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 :)

Banana cake, popcorn, ugali...

There's a lot that goes on here that I can't really write about because I don't know who reads this blog and being on the internet, it's public domain. So normally I just stick to the happy parts. When I was home for Christmas I delved a lot more into the nitty gritty inner workings of how things are here, but now that I'm back I have to be careful what I say.

So, in keeping with tradition, I'll stay focused on the good stuff. School is going alright, except that the new Form 1's are starting to arrive and they don't have a classroom since the teachers are currently using the Form 4 classroom as an office (maybe that's not so good). Nobody has seemed to do any real planning about what's going to happen when the Form 1's come, so I guess I'll just wait and see, which I do a lot here. I'm teaching a LOT of lessons per week (which isn't new) and still loving every second of it. Every minute with my kids is precious. Although by the end of the day I'm so flippin' exhausted I crash, normally before 8pm, if I don't have clothes to wash.

So basically it's the same old same old. Teaching and teaching and eating ugali. Today after computers I sat outside school on a bench with my book and watched the sun go down while the boys played football and the smell of the looming ugali wafted through the air. Such a normal, every-day, no-big-deal type thing, but somehow so totally perfect.

Yesterday some of the boys asked me to teach them how to make banana bread, or "banana cake" as they call it. I told them if they got me the ingredients I'd be more than happy to show them how to put them together. They got sugar, flour, butter (not enough), and some eggs. I realized we were missing a lot of things so I ran back to my house to get the other essentials. We have this FABULOUS cookbook from Peace Corps, (the one Peace Corps manual that actually gets used - don't tell) and the page with the banana bread on it is entirely covered in food stains and cat prints and everything else you can think of. I make banana cake A LOT. My neighbor, and another teacher at the secondary school with me has a banana tree in his yard, and sells bananas two for 10 shillings. What a deal! So I came back to school with everything else we needed for banana cake, and started whipping it up (since clearly I have the recipe memorized by this point).

          2/3 cup sugar
          2/3 cup butter
          1 cup flour
          1 egg
          pinch each of salt, baking powder, and baking soda
          little bit of vanilla
          enough cinnamon and nutmeg till it tastes good
          as many bananas as you can handle!

By the time the mix was ready I had about 20 kids all huddled around smelling the different ingredients and asking me what everything was. NOT UGALI was my continuous answer. Now since having an oven in a mud hut kitchen -where everything is cooked over a wood-burning fire and rocks always find their way into my beans- is unlikely, we have to make do with other things. The trick to baking without an oven is just making sure the heat is not coming directly from the bottom. So you take one large sufuria (silver pots we cook stuff in here) and put a whole bunch of rocks or dirt on the bottom as a spacer from the actual thing that's being baked. Then the banana cake goes into a smaller sufuria, which goes on top of the rocks, and ideally there would be a lid for each. We only had one lid last night, which made it bake slower. I had to leave before it was done, because it was getting dark, but I got a text later on from one of the cooks that it was delicious. And everyone who had some last night told me again today how good it was. Yay banana cake! One of my kids wants to be a chef, so he regularly asks me how I cook things and what I ate on the weekend, and how it was made. Keep it up, I say!

Here's the banana cake evidence:

Last weekend I spent at least two lunches in a row at the Boatyard, that swanky place I went to for New Year's. I think I'm becoming a regular, Lord help me. The food is a little pricey, because the clientele is the rich white Kenyans and ex-pats that live in Kilifi, but the cheeseburgers are homemade and TO DIE FOR. It's 700 shillings well-spent I think. Anywho, Sunday after lunch I reluctantly followed a friend from the UK onto another friend's boat with the prospect of going water skiing. Apparently I can ski on snow like a champ, but on water I'm crap. Everyone kept telling me it's ok because it was my first time but I still think I was miserable at it. I got a ton of salt water up my nose and probably in my brain too, and my arms hurt like hell two days later. Oh well, I tried, and I'll try it again later, hopefully with better luck, and with less looking-like-an-idiot.

So in the spirit of the good stuff and happy parts, and since life is pretty much the same as always, here's some more pics to keep you busy :)

School meeting one Saturday morning

This is the girls' new sign name for me. 

Long story short they're making fun of me. 

Osman looking like a pretty little girl with a new bag

I'll never get tired of this view: Beach 3km straight ahead, 

Mombasa an hour to the right, and Malindi an hour to the left

Boys during afternoon football

Ugali line at dinner time.

Monica and I, love this girl. 

