Dear My Deaf Kids,

You guys are the best thing to ever happen to me. Thank you for always being patient with me, with each other, and with life in general. You have no idea how much I admire your constant strength and unfailing happiness. I hope one day you can realize how much you all have come to mean to me in so short a time. Two years is truly not enough. I will never forget the way you guys sign, the way you all say my name differently, and the way I have so little privacy and personal space around you. I love it and I wouldn't have it any other way. I adore your perpetual hunger for knowledge and learning new things, and I admire your heart and humility in learning them. I respect how brutally honest and utterly unreserved you can be; you have stripped me of any vanity and conceit and unknowingly forced incredible amounts of personal acceptance on me. I can never thank you enough for that. Please try to remember some of the things I taught you, and know that I strive every day to teach you guys as much as you teach me. Thank you for your openness, your perseverance, your stories, and your overall ability to spread unbelievable happiness. But above all, know that I hope you always stay your open, kind, cheerful, curious, patient selves.

                                   Love always,

Sarah, Sthedla, Thera, Aras, Chana, Madam, and always and forever *insert sign name here*

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 :)

Camp GLOW and August

So I actually got to sleep past 6:00 this morning, because the neighbor kids weren't screaming as loud as usual. *Sigh*. It's now mid-August, and as much as I need break months to catch up on sleep and get things done around my house, I miss my kids like never before. The school compound gets full of hearing children come home from boarding school, and is completely void of Deaf kids. It just feels like something (a lot of things) is missing. But I know that in a few short weeks they will all start trickling back into school, and things will be back to the way they should. I can't even fathom how much it's going to hurt to leave these kids for good. They are my life here, and without them, I don't feel right.

Maybe it was a mistake from the beginning to get so attached, knowing that I can't be with them forever. That's one of the caveats of teaching right? Students continuously come and go. Except in this case seeing them after school, sometime in the future, seems almost impossible. Hmph.

Anywho, I just got back from Kisumu last week, with 4 of my girls, one teacher, 4 girls from Lamu and another teacher, a couple girls from Malindi and south coast, and a BUNCH from Western and Nyanza province. Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) in Kisumu had about 86 girls total, half of which were hearing, and half of which were deaf. It's a two day trip to Kisumu for us coasties, since it's literally the opposite end of the country, but we survived, and yours truly ended up being in charge of A LOT of money to get A LOT of people fed and transported. It was uber stressful but also tons of fun, mainly because I had 4 of my own awesome girls with me. I took Mercy and Monica, both Form 3, and Teresia and Amina, both Form 2. All four are great students, but most importantly, girls that a lot of other kids look up to. Plus they are hilarious, and just fun to be around, so that was a bonus for me :) What was also cool was that since the majority of the other deaf girls at camp were from primary schools, my girls were forced into being role models right from the get-go. But they had no problem with that. Even on the first night of travel, one of the other volunteers commented to me about how responsible and grown-up my girls are. Even though that has nothing to do with me, I blushed anyways and went to tell them. The girls were just as flattered as I was, and I told them it was a great start and to keep it up for the rest of the week.

Mercy and Teresia were SUPER excited for PB&J and

potato chips. What a treat!

So Monday was all about communication and confidence and goals for the future. We started with the deaf girls teaching the hearing girls a little sign language, and giving them sign names. I then did the introduction for just the deaf girls, and later taught a lesson on saying 'no' and being assertive (something I keep going back and forth with in Kenya; should I abide by the silly rules of this perpetually indirect culture, or should I just be rude and confront people and say no?). Tuesday was women's health: I taught the lesson on pregnancy and already exhausted from all the hassle of traveling I took the afternoon off for a much-needed nap. Wednesday was HIV/AIDS day and I and another volunteer did the lesson on prevention. ::Enter dozens of penis and vagina models, and more condoms than anyone could ever ask for:: I showed the girls the proper way to put on a male condom then everyone got a chance to do it themselves. Shyness and embarrassment had to be thrown out the window for this part, but since they're all girls anyways, it wasn't too tough. I also told a really fun story to the girls about condoms, and deaf people, and communication. It doesn't translate well into English, and is much better in sign. I posted it here, with a brief intro. See if you can get any of it :) Thursday morning was about decision-making, and Thursday afternoon we did field trips to some NGOs in Kisumu town, and to the LVCT, the Deaf VCT in Kenya. Friday I taught a lesson on rape, just before the girls learned all about self-defense. Then Friday afternoon we went to an Impala park; saw a couple zebras, had a nice little boat ride on Lake Victoria, and came home for the closing ceremony and the disco. At the ceremony, each girl got called up individually and got a certificate and photo of the whole camp. The disco followed shortly after and lasted an hour or so before all of us counselors decided it was much more worthwhile to sleep. All in all, it was a good week. Exhausting, but good.

