In which I love this new church, and spend a day in the slum

I could/should have wrote this days ago but I’ve been busybusy and therefore tired at the end of the day and not feeling like thinking enough to type out a post.
BUT.
So…last you heard it was Thursday and I’d just arrived.

So Friday was a waste of time, basically…I went to the Zinduka office in the morning, got a tour and got introduced to all the people who work at the office, and then was told to wait for them to get my schedule for the week. An hour and a half later I got the schedule. For Friday it said “introduction”. Also the office closes at noon on Friday, so I took a nap with my head on the desk, wrote in my journal, and drank tea. When the office closed I went and sat in the church’s main office lobby and read the newspaper and did all the crosswords and sudokus in the paper. Then I sat in Cathy’s office and read about all the kings of Israel that did really stupid things that made God really angry until she finished working and we went home.
Here’s a side note for you: Sunday after church they had these small groups and I joined a random one and we were talking about the book of Hebrews, which talks a lot about Jesus’ sacrifice and how it restored people to God, and we were talking about the old way of doing that, was to make a animal sacrifice…and when priests tried to enter the temple, or make sacrifices without being clean, without preparing themselves, God sometimes struck them down. Like…if you went into the room where the Ark of the Covenant was when you weren’t supposed to, and without making all the sacrifices for your sin, you just died. And nowadays people do all sort of sacrilegious things, and people whose only thoughts are for their own fame and fortune preach about God and in general we approach God with a lot of disrespect and dishonesty…but nobody gets struck dead for it. What mercy is available to us now that Jesus is here…and we’ve taken it for granted, I think.
Which is also interesting in context of those kings of Israel. They did EXACTLY what God told them NOT to do and built alters to other gods in the middle of God’s temple…and God allowed other nations to come and take them over but as SOON AS they repented and started serving God again, he delivered them. SO MANY times. So even BEFORE Jesus he was being SO merciful to them, ya know? We always say “In the Old Testament God was wrathful and judgmental and in the New Testament God is forgiving and merciful because of Jesus…but truth is he was REALLY merciful even in the Old Testament.

Anyway. Saaaaturday we slept in and then made chapati dough (YEAH!!) then I went with Cathy to pick up her niece and nephew from her sister’s house, and bring them over to her brother’s house. Her brother’s house is really close to hers so we walked home. On the way we stopped at a fruit stand just inside the gate of the estate, and some random guy said hi and asked where I was from and what my name was, and tried talking to me but I couldn’t understand his English or Swahili very well…which is a common thing for people to do. What isn’t common is when we moved on to the vegetable stand 50 ft away, he followed us and just sort of stood next to me, trying to talk but not doing a very good job getting words out. So I realized he was drunk, and we told him to go away, and the 3 or 4 other people around us watching were just like …”dude…leave them alone, you’re embarrassing yourself”. So eventually the vegetable man finished chopping the cabbage and we left Mr. Drunk behind.
Then we got home and made CHAPATI S and they were DELICIOUS as usual.
Then we went to the airport to say bye to Sam’s mom, who was going to the US for 3 weeks to visit some family member who’s there. That was the first time I’ve been to that airport with no intention of flying out, which makes me officially a local, I’ve heard. :-P I met Sam’s dad who is also the senior pastor of the church, and his mom, and a couple other family members. We stayed for a while until they fiiinally had to go, then took literally 30 minutes to get out of the parking lot, even though it would have taken 10 steps to get from the parking spot to the gate. Apparently a lot of people want out of the airport lot at 9:30pm.

Suuuuunday we went to church at ICC, and I LOVE this church. I went to the youth service (youth here is the equivalent of “young adult” which was about 150 people. Everyone is so incredibly HAPPY to see each other and to be there, it reminded me of an extra large Chi Alpha. They were even serving tea and mandazi (fried dough things) which would have been icing on the cake if I hadn’t gotten on line too late to get any before they ran out. Oops. Sooo we had church and then I went over to the visitor table to say hi and they had tea and mandazi THERE so I did end up having some. :-D After church they had their small groups. They’ve all been going through this book that is a re-arrangement of the books of the New Testament into a different order…plus no chapter and verse numbers. So we had a discussion about Hebrews that was really good. Theeen we did a LOT of sitting around and talking to various people…the youth were having some sort of small group competition so there were a lot of games out, and I watched and kept score and was the official dictionary for a game of scrabble. I did not expect to find that game amongst non-native English speakers, but it will indicate to you how educated and westernized this area is that they actually played, and only one person made a habit of using only 3 and 4 letter words, and added “s” to the end of other people’s words.

