Close Of Service

In the grand scheme of things, two years is really not that long of a time. When I'm old and grey these past two years will be a very small percentage of the total life I hope to live. But when what seems like every second of that time is either the hardest and most frustrating, or the happiest and most wonderful, two years can end up feeling like a lifetime.

Thanks to Peace Corps, I ended up on a free flight to Kenya, and two months later, thanks to a lot of general happenstance, ended up in Kilifi, which I know now is the one of the best little places in the world. Peace Corps Kenya, though I've stayed in constant contact with administration throughout, and continually worked with PCKenya on a number of different projects and initiatives, has become less and less about Peace Corps, and more and more about just living the wonderful life I have in Kilifi. That's not to say I don't recognize Peace Corps' importance in all this anyways - if it weren't for them, I would never have even imagined a place like this existed, or that I could love it so much.

I've spent two years making some of the closest friends I could ever ask for, and forming the most incredible relationships with my students. If it weren't for Peace Corps, I would never have met my kids, who, Kilifi deafness, PC, and novelty of living in Africa aside, are still the most fabulous bunch of people I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. I have relied on them for two years to keep me happy and keep me going, and they've fulfilled that responsibility to no end. I've learned so much from them, so much that they'll never even realize they taught me. They've spent the last two years just being themselves and, what I know now is, that's all I've ever needed.

Life here can be SO unbelievably complicated sometimes, but the majority of the time, life is easy and simple and happy. As is known about Africa and the developing world, people here worry less about material things, and more about things that really seem important. Ground flour from maize in the shamba, milk from the goats and cows, hanging clothes out to dry, carrying water for your bath, and slaughtering your own chickens, all seem to me like things that are supposed to be done. There's so many other wonderful ways of life that I never imagined before coming to Kenya, and I've been lucky enough to be a part of this one on the coast. Not to say when I get back stateside I won't thoroughly enjoy my hot showers, cold milk and cereal, and luxury of a washing machine, but I know for a fact that I love living here. Life here is more just about everyone being together, enjoying each other's company, and when it comes to my group of Kilifi friends, making and eating a lot of really good food. With my kids it's just about each other's company, because the food could always be improved a little bit (however I've become extremely attached to ugali and mchicha).

That being said, my life in Kenya is not over. My life in the Peace Corps is coming to a close, but Kilifi has made too much of an impression for me not to return here. I will, without a doubt, be back here next August at the very latest, for a very important and exciting wedding, one of probably four that I'll be at next year. And whether or not that turns into staying here for even longer, or going back to the US for a job or school, is yet to be determined. What's nice to know is that I have the option to come back here. I guess we'll just have to see what happens and how I feel when I'm back. All I know right now is that I'm gonna miss Kilifi, my group of friends here, and my kids more than anything in the world. Hmpfh.

I've been on duty this week at school, which means, even though I do like going into town and meeting up with the gang, I get to be at school with my kids all week :) Last night was movie night, the second to last movie night I'll ever have with them, and I showed The Mask. Boy did they love it. They've been asking for Transformers 3 but I've told them I want to save it for last because they're gonna love it so much. Next weekend won't be easy.

I've been trying to find a way to properly explain to all my kids what they mean to me. I can tell my friends here fairly easily, because they get stuff like that. But my kids are a different story. I can sign to them right now just as fluently as I'm writing this post, but even in English it's hard to express how I feel about them, and how I feel about leaving them. There's also an aspect of emotional attachment that I think a lot of them don't really grasp, only because they've never had the opportunity to feel that way about anyone, or been exposed to someone else feeling that way about them, or just recognized either of those situations. It's not a bad thing; just different. Not to say they don't love, or can't, but maybe it's just a different kind of love, and they have different ways of expressing it .... hard to explain.

Either way, I'm gonna try my absolute best to tell them next weekend just how much they mean to me. And I'm going to try to do it without crying. Easier said than done.