Mercy and Monica teach their new hearing friends how to fingerspell

My girls and I at the bonfire :)

Me teaching pregnancy

or something Yay condoms!

At the end of the week at the Deaf VCT. Love them!

Remember I said I did the introduction for my group? Well what I thought would be cool, since we had deaf girls from all over the country, would be to compare signs. So I held up a bunch of cards with words on them, and had everyone show their specific sign for it. Some words had virtually all the same sign, with a little variation in hand-shape or movement, but some had 4 or 5 different signs that were not even close to similar. Examples were "coast," "mzungu," "mango," "rice," "sex," "bus," and "pregnant." What's interesting though, is that even though the girls have different signs for the same word or concept, 98% of the time they still fully understand each other. It's actually pretty cool. Once you have a general idea of what a word might look like in sign, seeing it in lots of different ways is pretty intuitive. And on that note, I remember being super nervous that my girls from Kilifi would be the only ones at camp that understood me. Thankfully though, because of that whole intuitive sign stuff, that wasn't the case. I adjusted some signs here and there, or repeated myself with different signs, but all in all, it seemed to work ok.

Another funny thing was that a lot of people at camp thought I was deaf when they first met me. Some of the other deaf ed. volunteers brought counterparts with them, teachers at their schools who are also deaf. And apparently, for some reason, upon first meeting me, they assumed I was deaf as well, because of the way I sign. I took it as a compliment every time, and reiterated that my students are the best teachers in the world. I think I'm actually learning more from them than they are from me. Another flattery moment came when volunteers who teach in primary deaf schools told me they wished they taught my kids in secondary. My girls LOVED this and I told them once again how happy I am to be where I am, and how lucky I am to have them as my kids. Peace Corps is tough, but there's a lot I have to be truly thankful for.

SO. This week I have been sleeping and washing clothes and baking a lot. Those three activities usually take up most of a day, but I've also been catching up with my friends in Kilifi. Before I forget, I want to give a big shout-out to Ellen Jennings, who is moving back to the UK next week to go to grad school, and who has been an awesome friend and integral part of my sanity here. Thanks for all the Thai pork curries and the showers and letting me use your oven to my heart's content:) I miss you already!

Right now there are a bunch of volunteers in Mombasa (Bamburi, actually) at a week-long Peace Corps workshop, and when they finish there, a few of them are make the oh-so-long 45 minute trek north to Kilifi. Most of them have never seen the coast before, and since I practically live in a vacation spot, I plan on taking them on all the vacation-type adventures I can. I want to go to snorkeling, spend a day at a resort, and just relax on the beach. Yay Beach Corps! Then next weekend on the 21st I make the day-long trip to Nairobi once again for PST planning. We'll have 3 full days of meetings, I am DEFINITELY going to fit in time to see Harry Potter, and I'm coast-bound again on the 25th. Then the week after that I have to go to Bamburi for the same workshop half my group is at now. That will end the first week of September, and then my kids start coming back to school :) As long as I stay busy break months aren't that bad.

The pakas are doing good. We've been working on letting them outside, which is much harder for me, actually. It's like letting your kids go off to college: you just have to trust they'll come back at some point. I have recently seen one of the neighbor kids trying to beat them with sticks though, so I've kinda regressed and become even more hesitant than I was before. Oh well. Karibu Kenya. Currently, Marie is sleeping above me, on top of my mosquito net (she likes the hammock feel) and Toulouse is sprawled out on my Spongebob blanket, which he also enjoys peeing on now and then. Marie has no boundaries whatsoever and will go anywhere and everywhere she pleases, and Toulouse's new favorite thing is to eat everything in sight, whether it's edible or not, throw it up a few hours later, then eat what he just threw up. Cute.

So everyone is good, I'm still alive and kickin', and I hope you guys are all great back home. Summer is almost over right? Hooray for school again! Ok, love you all bunches and bunches. Check out facebook for the full reel of Camp GLOW pics, and have an awesome rest of August :)

Miss you!

~ Shub :)