I went home with friends of Cathy and Sam’s who live a couple of houses away because Cathy and Sam had a married couples’ class, so I spent the afternoon watching the Style network (cable TV..is that cheating …am I still allowed to call myself “on a missions trip”?) because it made me feel connected to home to know what Giuliana and Bill are doing with their lives. :-P

Monday was an adventure. I went with Zinduka people to do VCT just outside the Kware slums (Which is where we did the clinic both of the previous times I’ve been here). They basically set up 4 10ftx10ft tents with curtains down the middle to make 8 small rooms , with plastic stools. The front is covered by a “Free VCT” sign which sort of makes privacy but not really. Each counselor takes a room, and 2 people are on recruitment duty. They basically tell people “come here” and they come, then they say “go get tested” and sometimes they go, sometimes they don’t. Usually people need to be asked otherwise they will walk right by…but a lot of people will go in as soon as they’re asked…like they only need the tiniest bit of convincing to get tested.

I want to make this short so I will tell you the facts and keep the entertaining story until next time. :-D

So from my experiences through the day and asking the counselors I gathered the following information: The counselors have a 3-week training program before they can counsel. They do this free VCT every day. They choose one location and go there every day for a week, then move on. The counselors go in 2 shifts, one from 8-noon, one from 12-4…which is actually closer to 5:30 or whenever-they-feel-like-stopping (since the street becomes much more crowded around 5 as people get off work). The session takes about 10-15 minutes, they get counseled, informed about HIV, how to get it, prevent it, etc., then they get tested. There’s a standard 1^st test. If it’s positive they use another one to confirm, if that is positive they are positive. If the 2^nd is negative there’s a third test (They’re all different KINDS of tests, not just a repeat of the same one) that is the tiebreaker. Whichever it says is the answer. They do a questionnaire to find out if they’re an “at risk” person (prostitute, IV drug user, fisherman/truck driver[“a girl in every port” ya know?]) to see if they should have further follow-up at another facility. Then they go on their way!

So some funny things happened, involving a couple of drunk-but-not-disorderly guys, but I’m tired and we’ve passed 2 pages so you’ll just have to wait until tomorrow. :-D

I will also inform you about today's adventures.
Isn't the suspense killing you?
I didn't think so, you're more patient than that.

