that it's hard for all the wrong reasons. I know now it's not the material things from America that I miss, it's the aspects of peoples' personalities, and things like a sense of priority, work ethic, and accountability. I'm learning more and more about how to 'play the game' here and how essential it is to my success as a volunteer. Hopefully this term was and will be the hardest, and hopefully things will only get easier. Time will tell right?

Ok, I'm exhausted and need some sleep. Miss you all like never before. Did I tell you I'm coming home for Christmas?

:)

Cheers!

~ Shub :)

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.

Bow of the dhow I went on with Ellen and her parents a few weeks back.

Boys enjoying themselves at a little birthday party they had for one of the girls.

Catherine is saying "I love you Sarah."

Here's me with Reily, another volunteer from my group, when we met up in Nairobi. We were wearing the same thing and def lookin' pretty gangster.

Here's some of my girls doing a hilarious drama at the big

tree-planting ceremony we had a couple weeks ago.

Aaaaaand this is what happens when I try to plan lessons and stuff.

Okie doke. Give my best to America. Kenya says "whatup." Keep reading! Stay awesome. And Happy Belated 4th of July!

~ Love Shub :)

Stories.

It’s Week 7 of Term 2 and as far as Kenya goes, the phrase “same s*#@ different day" hasn’t ever meant more. I don’t know how my kids can continually be so happy all the time. It’s crazy.

Anyways, I just recently finished my all-time favorite literary trilogy, for like, the millionth time: Philip Pullam’s “His Dark Materials.” I know my mom would say that I need to try reading something new and get out of my rut, but I kinda like my rut; it’s comfortable. Every time I finish reading these books I get a new impetus to not be lazy and get up and do all the good I can in one day, and to stay cheerful and keep my mind open to new things and enjoy all the little stuff as much as possible. I love the way Pullman can make me feel like that. He also writes about how important stories are, not how well things are written, or how advanced the language is, but what happens in the end and how it happens. He says “After nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most on the world.” He also says that "There are some themes, some subjects, that are too large for adult fiction; they can only be dealt with adequately in a children's book." I like these quotes, and I think they say a lot. And for no particular reason other than to tell them, here’s some stories:

So my school, as you might have read before, is brand new. It just started in 2009 and the process of finishing the compound and all the buildings is still going on, and probably will for a number of years more. Or decades. Anyways, we have this big tree-planting day thing this coming Friday, and the compound is supposed to be super clean and pretty for “visitors” who are coming on Friday. Who these visitors are or where they are coming from, no one has told me, and thus no one has told my kids, so I guess we’ll just wait and find out. But as far as keeping the compound looking spotless, there is not really anyone paid to do that, and lord knows the teachers don’t partake in manual labor, so who is left to do all the work? My kids. It was for that reason that Life Skills got canceled two weeks ago, and that I now have slowly-healing blisters all over my hands.

Last Thursday after school, around 4pm, the kids got the mandate again that they needed to slash. Now that the rains have come, the grasses are growing like crazy, and lawn mowers don’t exist here, so they slash. There are these things called pangas: flat metal rods with a lip at one end that is sometimes sharp and most of the time dull, and a handle on the other. These serve as lawn mowers. The kids each get a section of grass to slash, and they work till their blisters are full of blood and about to burst. Fortunately (I guess), they’ve been doing work like this their whole lives, so their palms are already calloused and rough, and slashing for them is just part of being human. But when they are finished they like to show me their palms and have me poke at their blisters. They don’t want anything more than a big “pole sana (I’m sorry)” and once they get my sympathy, they get on with their day. No big deal. And what’s funny is that since (THANKFULLY) they don’t cane at my school (at least not that I’ve seen), they only punishment anyone ever receives is to slash. But they all have to do it anyways to maintain the school grounds. So either the actual slashing as a punishment ends up not meaning anything, or the regular slashing everyone has to do anyways ends up feeling like a punishment. So last Thursday at 4 all the kids had to go get their pangas and start workin’ on the grounds outside the dorms and school. I was sick and tired of helplessly watching my kids suffer right in front of me, so I grabbed a panga from one of the girls and started slashing her part of the grass. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but with a little help and lessons from my kids, I was slashing like a true Kenyan. And man is it hard work. And man did those blisters show up fast.

I kept at it till Teresia’s rectangle was finished, and headed home to bandage my hands. If this was anywhere else, I would probably be complaining a ton, but this is what the kids go through every day. I wanted to experience it for myself. After slashing, they also taught me how to care for my blisters; “don’t pick at them,” they said, “and be careful with your chalk.” The roles then reversed and I showed them my hands, and got a big “pole sana” in return. But it’s true, that’s all I needed, just a little sympathy. Such is life. There’s a sign the kids use for when they feel like they’re being oppressed but they don’t complain and shut their mouths and sit on their hands and take it. If you ask them to spell it they’ll spell “mercy.” There’s another sign that they’ll spell as “normal” but actually means something along the lines of “no big deal, we’re used to it.” Those signs are used A LOT here.