This post is getting pretty wordy... Some quick updates on the following month to come, and then pics :)

The last movie night will be next weekend, which will be after a big ceremony thing at school to open the new girls' dorms, and immediately followed by a music night party thing in Kilifi. The week after that is the week that we close school :( and I think the kids should be going home around the 23rd. The 24th is our augmented Saturday Thanksgiving, since most everybody here is busy with work on Thursdays. I'll be making a HUGE turkey, sweet potato casserole, stuffing, salad, and those will hopefully (considering the number of people I've got coming to this) be accompanied by a lot of other good dishes. That next Sunday the 25th I've gotta get my butt up to Machakos for the start of Model School for the new group, that really scary week towards the end of training when you practice teaching for the first time. I'll help with that for the week in Machakos, then need to head to Nairobi to actually close my service. We have to take one final language exam, close our bank accounts and other administrative stuff, and then I'll need at least half a day to say goodbye to everyone in the office. After COS I'll be heading back to the coast on the 6th of December, and that weekend is supposedly some sort of goodbye thing for me, though we're all sort of in denial about it. The week after that will be my last in Kenya for a few months so I will need to spend some time just being around and seeing everyone. I also want to head down south coast for a day or two and visit some friends there. Then on the 15th I fly home. Mombasa to Nairobi. Nairobi to Amsterdam. Amsterdam to Detroit. Detroit to Grand Rapids. We should be in GR for only a few days before we drive down to MD. Hopefully be there before the 20th.

Also, after a LOT of thought and one very unhappy afternoon, I've decided not to take my kitties with me, THIS TIME. I'm leaving them here with the new volunteer moving into my house until January, when they'll go to another friends' house until I get back to Kilifi next August. At that point I will either take them back to the US then, or will have decided to come back Kilifi for longer than just a visit. We'll see. Whatever ends up happening, it's not going to be easy leaving them.

Whew.

Ok. Picture time.

Gona and Osman :)

Drinking my morning bathwater...

Evason tried to climb up onto the water tower without a ladder, but didn't quite make it.

Kelvin took this. At members for the afternoon.

They draped me in the Kenyan flag while I was on the computer..

I LOVE this shirt Chaka has on :)

And the ever-beautiful walk home at sunset. 

Aright dudes. I'm out. Again, I'll be back in the States on the 16th of December, and will be in Maryland a few days after that. Happy November and lots of love and hugs from Kilifi!

~ Shub :)

Things I did this week

in no particular order:

• Made banana cake
• Hugged a lot of my kids
• Saw an AWESOME sunset

• Cleaned out my pantry
• Ate a LOT of ugali
• Paid for a kid to go to the hospital to have his tooth extracted
• Gave pain meds to a lot of other kids with tooth issues
• Explained to some of my kids about my eight years of orthodontia
• Gave two math quizzes and one physics quiz; drew a heart on the board at the end of the Form 3 math quiz and wrote inside "Sarah loves you," and received these little notes in return from my Form 3's:
• "Sarah I love you true but because maths easy why? If you want hard happy can Sarah Love!!!" - Omari
• "Thank you Madam, you are special principal at P.S.S.D. Te amo come over!" - Emmanuel
• "I am Sarah I love you!" - Lilian
• "Mina is my name by nature. My native language is Chinese." - Amina
• "Sarah loves you and all student!" - Jumaa
• "Lucy is cry because love about sorry. Obama I love you." - Lucy
• "We are fine me will you wave thank you." - Kache
• "Sarah loves you teach Catherine Moshombo maths Amen." - Catherine
• And also this little nugget (turn up your volume):