New Blog Post- In which I arrive at Zinduka and plan to like it very much

I think I’m gonna like it here. 
For starters, there’s a toilet. A real live I-get-to-sit-on-it toilet. :-P
Let me backtrack.
This morning we drove an hour through Nairobi…and were still within the city limits (thank you, traffic) and arrived at the church ICC (it is “International Christian Center”)(the West campus)They have 3 services on Sunday mornings, all in English, and in general the offices and attitudes are very modern. There is a second campus a 20 minute drive away (the Imara campus) All of the staff I saw in the office today except for 2 of the head pastors are in their 20s or early 30s. It looks like a very happy place with their nice clean white tile floor and everyone using Windows 7 on their laptops except for the guy with the 30-inch-screened mac and they’re all friendly and laughing.
Within the church grounds there’s offices, the sanctuary, some other buildings I don’t know the purpose of, and then Zinduka, which has a 40-ft converted container and some offices.
Side note: some people from another church in Nairobi wanted to see the sanctuary because they’re renovating theirs and they’re looking for ideas what other churches do. So we went into the sanctuary and Cathy showed them how they set up the chairs, and the balcony, etc and the stage was empty. The woman asked what kind of chairs they put on the podium. Cathy said there were none, the pastors sit on the ground level with the congregants. The woman was like “…ooooh. But you give them a table.” Cathy said “no…they just sit in the front row, with the rest of the people. We give them water bottles?” The woman was again like “…oh” Cathy explained they wanted to be as approachable as possible, and to show that they’re just another person and don’t want to seem like special holy men. This seemed like a new idea to the woman, which didn’t surprise me since I’ve seen pastors sitting on thrones on the stage in front of their church here. So I like this attitude of respect, but not elevation-to-the-level-of-king, for the pastor.
Zinduka is officially an NGO. (Zinduka-afrika.com)They work with HIV+ people to do counseling, there is a VCT center (“voluntary counseling and testing”- so called because there was such a stigma about the word “HIV” that people would refuse to be even tested because they didn’t want to be seen associating with the word. So VCT is like a “safe” way to call it, where people are willing to come and get tested and counseled without the cultural stigma. So they do that, and they have support groups for HIV+ people, mentoring and marketable skills training, and they make home visits.
Today we went into the church office and I met Cathy, who is maybe in her late 20s, and we had a meeting with her and one of the pastors to finish up all the details of my staying here as well as the clinic that’s coming up. We spent about 2 hours hashing out all the details of timing and meals and how many translators we would need , etc. Here’s the plan for the next 2 weeks, now that I actually have the information.
I am going to be commuting with Cathy to the church compound every morning, then working with Zinduka. I was told I’ll get a schedule tomorrow so I can see when I’ll be in the VCT place, when I’ll go on visits, etc. On June 13, a team of 36 people from Chicago arrives, and on the 14th, we start setting up for 4 days of free clinic at the Imara campus. So those days the bus bringing the Americans from their lodging to the Imara campus will pick me up, since Cathy lives quite close to the Imara campus. We’ll do the clinic from 9-5 Wednesday-Saturday, with sports ministry and crusades going on in the afternoons and evenings, respectively. Sunday the team will do stuff at the churches during the regular service and then Monday morning we go on safari.
So that’s the plan.
Cathy’s house, as I mentioned, has a toilet. And a shower.
It’s an actual free-standing house in a development. They call them “estates” here…this estate has an unlocked gate, and there’s a bunch of shops…general stores, butchery, fruit stands, …a field with a volleyball net, some random open grass, and then several “lanes” which is basically a side street with a gate with a guard at it. Each side street is lined with houses, each house has a small yard enclosed by a stone wall with a gate. So…there are a lot of gates. :-P
The house is one story, with a kitchen, living room, master and guest bedrooms, and bathroom…one of the most westernized houses in structure and décor I’ve seen. So like I said, I think I’m gonna like it here. 
We will usually pack a lunch of leftovers from dinner, but today Cathy and I went to eat at a little restaurant/café/whatever you want to call it that was a 5 minute walk from the church. I got to eat a chapati, so I was happy. :-p Then we stopped at a small supermarket to get breakfast foods because Cathy and her husband don’t eat breakfast. She asked, so I told her I’d been eating lots of Kenyan food, anything was okay, the only thing I’ve eaten here that I didn’t like was liver, and she said she ALSO doesn’t like it, it makes her want to gag. Awesome. I think we are going to get along quite well. 

In which I give you pictures and get philosophical

Welcome back to Nairobi!
For me at least.
There’s this very large main road that goes from Nairobi to Thika, called very imaginatively “Thika Road” and a company called also very imaginatively “China”(as it is from China) is doing a lot of construction on this road. They are also doing some destruction, because there was apparently this huge fiber-optic cable buried near the road that is responsible for providing internet to a LOT of people…and they cut it. So not only do none of the plug-in modems or routers work very well while they’re trying to repair this mess, even the wireless providers are having issues.

I don’t think this is related but also, the town water hasn’t been working for weeks so all the houses on the AG compounds have very limited water. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, and you absolutely can’t take a shower at the same time the washing machine is going.
But at least there’s no electrical water heater smoking and shooting sparks at me like there was in Limuru. :-P

It’s been almost a week since I wrote! That is partially due to my internet deciding to run out at a very inconvenient moment, right as I was trying to read a facebook message from my sister…I tried to go and buy more air time. I like to buy air time in increments of 1000 shillings because you use the air time to buy packages. It’s cheaper to buy in bulk. So I went down to the nearest little shop and asked if they had air time. They had one card for 20 shillings. Ok, I bought it. That will give me about 3 MB of bandwidth, since no packages are cheaper than 250 shillings. If you don’t understand how much internet that is, I don’t really either but it is NOT enough to last very long. :-P So I went to the next stop. They had 1 scratch card for 50 shillings, and a bunch of 20s. So I bought them and when I got home had to scratch off 7 scratch cards and type the pin numbers into the computer and so on.
The first thing I did when I got back to Nairobi (After, of course, getting some fried food in the form of French fries) was buy air time in 1000shilling increments. But like I said, all the internet in the city is, I think, having issues.

