In which I basically just spend a lot of time in the sun

I am currently darker than I’ve ever been in my life. Buuuut that still isn’t dark enough to be able to walk around the beach in Mombasa without being followed around by 4 beach boys looking to sell me things. Even if I go for a walk and make no effort to slow down, or show the slightest bit of interest in what they’ve lined up in the sand, I am greeted from 30 feet away, welcomed, and informed that “looking is free”(haha!) If I stand still, and then turn my head 1 degree in someone’s direction, they just JUMP on the opportunity to try and sell me something. At first I laugh, but it doesn’t take long for me to get frustrated by it. The other day I had a very short conversation on the beach right in front of our hotel, and then said I wanted to just walk and think, and as I turned to walk away the guy said “I love you!” I said “You don’t know me well enough to love me” he said “Yes I do, you are beautiful” and I said “that’s not love, that’s lust” and walked away. Insert eye-roll here. :-p

So other than that sort of thing, we spent a wonderfully relaxing week with meetings in the mornings and services at night, with lots of pool and beach related lounging in between. One day we did jet skis/those hot dog/banana things you sit on and get pulled around by a boat, but mostly we just did whatever we felt like on the resort. Yesterday I took a walk some incredibly long distance down the beach with Danny and Joseph (Danny being my host missionary and Joseph being my pretend little brother, who’s more of a pretend same-size brother, because he’s 13 and we have at this moment exactly the same height, and haircut, haha) to explore these caves that I’d heard about…we had nooo idea how interesting of a cave it was, or if it was just going to be a crevice, but we got there and it was pretty interesting…I would have liked it much better if we didn’t have to walk for a full 40 minutes along the hot, shelly sand just to get there, and then again to get back…but someday if I go back I’m going to take a motorized vehicle out to those coral-dug-out-by-the-water cave/cavern/clif-ish things and spend a couple hours while the tide’s out exploring them with sneakers. J

It’s really weird, being on a very family vacation sort of vacation, with a bunch of families…without my family. I couldn’t help thinking how we’d NEVER have a vacation like this, because my mom can’t spend more than one day in a row doing nothing on the beach/poolside. We’d have to find more non-sitting things to do each day. Everyone was very group-y and welcomed me in and what not…I was never sitting by myself unless I wanted to be, but it still felt a bit like I was intruding on other people’s family vacations, even if all the families were mixed together all the time. I did a lot of wondering how much I should invite myself into group conversations and how much I should just stay where I was…I don’t know where the balance is between being social and overstepping my welcome, if I may combine two expressions, so I tend to err on the side of caution (if I may now use a third. :-P)

We left this morning at 4am, and got back to Nairobi around 11, but didn’t get to where we were eating lunch until around 12:30 because that’s how bad traffic is in Nairobi…while they’re busy doubling the size of the main road, it’s been halved. Also, there’s no such thing as a highway that goes around a city, with an exit you get off to go into the city so if you’re passing by, or driving to the other side of the city you can just go around it. You just gotta deal with the traffic. Woo hoo!

Monday I’m going to Naivasha, my next clinic stop, to be there for a month…I forget if I said this already or not so I’ll just tell you again- there’s a church there and a school and clinic and some housing buildings, all within a gated compound. I’ll be living in a group home with 6-ish 5-7^th grade girls (orphans) who go to the school. So I’m quiiite excited about that, my very limited interactions with the girls that age so far have been a lot of fun, so I’m looking forward to it for an extended period.

Soooooooooo this has been my break, we will return to the regularly scheduled programming on Monday-ish I guess!