So life is life, and not much new. The cats are still redonkulous by the way. Marie is totally healed up from her uber-invasive surgery and Toulosue has taken to shredding my couch cushions. Thanks a bunch cat. They spend the mornings outside chasing chickens and hiding from Kenyans, before they come in for lunch and go back out to do it all over again. Between the food for the two of them and the spaying and neutering I've spent way more money on them than I ever imagined, so who knows what'll happen at the end of this year. If I can't even leave my cats behind how will I ever leave my kids?

Oh and projector update: We have been successfully having movie night every Saturday and it's quickly become me and the kids' favorite night of the week. The weekend before last was "Iron Man" (a sure-fire winner) and this past weekend was "The Incredible Hulk." I plan on something Pixar related this weekend so  we stagger the genres  and don't exhaust all the bang-bang-shoot-'em-ups in one month. They'll probably complain there's not enough fighting but I can always say Pixar or nothing at all, since I'm the movie/projector guru anyways. Last week some friends decided to "sponsor" my movie night and handed me a 1,000 shillings to buy popcorn for everybody on Saturday. I made a deal with the popcorn lady outside Tusky's and Saturday afternoon had three giant bags of popcorn to take home. The kids loved it. AND we started off the evening with a video chat with Charlotte, the volunteer at my site before me. Ten minutes of video consisted of each kid wanting to ask Charlotte if she remembered them. Obviously she remembered all of them, because, like I've said before, how could you ever forget them? Look how happy everyone is with their popcorn!

And I'll leave you with my favorite view in all of Kilifi - the bridge from a boat on the creek :)

Cheers and I miss you all!

~ Shub :)

Signing without seeing, driving without a car, and birthdays without a date.

My last post seemed rather sub-par. I think I was still just trying to remember how life here works. I now feel pretty much back to normal life here and, as always, it feels just right. Aside from the minor hardships and certain frustrating people that I have to deal with here, and could totally live without, everything else about this place is great.

I said in the last post more time at school would bring more stories:

Story #1: I brought this fabulous projector back from the States with me. We've used it a couple of times so far and hopefully it will end up being well worth the donations I spent on it. It's hard to use it during the day because of the sun, since there is no way to shut out the light at school. The windows are just big open holes with bars in them. So I've been petitioning for the opportunity to play things at night, after dinner. After I finally got permission for movie night, because we now have a watchman who can walk myself and the girls back to primary since it's after dark when we finish, our first real movie night went wonderfully. I spent a lot of time talking to Mom about what would be best to show the kids. I always call them my kids, but they're not kids. They're my age or almost out of their teens. Tom & Jerry won't cut it for them anymore. But I wanted something that would also get them thinking, not just a bang bang shoot 'em up with no real substance. So Mom suggested I show "The Miracle Worker," the 1962 version of the Helen Keller story with Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft. It was awesome. I prefaced it by asking them how they would all communicate if they couldn't see. They all just said well, it's not possible. At first they were a little perplexed by the black-white-ness of it all, but in the end, really enjoyed it. I downloaded subtitles for them, even though most of the time it doesn't help, but the movie is more just about the physical interaction of Helen and Annie than the actual dialogue anyways. (Plus there are studies that say watching movies with subtitles really improves English skills). Afterwards they asked questions and we played games where one person closes their eyes and another fingerspells into their hand. It's amazing what you can get across without seeing or hearing anything.

Story #2: Anywho, teaching is finally back in full swing which means every day seems like hour after hour of math. We were talking about travel timetables in Form 3 today, arrival times, departure times, and a question came up asking about average speed. I always try to reference things they know when I'm explaining words they've never seen before. So in explaining the concept of speed, I started with the dashboard of a car (everyone's been in a matatu). The gas gauge, tachometer, and speedometer somehow led me to the pedals and the gears. They were dying for me to explain driving further so I made sure they all got the average speed thing down and then we went back to how to work a car. Automatic was super easy to explain but then moving on to manual it got a little tougher. Getting back behind the wheel at Christmas was like remembering how to ride a bike, or remembering that chocolate tastes good. Easy. But trying to explain it without an actual car is a different story. I actually had to sit down and close my eyes and pretend I was back in Mom's mini to remember everything well enough to explain it to them. I kept telling them I can only describe so much, you have to just do it. A few of them did a whole reenactment of getting into the car, putting the seatbelt on, putting your foot on the brake, turning the engine on. This all took place right in their chair at their desk of course, but it did look pretty real to me. Some of them now think they can totally drive a car. Oh well.