I did manage to get over 100 new pictures from Limuru up on facebook, here:
http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.971909453505.2523324.428882&l=5f33e43b44
Even if you don’t have a facebook account you SHOULD be able to see them.

The last week I was in Limuru I just felt…weird. It was a combination of a bunch of things that culminated in me being really restless and wanting to just get out of there. Some people were frustrating me, it was the longest I’ve been in any one place, and I think my patience for being away from home and all things familiar was wearing thin. In retrospect, I think a lot of it also had to do with the fact that I’d stopped writing in my journal for a while…just because I was bored of writing. But I didn’t realize how much it was helping me to get stuff out of my head. The closest thing to having a friend to make my sarcastic comments to and laugh at the same things with me was writing there, and when I stopped getting it out it built up. Whenever I came back to Nairobi and lived with Americans for a few days I never felt like writing and I guess that’s because I wasn’t experiencing new and different things I needed to debrief about. I started writing again…not a really detailed description of each day but just a “brain diarrhea” as I’ve heard it called of how I was feeling at the moment and it did make me feel better.

The best thing I saw in the clinic all week was this girl who cut her hand right over her index finger knuckle. I could see the tendon all white and glistening in there, and it was cut. Not all the way through, thankfully, but definitely cut. I would think that more would be done than cleaning and bandaging it but that’s what we did.
The original attempted bandage was one of those tiny circle Band-Aids that comes in any “assorted Band-Aids” box that you always have left over at the end because they’re not good for anything except…what, needle sticks and pinpricks and usually they’re not even big enough for over-scratched mosquito bites…but Naomi opened one up and tried to put it on a 2-cm, deep-enough-to-cut-the-tendon laceration, but thankfully for all involved she decided it was too small before she actually put it on. Sometimes I don’t understand her. :-p

But. Now I’m back in “Little America” and I got a box of Entenmann’s doughnuts that Chrissy brought back from the US with her thanks to my Mommy Dearest and they are a bit crushed by a lot delicious…and this morning’s breakfast. I’m sure Mommy Dearest doesn’t really like that idea but it’s a special occasion. I have to eat them before they go bad you know. And the only way to do that is eat them fast!!

Cornell’s graduation was this weekend. I can’t fathom that my graduation happened ONE YEAR ago, because it feels like forever and ever ago…but I still wish I was back there frequently. Not that I don’t love being here, moving on with my life, the exciting things that are to come…but Cornell was an experience wonderful beyond words and I don’t think I’ll ever look back at it and not wish with at least part of myself that I could experience it again. (Minus the chemistry, that is) I see pictures on facebook from the people that are still there and I’m half jealous, half ridiculously excited for them that they still have so many awesome experiences ahead of them.
I sometimes worry that I’m gonna be one of those people who spend the rest of their lives wishing they were back in the ‘glory days’ of college…I hope I don’t end up like that. It’s sort of exciting though...because if the rest of my life tops how wonderful college was, it’s gonna be a good life. Even if it’s hard. Because college was hard, and I still feel a great deal of nostalgia towards it.

Anyway. The next step in the right-now journey is a church called ICC (International Christian Church, or Center, or something) that has a ministry for HIV/AIDs testing and counseling, called “Zinduka”. The new clinic is going there, and is set to open this weekend, we hope. Starting Thursday I’ll be going there, and next next week (as in the week of the 13^th) the Chicago team is coming to do a free clinic there as a grand opening/promotional sort of thing…then we safari! Get excited for that! Hopefully I will have awesome pictures to show you. :-D
as promised, I will now tell you whether Kathy, the woman I am living with for the 2 weeks I’m at Zinduka, is Kenyan or American.
She is Kenyan. :-P
And that is about all I know at this point, I’ll probably write again Thursday night to tell you all about the new setup. Toodles.