• Finished two books
• Co-hosted our Fall Extravaganza/Mark's 50th birthday, complete with roasted chickens, sweet potatoes, pumpkin cous cous, stuffing, autumn spice cake, and fudge. 
• Caught a snake in the house that the cats were going to eat
• Showed Spiderman 3 to the kiddos, which they LOVED
• Thought more about what to do with my life post-Peace Corps. (Neurophys + deaf kids = Audiology school?)
• Told my kids I love them
• Told my cats I love them
• Set up the new (and still empty) girls' dorms for the Form 4's' K.C.S.E. on Monday
• Found out who the new volunteer moving into my house and teaching at primary is! Ack!
• Met with some new guys from the U.S. Navy about the finishing touches on the new toilets
• Got in a fight with my kids about the boys using the new girls' toilets to take showers in the middle of the night
• Met with the Kenya Ports Authority people (the ones who funded the building of the new girls' dorm, about an official opening and tree-planting ceremony
• Thought about how much I'm gonna miss Kilifi
• Went to Mombasa to pick up the three new volunteers being placed on the coast, who are coming now for their 'shadow week' at a deaf school. They're pretty great. 

I'm sure I did more but it must not have been too exciting. 

Love and hugs,

Shub :)

Ninety goofballs.

October is ticking away, probably faster than I would like, and before I know it I'll be back in the U.S. Ack!

We're back in school (thank goodness! - I was going stir crazy without my kids and with nothing to do) and it keeps coming up in conversation what my kids are going to do without me, and more selfishly, what I am going to do without them. I always knew the day would come, when I'd have to say goodbye, but actually living through it is going to be real tough. These kiddos of mine have now, and will forever have, changed my life for the better. They are some of the most fabulous people I've ever met and I consider myself one of the luckiest people in the world to have had two full years with them. I just wish I could pack them all up with my kitties and bring them back to the States.

Alas, such is not the case.

Just about every single one of them is back at school now, and I'm just trying to make the most of the short time I've got left with them. I've been getting into a very heavy conversation with a bunch of my Form 4's this week that started with "The Bible doesn't tell me why there are black people and white people, can you tell me?" and went all the way through "Where did life come from?" and "Am I supposed to believe religion, or evolution?" and "Do you think people have souls?" Clearly the topics were loaded, and after about an hour of me explaining everything I could in the best way possible, including drawing things like vestigial organs, pangaea, and the development of a tadpole, they still hadn't had enough. Another teacher wanted to come in and teach, so we had to postpone the rest of the conversation for later. What I did attempt to make them take away from all of this was that it's good to ask questions. I told them I was proud of them for wondering why things are the way they are, and for being so curious. I told them to never stop asking questions, and never stop trying to get answers for things they don't understand. I told them science isn't perfect and neither is religion but they're adults and humans and therefore have a right to as much information about life as possible. This conversation about the meaning of life has been restarting and continuing for the last few weeks or so, and hopefully will until we all have to leave school at the end of the year.

This week also my Form 4's started their KCSE (Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education - the national exam after secondary school). The first subject in the big long list of test papers they need to complete is KSL. The one we started this week was Paper 3, the practical portion. Thankfully, being deaf, most of them are pretty fabulous at sign language so hopefully this part of the exam wasn't that difficult. They all seemed relatively happy when they came out of the interview room, so I'll take that as a good sign :)

The KCSE is a nation-wide thing as well, so it's not just my kiddos who are doing the exam. All Form 4's across the country have to take it. The deaf ones, however, are the only ones that do KSL. But there are these things Kenyans love called success cards, that they send their schoolmates, or to Form 4's they know, to wish them luck on their exams. Almost always, these success cards have a little musical box thing inside that plays while the card is open and stops when you close it. And almost always the high-pitched whiny sound coming from the cards is a horrible screachy version of Fur Elise. There's also a tiny little light that comes on when the song plays. The tough part about this is that I can unfortunately hear those damn things, whereas none of my kids can. The noise gets into my brain and makes me cringe, and my kids have realized that now. So the Form 4's, in the last classroom on the block, will open their cards and keep them open, hidden in a desk somewhere, while Sarah has to leave her lesson in another room and run down to Form 4 to search and destroy those stupid cards. They obviously think it's hilarious when I'm all in a tizzy following that incessant noise. I've asked a few of them to ram a pen into my ear and make me deaf, something I would much prefer in situations like this. Alas, such is not the case and I have to deal with being a boring old hearing person.