Story #3: I have one kid, Amir, who is now Form 3, and somehow or another cannot for the life of him stop getting injured. I'm nervous about every step he takes, worried something is going to break, or get poked or something. There was one week last year that he spent entirely inside the dorm. He got this thing called Nairobi fly - it's a tiny little beetle thing that doesn't bite and doesn't sting but if you squash it on your skin it gives you a chemical burn. And it hurts like hell. Besides Amir, a couple volunteers can also attest to it. If you see them you're just supposed to blow them off you, rather than rub and run the risk of squishing them. I'm pretty sure Amir had inadvertently tried to rub it off his eye in his sleep, cuz the next morning it looked like someone glued an apple to his eye. Poor kid was in so much pain for so long and was so worried he'd never see out of that eye again. Thankfully it's all better now, and he can see just fine. However that doesn't stop other accidents from happening. Last term he was playing football and a GIANT thorn lodged itself in the bottom of his foot. One dinky ice-pack and a lot of coaxing on how to pull it out later, it was finally out and the day could go on. THEN, this past weekend, he was trying to show off how fast he can run (he's probably the fastest kid out of all of mine) and somehow or another tripped and fell and landed on his shoulder wrong. I was actually gone that evening but the girls told me about it when I got home. The way they described it I was thinking his shoulder blade had cracked or his arm had fallen off. I had to wait till the next morning to get the full story from James, the one construction worker at school who's taken a real liking to the kids and speaks super good English. Turns out when he fell James and Samuel (the dorm father) took him to the hospital where they just told him it was dislocated. They shot him with something to put him to sleep and popped it back into place before tying a piece of gauze into some very strategic knots to serve as a sling. He was a little woozy the next day from whatever they gave him to sleep but he's in class now and signing well and back to his old goofy self. Hopefully another week will pass until something else happens to him.

Story #4: I was told today that I need to get the names of all my Form 3's who or are 18 years or older. I was class teacher for Form 2 last year and now will move up one with my same kids to be class teacher for Form 3. Anyways, I have had conversations with a lot of the kids before about how old they are. Never officially, but just in passing. So when they all started telling me their ages again this year I got a little confused. Turns out they were the confused ones. They understand the concept of 'the date you were born' but not really that you're not actually another year older until that exact date comes around. So most of them were telling me that they are now 20 or 21 or 22 because it's now 2012. Then when I ask them their birthday it's not till July or August or November. That means in July or August or November they'll turn another year older. You don't become a year older just because the world itself got a year older. It took them a while to understand it, but I think I got through to most of them. Another issue is a lot of them don't even know their birthdays. Some know the month but not the date, some the year but not the month, and some just have a roundabout time frame but nothing concrete. It's hard when both parents are dead and nobody is still around who remembers when you were born. I guess when it comes down to it they'll just end up picking a day. Birthdays here are obviously not really a big deal. It's crazy to think about the cultural differences with birthdays; America has the show "My Sweet Sixteen" where girls literally have to be turned into actual royalty and be given and 3 pink SUVs  for their birthday or they'll throw a fit and kill someone, and in Kenya so many people don't even know what day that would be for them.

I keep trying to remind myself that I will only get another year with these fabulous kids of mine, and that it's going to go faster than I think. So I also keep trying to remind myself that I need to soak up every second I can with them, and remember as many details about them as possible: the way they look, the way they walk, the noises they make, the way they smell, and most of all, the way they each sign. I feel like a kid in candy store when I'm surrounded by them. They have no personal space and don't understand what it means to offend someone, but I don't care. One day without seeing my kids is a very strange day, and not strange in a good way. I get hungry for them; for the sight of them signing, the sounds of their laughs, and the feeling I get when I'm with them. I'm not sure how I survived before I knew these kids.

Some of them have voiced (signed) their worries that I'm going to forget about them as soon as peace corps is over and I leave Kenya. I don't think there's a single part of me that can ever forget these kids. They have made more of an impression on me in one year here than I ever thought possible. They have so much personality, so much spunk, so much curiosity, and so much love in their hearts. Why does it seem that I'm the only one that sees that? And why does it seem that schools in Kenya are not really built for the kids? If I had my way in the world I'd pack all of 'em up and take them right back to the States with me. I always joke with them about what Mom would say if I came home from Peace Corps with 70 deaf Africans following me. If only.

If only I could freeze some of these moments in time until I really truly had enough. If only they understood how much I crave them and how much I depend on them for happiness. If only others would understand how spectacular they all are. And if only I had them forever.

I hope I remember all this in 30 years. Dear Internet: Thanks for keeping my blog and remembering everything I've ever written on it. You rock.

~ Shub :)