In which I ponder about perception of people and tonsils

Sooooo Remember I was writing about the kids’ tutor who said he believed everything but “I haven’t repented”? Well. On Sunday, as every Sunday, no matter what the sermon topic every Kenyan church I’ve been to has said “if anyone wants to get saved raise your hand”- kind of as an afterthought (albeit a sincere one) and this guy raised his hand and went up there and got saved. Ha! So I’d like to think my prodding helped him along that process just a little bit. :-P
(what was interesting to me was that the pastor then took like 10 minutes to talk about him to the church, while he was awkwardly standing up there, before praying…like “I know this kid, he has no dad, he repeated form 4 (equivalent of 12^th grade) twice to try and get better grades (the system here is, if you get a certain grade, the government will give you a huge scholarship towards university, but each field of study has certain grades you need…so think what happens is people repeat and retake the final exams until they get the grades they want.)and now he has Bs (up from a C+) and on and on…and I was thinking …I would NOT want all this information announced to the church, especially at a time like this. But I will call it a “cultural difference” and move on. :-P

Sunday I did my laundry again…ONLY enough clothes to last me until the weekend when I got back to Nairobi and live in a house with a washing machine for a few days (tee hee) BUT on Saturday I watched the kids do theirs and became significantly enlightened as to how I could do it better, and it was a much more pleasant experience than it had previously been.
Then I scrubbed this pair of sneakers I’ve been wearing through the mud since I got here and they got 27 shades lighter brown afterwards.

We are STILL picking the ends off green beans and cutting them up. But I like it so it doesn’t bother me. But what makes me sad is that they all get chopped up into tiny pieces. I think part of the goodness of a vegetable is lost when you just cut it into tiny pieces and mix it with rice. I’d like to bite a chunk out of a carrot, or have a mouthful of tomato instead of seeing that my rice is tinted red and thinking “there must have been tomato in here” ya know?

Someone brought a huge boom box to the house on Sunday, so there’s been music blasting from the radio LITERALLY from 6am until 10:30pm EVERY DAY since, except for from 7:30-9 which is designated study/homework time. As soon as 9(ish) hits and we pray for the food, the radio goes back on FULL BLAST and the kids all come alive. They dance down the hall, dance standing in line waiting to get their dinner, dance while they spoon themselves heaping platesfull of ugali, dance while they’re eating, and dance themselves into bed. It’s soooo funny.

This week at the clinic has been vomit week. Either people have instant dizziness-nausea-vomiting reactions to the antibiotic I just injected them with, or little kids cough themselves into throwing up, or they just..do. It’s lovely, let me tell you. Good thing I’m not a sympathetic vomiter…though there are few smells I dislike more.
Sometimes I think Naomi thinks I’m the stupidest person ever. It may come from the fact that I frequently ask her “what!?” when she says things, but that’s because I don’t understand which words she’s said because of her accent, not because I don’t know their meaning. Maybe she hasn’t realized that? She often asks me to do things I’ve already done, and then…doesn’t know what to do with herself, almost…when she sees I’ve done it “Write a lab request form for MPS” (malaria parasite) I say “I did it” and hand her the paper. She goes “oh…”. I don’t get it..like she can’t fathom how I could have been that perceptive as to write a lab request form when she tells the mom she wants to send the kid for a malaria test. I’ll be in the middle of wrapping the blood pressure cuff around someone’s arm when she tells me “Take the BP” …great, got it. I ask her “what’s the dosage for *insert name of medication here*?” and she tells me the name of the medication. I say “what’s the dosage?” but when all I’ve said is “what’s the” she starts saying the name again really slowly and annunciating each syllable. I say “I GOT THAT, WHAT IS THE DOSAGE!?” Ha!
We don’t communicate well. Whatever else is going on I don’t know, but I am certain of that. :-P
I was telling my mom, if this was a med school rotation I would have to try and figure out a way to deal with this … if I was getting evaluated I wouldn’t want her to think I was clueless. but since I’m here for such a short time and I have no actual responsibility, and there will be no evaluation, I don’t feel like trying to figure out how to fix it, and I will just deal with the possibility that she thinks I’m stupid.