This week we also had a visitor come to school from the UK, a lady from an organization called Sound Seekers (http://www.sound-seekers.org.uk/), who were the ones who helped fund the initial building of the school - two of the four classrooms and the boys' dorm. She's the new project manager for a lot of the things they've got going on in Africa and came to Kenya and Kilifi specifically to check up on school. Unfortunately for her things have not been going necessarily the way they planned when the school was first built in 2009, but that's a whole 'nother issue that I needn't write about on the internet. Ask me if you'd like to be more informed :) Anyways, we had an afternoon meeting with her and the kids (me interpreting, because even though she knows a little sign language it's only British Sign Language, which is worlds away from ASL or KSL) and we talked a lot about  improvements the school needs, things that we like already, and their plans for the future. She was most concerned about the latter. When they finally decided to open up and explain their worries about what's in store after school, the Form 4's voiced a lot of concerns. Many of them are worried about passing the KCSE (only a small percentage of hearing students pass the national exam, and they've had teachers that speak their language all throughout school), they're worried about getting into college or university with terrible test results, about paying tuition if they ever do get in, and about even finding a decent job if none of the former options work.

When my kids talk about this stuff my heart breaks. It's been breaking for two years, knowing that I can't give every single one of them the brightest of futures, but I have to keep reminding myself there is only so much I can do. I've attempted to give them what I could in the past two years, and though I haven't always given it my all, for one reason or another (could be the heat of the coast or the incredible amounts emotional stress I've been under, or both), I'd like to think that we're all better people for knowing each other. Although again, I know and will keep saying for the rest of forever that they've made more of an impression on me than I have on them. I just hope they've learned a little something from me.

Speaking of things they've learned from me, one of those is just how exactly to get Sarah all riled up, and it's without a doubt my Form 4's who have gotten exceptional at it. We know each other so well and unfortunately for me they've been having a lot of fun using that against me. Remember a while back there was a huge joke about Sarah looking like a chicken that's been plucked but not cooked yet? Well that's come back recently, as well as "can you just grow a little more so you can start writing at the top of the chalkboard instead of the middle?" and "we really wanna see you with makeup on because we don't much like the way you look right now" and also the "ha ha you can hear these stupid success cards and we can't!"

However after all of this, all of the torture I've received, the making fun of and everything, I still don't know what I'm going to do without them. These kids make me laugh SO hard.

In other news, I've got lots coming up in the next few weeks. Next weekend we're celebrating our good friend Mark's 50th birthday. Mark teaches water sports at Mnarani Club and the boatyard here in Kilifi, and even though he'll be twice my age next Saturday, we still love him (most of the time) and are going to cook him an amazing meal. Then next week I think I've got three of the new Peace Corps trainees coming to Kilifi for the 'shadow week' portion of their training. They're going to be teachers at primary schools, so they'll mainly just be sleeping at my place and then going up to primary for the actually school-shadowing portion. Though I'm sure my kids wouldn't mind if I brought them up to secondary to visit for a bit. We'll see :) Then the next week I might have to go back to Machakos for a deaf-ed committee meeting. Then the end of November I head back to Nairobi one last time to close out with PC, and then mid-December I'll leave! Granted I still need to buy my ticket...

Whew!

I'll leave you with some pics of the 90 goofballs I get to hang out with everyday. Thanks for keeping me happy guys :)

Redonkulous.

Opiyo being silly and not letting me see his face

Yum!

Chengo doin a little dance in Form 4

The whole school! 

Dinner - ugali and beans and cabbage.

And last but not least, aside from my own kids at school,

this little man is also one of my own here :)

As always, thanks for reading, miss you all like crazy, and can't wait to see everyone again!

Love and hugs from Kilifi!

~ Shub :)