So yesterday when I headed back up to school after computer class at the primary compound, I realized everyone was slashing again. Some of the boys had been told that they had to slash around my house. I remember thinking to myself a while ago that if anyone ever told my kids they had to slash my grass, I wouldn’t let it happen. So when I realized this was the case, I ran to steal a panga and though I tried to tell John and Jumaa that I could do it myself, they refused, and with the help of their huge Kenyan muscles, the work got done a lot faster.

Switching gears. I’ve been teaching (or at least trying to teach) Life Skills every Saturday. The Kenya Ministry of Education has this Life Skills syllabus that is racked with things like promoting self-fulfillment, self-awareness, self-esteem, and friendship formation and maintenance. Nowhere in the syllabus is there anything about HIV/AIDS education, healthy nutrition, or even how to get a job and rise above the poverty line. And those are the things these kids know the least about. So a number of years ago the Peace Corps developed a Life Skills Manual for volunteers that’s constantly being edited and improved. It’s awesome. The second lesson dives right in to how HIV is transmitted and how you can protect yourself. Ah ha! Something applicable! Anyhoodle, all of Term 1 was about HIV, and I still haven’t gotten through the whole topic, so I started it up again this term. Last week though I had a random question come into my head about my kids. I was curious about how their deafness came about; if they were born deaf, and if not then how old they were when they went deaf and what the problem was, and so on. So I asked them. Turns out the answers were all over the place. Some were born deaf, but don’t know why; some went deaf just a few years ago, some when they were five, and ten, and sixteen, and many that have absolutely no clue. They say, “well I remember crying a whole lot, and then I changed deaf.” One of my Form 3’s, Osman, told me his story a while ago. He was 8 or 9, had a really high fever one night, and woke up the next morning deaf. So I decided to change Life Skills on Saturday from HIV/AIDS to deafness and its causes. I feel like these kids have a right to know about themselves, and since their deafness is what defines them here, it seemed appropriate.

So since I forgot a lot of what I learned in my Hearing and Speech Sciences and neurobio classes in college, I had to give myself a little review. An afternoon on the internet (thank God for the world wide web) and I had my whole 2 hour lesson planned. I like Life Skills because it’s normally just me and the kids. And it’s all the kids too, all 72 of them. And they don’t have to wear uniforms, and they can sit on the floor, and ask questions, and we play games and have fun. And this topic was actually interesting for everyone. So I drew the whole diagram of inside the ear on the board, explained how hearing works, and where the problems of hearing loss can occur. Most of them had never even seen this diagram before. Then I moved on to the different types of deafness: conductive and sensorineural. Conductive hearing loss, since it’s in the outer or middle ear, can often be cured with surgery of some sort. Sensorineural hearing loss, however, is in the inner ear and thus is most of the time permanent. My guess is most of my kids have the latter. The last part was me explaining the different diseases and illnesses that can cause deafness, especially if not treated. These include measles, mumps, rubella, meningitis, scarlet fever, malaria, and more. I went through the physical symptoms of each one, and some of my kids actually recognized some of them as the one they had, if they were old enough to remember. I think the majority of them had either meningitis or malaria, but some recognized mumps and rubella as well. Another question I asked (which I sort of knew the answer to already) was if any of them have deaf parents or family members. Answer? Not-a-one. “Me deaf alone.” Poor kids. And I think I’ve said this before too, but their families don’t know sign language either. What sucks is that, even though I would never put down the deaf or Deaf culture and I don’t consider it a disability in any way, so many of these kids’ cases could have been prevented, with either the right medication or just a few shots. It is hard to be deaf here, and I feel for them every day.

I started writing this post on Tuesday. It’s now Thursday, and after a really rough day yesterday that ended in me crying in a bathroom in a fancy white-person resort outside town, I’m slowly figuring out the things I need to do, and how I need to change other things, in order to help my kids. They are the most important thing to me here, and though I enjoy every second I’m with them, I won’t be here forever. They were here before I came, and they’ll still be here when I leave, as will the other teachers and the way things are run. “Slowly by slowly,” as the Kenyans say.

There’s another quote I found somewhere on someone’s facebook wall: “If you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it. Nobody said this would be easy, they just promised it would be worth it.” I think this sums up Peace Corps quite accurately. I took this chance and now I’m here and these kids are changing me in so many ways. It’s frustrating and stressful and exhausting and sometimes takes every fiber of my being not to stab someone in the eye, but I’m pretty sure that in 20 years, I won’t have forgotten these kids, and I definitely won’t have forgotten the way they make me feel.

Well, I hope you enjoy these stories. I'll try to keep 'em coming. It’s hard to remember that it’s summertime back home, since things are so crazy busy on this side of the world, but I hope everyone is having an awesome summer. I just passed my 8 month anniversary of being in Kenya. Which means it’s no longer “When I go home in two years…”, it’s now “When I go home in a year and a half…” Yikes! Time is flying.

Sawa, tutaonana baada ye, na ninakukosa sana! AKA, cheers!

~ Shub :)

PS As always, here's some pics of my kids. Have I mentioned they're great?

Here's Paul, and Chengo hiding behind him.

Here's Monica and Mercy, enjoying my stylish

new rainboots, courtesy of Momma Hubbard :)

And after a day full of slashing, they turned

one of the hills into a long-jump competition.

Ok byeee!