It also amazes me how difficult it has been to get a few specific kids to open their mouths to see if their tonsils are inflamed. Some of them are terrified you’re going to give them a shot …(with a tongue depressor? ?In the back of the throat!?...but to a 4-year old there is no such logic of course) and others are too sick and lethargic to make much of an effort…so the mouth opens like 2cm and you can’t see anything but the tongue. The tongue depressor is good for…depressing the tongue…but if the mouth won’t open it doesn’t help much, except to serve as something for the feisty kids to bite. So yesterday I actually put on a glove and used the “scissor finger” method they taught us in EMT class to open an unconscious person’s mouth to check if the airway was clear, to further open the mouth of this kid who was making a very unsuccessful effort to open his mouth. But apparently he decided after that, that he didn’t want his mouth open any farther, and tried to clamp it shut. Apparently I have a strong thumb because I won that battle. His tonsils weren’t even inflamed. Ha.
However TODAY there were FOUR people trying to get this one kid to open his mouth. He was resisting. Mom was holding his upper body and tilting his head back, aunt was keeping him from kicking the doctor who was holding the tongue depressor and flashlight, and I was holding his nose closed so he was forced to open his mouth (thanks Mom and Dad for teaching me that one…through telling stories of trying to force medicine down my throat when I was that age)…it was a circus in there. The poor kid was miserably sick and deathly afraid of everything in the clinic…including the scale.
I often wish I could get inside other people’s heads and understand what on EARTH they are thinking sometimes. :-P

Back to Naomi thinking I’m stupid (maybe) I’ve been thinking about this…Being here has sort of freed me to do completely whatever I want. In American society I always feel like I’m being watched and judged, and I act accordingly. Everyone says “I don’t care what people think” but the truth is we all do to some extent…and we act or dress or cover up our flaws accordingly. Here, I KNOW I’m being watched, and probably also judged, but I know anything people think is strange about me can just be chalked up to me being American, and so I don’t care. I can truly embrace the “I’m never going to see half of these people again” and make a fool of myself without feeling like a fool. I wear the most ridiculous outfits because it’s WARMER to wear sneakers and leggings with a skirt than no leggings and sandals. And when my shoes were wet I didn’t care that I went to ‘work” in filp-flops and socks, or that in the morning I shower and forget to even try to do anything with my hair. I say and do whatever weird little things I want and don’t mind the confused looks…maybe because I know I would get them no matter what I did. When I try to blend in (like hand-washing my clothes) they laugh at me and think it’s funny…so I might as well also run around the yard in circles every night, eat the small amount that I like to, sit with my legs curled up under me, etc…because no matter what I’m a strange creature to the people I’m surrounded by. Hence why I don’t care that Naomi thinks I’m stupid, and I even often play dumb to get out of awkward situations, or give myself time to think of a reason why I can’t go into town with pastor’s 25-year old nephew who also wanted to come to the house to taste my chapati (which is, like the number one requirement for marriage- you have to make good chapati)
So while I’m here I am for once completely free of all cares about what people think. Be jealous. Maybe when I get back home I’ll do the same thing and I will tell myself that people are justifying my weirdness with “She just spent the last 6 months in Africa” as opposed to the current “She’s American”.

This is getting long but I HAVE to tell you about my DREAM the other day! It was the best dream ever and when I woke up it still felt real and good and not like “oh no, it was just a dream and now I am sad and disappointed” because the thing I got that I wanted was not something you carry away with you and enjoy later like a new car, or whatever. I had a dream that I met my mom and dad and brother and sister and both sets of grandparents at some show…somewhere..and I don’t know why. But in the course of this evening I specifically remember giving my mom and dad both the best longest hugs ever and sitting on Mom’s lap for like 10 minutes. (I never sit on her lap. Idk why this was in my head other than I’ve seen a lot of sick kids snuggling on their mom’s laps the past couple of weeks and it put the idea in my head) It was wonderful and when I woke up I really felt like I’d recently gotten a hug from them. J The human brain is fascinating what it can do.

In which I make 78 chapati and pick the ends of 30000000 green beans

I’ve been keeping this suuuper detailed journal of basically everything I can think of over this trip. About once per month I get sick of writing in it and get really slacking for a couple of days. This is that time. So instead of writing in the journal I decided to write a blog post…because typing is so much easier than writing stuff out, especially when my pen gets moody and decides to go back and forth between behaving and being a headache.

