In which I brave the desert and get an arm workout for my internet

So! Here I am in Sombo!
But first things first:
Monday, I spent the morning repacking my suitcase with different things to take to Sombo, then we went out to the medical supplies container and spent a few hours sorting through boxes of gauze, gloves, bandages, IV tubing, syringes, and my absolute favorite, suture material. I got to sort through that box and organize them by material. Apparently cotton and polyester are not just for sewing your clothing! I’ve been the nylon and the cat gut and the prolene before, but I’d never seen polyester or cotton suture material. There was even one set of surgical steel suture material, which I was excited to find because I have a stash of it myself, making circles around my sternum!
Anyway. Then went to the Nakumaat to buy 3 weeks worth of groceries for me to eat while I’m here, then we went to Anna’s basketball game and left early cuz it was raining, to have dinner at an outdoor café in the pouring rain. There were porch-y ceilings so we were mostly dry but the tile floor was soaked and it was freezing (for Nairobi…not like most of you people are dealing with now!)
Tuesday morning bright and early we left to go to Sombo, we took 2 cars because there were 8 of us going, and the car I was in decided to make strange rumbling noises every now and then. So 2 hours in, we pulled over to see what was wrong, couldn’t figure it out, kept going, and made is most of the way there before it became a problem again. They thought they figured it out so we stopped to ty to fix it, but it wasn’t that, so it didn’t get fixed until we got to Sombo, sent some people back to the nearest town (an hour away) to get oil, then came back.
The drive took about 6 hours and the first half was absolutely gorgeous, with mountains and crazy rock formations, and the second half was not gorgeous but it was interesting, as there were lots of villages, with people herding cows, goats, and camels all over the place. I saw more camels in 30 seconds then I had in the entire rest of my life combined. If I can ever get the internet good enough, I’ll try and post some pictures.
The road was pretty good until we turned off the main highway to Garissa (said nearest town) and then it got really pothole-y, so much so that there were dirt roads on either side that people drove on instead of the road. When we turned off that one, the “main road” to Sombo looked more like an ATV track through the desert, and off we went, bouncing around until we got to Sombo!
So we’re on a 35-acre compound. There’s the church, which is attended only by the mission staff, because EVERYONE else here is Muslim, a couple motel-style apartment buildings, the 4-stall (2 holes in the ground, 2 no-holes for taking a bucket shower) bathrooms, the pastor’s house (has a solar panel for electric) the school building (attended almost entirely by Muslim kids (they learn about Jesus in school, and they come because their parents want them to have an education, and this is the only school in forever distance. Tee hee.), the clinic, which has no pharmacist or lab technician (I’ve been the pharmacist lately) the church (which is literally built on the Bible…the team that built it laid Bibles in the 4 corner posts of concrete when laying the foundation), and a good-sized farm area. There’s a river nearby that has its water pumped to the house (then filtered!) and a couple giant tanks, and one of the tanks has a system of trenches dug from a central aqueduct so they can irrigate the farm. They’re currently growing peanuts and watermelons and probably other things but that’s all I’ve been told. They’re still building the adqeduct/irrigation system so there’s a lot of land that is yet to be farmable. There’s a team from YWAM (youth with a mission) that is mostly Americans here, that are working on that. (I was very pleasantly surprised to know there were so many other people here, and they’ll be here for a little bit, and they’ve been quite nice in welcoming me into their little group and since they were here a few days before me, showing me the best shady spot , which we sat under this afternoon and ate sugar cane they cut from 5 feet away from where we sat, by the river.  )
So I am living in a one-room…room with 2 other women, one is the principal of the school and the other is a teacher, they’re 25 and 23 and named (5 things each but their most commonly used names are) Mapesa and Susan. The YWAM team has their people in 2 rooms on mattresses on the floor, but one room stands unoccupied every night as the boys and girls rotate who gets to sleep in the back of this giant truck parked in the…courtyard-ish place, because it’s cooler there. So I’ll probably be joining the girls in there tonight, the breeeeeze is beautiful and it doesn’t reach well inside because there’s plastic over one of the windows. Noooot really sure why it’s there, not everyone has it and it’d be much nicer without it. The YWAM team is here for about another week/week-and-a-half, so I might sleep in the truck every night once they leave, if I like it. :p
It’s about 100+ degrees during the day, and it cools down to maybe 70 at night, when it gets really windy, apparently from the Indian Ocean. The stars are gorgeous and the moon is really, really bright.
you can sit or even sleep outside all night long if you want, it’s nice and warm, and the whole compound is surrounded by a barbed wire fence plus a couple watchmen with guns, so we basically have freedom to roam wherever. The biggest danger is either the crocodiles in the river (I’ve not seen one yet but apparently there was a huge one, and a hippo, the other day) and the thorns that are all over the ground. They collect in your shoes and if you walk in the less well-trod areas you can get 15 in each shoe in 5 minutes, so I got myself a thicker pair of flip-flops for all of $1.
For food, I’m half-cooking for myself, half-eating with the team from the US at the pastor’s house…for laundry, I’ll finally be allowed to do it myself, out of a bucket. For electricity, people bring whatever they need charged to the pastor’s house where he has a power strip that’s constantly full. For internet, you walk 5 minutes to the highest elevation point of the compound and there’s a few cinderblocks set up as a chair and desk. It wasn’t working for me there so I went and stood on a couple blocks and held the computer in the air and that got it to work pretty well, as long as I lifted it up a little higher whenever I needed to click on something.
I haven’t gotten sunburn yet even despite being outside for a good amount of time yesterday, so I guess my gradual tanning attempts were successful, though my skin is peeling from those. :-D
This morning was actually really cool, it was cloudy until about 1, when all of a sudden the clouds disappeared and it got hot as anything again.
There are a lot of ants (little, regular black ones, nothing exciting or painful or deadly) in the room and I tried to eradicate them by sweeping and squishing them and pouring water all over where the opening to their hole was outside, but they just came out EN MASSE! Of another hole, carrying all their babies, and went somewhere else like 6 inches away. So…they’re still there, and they probably hate me now. :-p
This morning as I was waiting to get into one of the showers, I saw this 3-inch long insect waddle over to one of them and start to walk under the door, so I tapped on the door and told the person inside that a huge bug just crawled in, so he saw it and flung it out and said thanks. So then it tried climbing up the wall to the bathroom and I hit it back onto the ground with my shoe, and out of nowhere .003 seconds later this roster comes and just ate it in like 2 pecks, and I laughed.
Soooo, that’s Sombo! Hopefully my crazy antics will allow this post to be posted and the notification emails sent!