Almost a real school!

Pole (sorry) that I haven't written in a while. Things have been only mildly exciting in Kenya. School is still school (take that to mean whatever you want), Kilifi is still wonderful (but getting hotter by the day), and my kids still mean the world to me. Sometimes they ask me so many non-stop questions that seem so silly and minute that I get frustrated and forget how much I love them, and why. Last week my Form 3 girls told me not to wear light-colored nail polish because gosh-darnit Sarah you're already white. Today I spent most of math lesson reminding Emmanuel that this is a deaf school and he can teach me Kiswahili later. And every morning, no matter how many times I tell them I don't like it, they offer me uji anyways. Those are just a few of the many reasons why I love them.

Wait, what's uji, you say? Why, it's porridge! I've told you about ugali right? - maize flour boiled with water until it forms a sticky cake-y consistency and tastes like nothing. But ugali is palatable, especially with beans or sukuma (bloiled kale), and I actually crave it now. Uji on the other hand, for some reason, is just horrible. Uji is ugali with -- wait for it -- more water. It's liguid ugali. Maybe it's because it doesn't come with beans or sukuma or green grahams, but it smells like nothing and tastes like even less. Kenyans love it though, and my kids scarf it down like it's a bowl full of chocolate ice cream. It is the only thing they get in the morning, and besides half a cup of tea at 10am, it's the only thing from 6am to 12:30pm. So I guess a little uji is better than nothing. Maybe.

What's cool though is that we actually have our own kitchen now, up at the secondary school, and my kids no longer have to eat with the primary kids, and get served primary-sized portions. Due to some miscommunication at the beginning of the term between the head of my school and the head of the primary school, we had to construct a kitchen really fast and get ourselves cooking our own food super quick. The basics went up in a day or two, and the rest followed shortly after. Here's what it looked like when it first went up:

We all were pretty excited when we were first able to cook for ourselves. So I took a bunch of pictures of that too. Including one that my kids think is infinitely hilarious: the mzungu stirring (or rather attempting to stir) ugali:

(can you see the giggle on Francis' face?)

Anyhoodles, this is what it looks like now (minus some doors that they just put on yesterday):

Another thing I always think about Kenya and how we do things here, is the difference in things like building houses and food preparation. In America, when you want beef you go to the grocery store and pick from multitudes of different cuts, weights, fat content, prices, everything. If you want beef in Kenya you either kill the cow yourself or go to the butcher who just killed the cow 5 minutes ago. I think cows are harder to kill than goats, so we eat a lot of goat here. Also, our ugali is straight from the land outside. The maize was grown right on our school grounds, the kernels were picked off the cob by every single one of my kids and I, and it was ground into flour at another teacher's house. The beans come from a neighboring farmer and the sukuma comes right from our own school shamba (garden). The kitchen is made of mud and sticks and food is always cooked over a wood fire. We sit in the sun and eat with our hands and for me, everything tastes good because it's organic and unprocessed and real and seems exactly the way it should be. No plastic packaging, no expiration dates, and definitely no factory processing. It's pretty great. 

So we're up and running with food, and save for a girls dormitory, we're almost a real school! Huzzah! The boys have also been doing a good job clearing a nearby field for football. After an afternoon of slashing and moving rocks they all celebrated with a giant football game before dinner. The field is a little rough and not level but I'm sure continuous afternoons of playing on it will totally do the trick. Also, a while back, the boys decided the wanted a new football, since the ones they had were old and weak and fell apart pretty easily. So they pooled their money and had me go to Tusky's to get one. They gave me 800 shillings and I found a ball for 750/-. I was pretty proud of myself for finding it and the boys were super excited when I brought it home. Unfortunately though, it broke within the next week and we were back at square one. So for some reason (maybe because I can't resist their endless begging, big brown puppy dog eyes, and beautiful smiles) I told them I would buy them a new ball, and a good one this time. I figured my judgement on the right one last time didn't work so I would go by price instead; the more money it is, the better the quality, right? Well this time I spent 2,000/- and thankfully the ball hasn't died yet. Fingers crossed it stays solid or I'm out another few thousand shillingis. 

Last week, and for about 8 consecutive days into last week, it rained non-stop. This is obviously good for crops and water tanks and stuff like that, but not good for walking or playing football, or cooking in a roofless mud hut. The rain ended a few days ago and hasn't been back since, and has been rapidly replaced with scorching heat, which is what I'm a little more familiar with here. BUT the rains left a giant lake in a valley next to school which, to my surprise and no one else's, has proven really resourceful for Kilifi residents. All manner of livestock come to drink from it. Every form of transportation vehicle has been driven in it to be washed. People come to wash clothes, to drink, and bathe, and you wouldn't believe the number of little naked Kenyan children that spend all day in it just playing. My kids and I can sit on the front porch of the boys dorm and have a really great view of our new Lake Victoria/local watering hole. 

Since the rains have stopped, I can see the water level getting low, and before too long it'll just be a big pile of dust again, but for now it's pretty cool. 

Here's another pic I took of the boys dorm (uber clean for the weekend):

I remember when I first ever walked into the dorm, I looked around and thought, man this is like workcamp, but for life. Everything seemed so similar to those weeks in the summer I would spend at church workcamp rebuilding houses and sleeping on gym floors. I couldn't believe the condition of things here at the beginning of the year - those "mattresses" as they call them are just pieces of 2-inch high foam, and underneath is just metal rods. I mean, talk about uncomfortable. But a year later I realize now I only thought that because I've seen something different. It might not always be better in everyone's eyes, but it's definitely different. So it's all about perspective. My boys haven't really known much else in life, so for them, it's totally and completely normal; and in fact kinda nice because it's brand new. The mattresses are clean and they're used to them. And now for me, nothing here really shocks me anymore. All that crazy cultural crap we had to adjust to is just life. Look at me! I'm adjusted! Well, mostly. I'm still learning how to play the get-things-done-but-be-really-indirect-about-it game. That could take a lifetime to master. 

The new group of Education volunteers (trainees) got here on the 5th of this month and are currently in training right now. Hooray! Like my group, some of them are in Machakos (the deaf ed-ers) and some are in Loitokitok (the hearing ed-ers). There are two new Secondary Deaf Ed trainees too, one of which will be coming to Kilifi next week to shadow me at school. Eek! It will be so fun, and the kids can't wait. ALSO, for this new group's Model School, Amanda and I will be going to Machakos to run things. That will be the last week in November, shortly after which I'll head to Nairobi for my mid-service medical exam, and then (hopefully healthy) I'll jump on a plane back to the States :)

So other than that, nothing else is new! I hope America is good :) My itinerary for the trip home is still taped to my living room wall and constantly reminding me how awesome Christmas is gonna be. 

And what better to end with than pics of the monsters. Don't be fooled by the innocent faces and cute sleeping positions.

Aight peeps, cheers and I miss you!

~ Shub out :)

PS I got yelled at by a Kenyan today for feeding my cats because there are starving people in Africa. Wait. What? 

I just can't win.

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 :)