In which I go to Naivashaaaaaaaa, and can't think of anything more exciting to put in my title

Naivash is…perfect.
Well, the weather at least. The journey here is gorgeous, and it rained a little last week so the rift valley is starting to turn green. The giant crevice in the middle of Kenya, with a giant volcano in the middle of the crevice, is going to be LUSH by the time I get back to Nairobi, and I can’t wait to see it again. J
But Naivasha weather is really perfect. It’s nice and warm during the day, in the 70s, and if you go outside the sun feels good on your skin, but not too hot. Sitting inside is nice and cool, and at night it gets breezy and as long as you close the windows it’s cool and juuuust the perfect temperature for falling asleep. By the time you wake up, it’s gotten a little warm again.
Also, as my mom has told me 5 or 6 or 15 times, something like 60% of the world's roses come from Naivasha. I have not seen even one yet...but I haven't been out much.

The clinic here is pretty new so we’re still working on the getting the word out, so traffic is pretty slow. The doctor here is named Edwin. The lack of many patients allowed us to spend a couple hours the first day putting all the pills of expired drugs into a bag for disposal, because apparently they smell really bad when you burn them so we couldn’t burn them with the rest of the garbage. We poured out all the bottles and popped all the pills out of their little blister packs…it was kind of fun, actually. The best part was squeezing 5 or 6 tubes of expired antibiotic ointment out of the tubes. I’ve always wanted to do that. :-P Then today I spent 2.5 hours taking all the drugs off the shelves in the pharmacy and dusting off the containers and the shelves. It gets quite dusty here until it rains, and it’s juuust starting to rain so it was pretty dirty. But it’s raining now so my work won’t be undone as immediately as I thought it was going to. :-P
Also, there is a thermometer in the clinic that you’re supposed to shine this red light into the patient’s mouth, and it tells you the temperature. !?!? The doctor shined it at the kid’s forehead (I don’t think he realized that it was blinking “oral”) and it said 93 farenheit…I don’t think he also realized that that must be inaccurate, because nobody’s temperature is 93 when they have no problems other than a cough...but he’s probably used to celcius and just knows what counts as “bad” in F and doesn’t realize how far off 93 is from normal, let alone high. The kid could have been 102 and it probably would have said 93. I shined the light in my mouth and it said 99, then 98.3, then 97, and it said the air was 73 when I pointed it at nothing. So..I sort of doubt the accuracy of the thing, I can’t fathom how shining a red light in my mouth can tell you my core temperature, but it’s a pretty cool little contraption at least.

So my living situation here:
There’s a big compound with the church, offices, the clinic, and a few buildings for the school/classrooms/more offices. Then there’s the “group home”, as they call it, which has a little porch, living room, dining room, kitchen with back-porch wood stove, 2 bedrooms for the 5 middle-and-high-school girls, a small bed-and-living-room-apartment for the caretaker, Nancy, and bathrooms (flushing pit latrine!) The clinic is 87 steps away from the door of the house. Yes I counted!
There’s running water and sinks but it doesn’t get hot, so we heat the water for showers on the stove and mix with cold water to take a bucket shower. The girls here have a rotation for cooking and cleaning and what not, so I’m hoping to get them to teach me some Kenyan cooking while I’m here. They’re much better at letting me help than adults have been! Last night we all spent a half hour digging through a giant bowl of maize picking out the stones and bad kernels.

I was worried about the predicament of being treated like a visitor for the duration of my stay, but when we arrived we informed the pastor and Nancy that I didn’t want any special treatment, just pretend I’m one of the girls, so they decided I would get special visitor treatment for the first 2 days, and then I can be a non-visitor. I can definitely deal with that. J

When the girls all got home from school yesterday, I was saying hi and they were all giggling and hiding behind each other and not making eye contact, but after talking a little with them (they are still learning English and I am still learning Swahili, so it’s interesting…though I’ve added a few more words to my vocabulary after a lesson last night) they’ve gotten less timid ,though they still smile and laugh whenever they see me. In time I’m sure they’ll get used to it and then we can be friends. :-P

Well I am going to go see what’s cooking in the kitchen and what else there is to do around here!