So as you can see, the world did not end, so we all live on. I am going to tell you two things that are seemingly unrelated, and then I will connect them for you…. 1. It’s the thing to do here, in Christian circles, to begin every semi-public episode of speaking with “Praise the Lord” (everyone says “amen”) and then “I am saved” or “I love Jesus Christ as my personal savior” and then you say what you actually wanted to say. 2. There is this guy who comes to the house every night to help the kids with their homework. The connection is Friday we were having the Bible study, and before the Bible study everyone is supposed to share a small something…a verse, or sometimes they sing a song…whatever they want. So this guy says “praise God” (“amen”) “I am not saved, but I believe in Christ” and then went on. So while we were eating dinner later I said “I’m confused…explain to me what you believe that you believe Jesus is Christ but don’t consider yourself “saved”” so he told me that he believes Jesus is the son of God, and part of the trinity equal with God, and that He died for our sins…and that he himself is a sinner (the guy, not Jesus…:-P) but “I haven’t repented”. I don’t understand how or why one would believe these things but not take the very small but gravely important next step of official acceptance of that forgiveness. What is he waiting for? I always assumed the thing separating people from that decision was usually a lack of belief, not a present belief but apathy towards making a decision? Maybe it isn’t, or maybe it’s just this guy.
I told him the world very well might end tomorrow so he’d best make a decision soon, but he didn’t and the world didn’t. So today I told him God gave him another day to make that choice, but the whole thing doesn’t seem to weigh much on his mind. I can’t fathom that, but it’s his choice.

Friday was AWESOME in the clinic…medically. AWFUL non-medically. Warning this paragraph talks about small children and their 2^nd and 3^rd degree burns.
As in, two little kids came in with really bad burns, from separate unrelated occurrences. I was expecting a third because medical things are supposed to come in threes but there wasn’t.
The first was a 4 year old boy with a 3-day-old burn all up the outside of his left leg. On the calf was maybe 2 square inches of 3^rd degree burn, and the thigh had 3 or 4 of 2^nd degree. So we peeled off the skin and scab and gooped on silver sulfadiazine (I still love that word) and paraffin gauze and wrapped him up. What was strange was that he was wearing a pink dress (it’s not unusual to see little boys here in very girly clothes or shoes…the cultural connotation of ruffles and pink and “cutie” or “princess” written on clothes making them girly is non-existent here …but the boys don’t wear dresses. That wasn’t thaaaat weird because he did have this burn and who wants to wear pants with the whole side of your leg is burned? But his toenails were painted. That I’ve never seen on a male here. Oh well.
Burn number two was a 3-yr old girl, this burn was veeery recent. I think she somehow got boiling water spilled all over her ankles. I don’t know how this happened, but her toes are completely fine (thankfully) but the tops of her feet, 360 deg. around her ankle, and the heel just up to the bottom of the foot have no skin. It just all peeled off and was sitting wrapped around the bottom of her ankle like baggy socks. So we had to cut it off, which as you can imagine was highly unpleasant for the poor girl. Awful for her, but medically intriguing. So she also got gooped (or “ooged” as Heidi likes to call it…) and gauzed and sent home. She came back today for a bandage change which she enjoyed equally as much as the original I’m sure.
Oh PS both episodes, neither kid had any painkillers. They both got ibuprofen to take at home. It is beyone me why they don’t get something stronger, at least for the part where we go poking around their open wounds and peeling off their skin, ya know?

Soooo today was also fantastic. It was raining this morning so for a while we had no patients in the clinic, and I remembered that I have the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings on my ipod, so I watched the Fellowship and the first quarter of the Two Towers…that was fun. J
Then I got home and some people were doing laundry outside while others were picking the stems off massive amounts of string beans, then cutting them into tiny pieces to freeze. So I sat down and started taking the ends off, and did that for a while before the post that holds up the clotheslines decided it did not like being pulled by 3 full ropes in 1 direction and 1 perpendicular to it, and fell down. So a bunch of us ran to pull it back up…I ended up climbing halfway up the post and hanging off it to keep it taught…for like 10 minutes…while they dug the bottom 2-feet that was buried in the ground and broke off…out of the ground. That was fun. :-P Then (after 3 brilliant ideas by Danielle..after each of which Simon said “I am using my brains!” (and I said “no, you’re using MY brains. :-P))they got the bottom of the post out and put the rest back in the hole. It was still leaning so then we had to jam some stones and other stuff into the hole to make it stay up….then we used the 2 feet that had been in the ground to support the post in the direction it had originally fallen.
I don’t know if ANY of that made sense to you, just from reading it…I hope so. The point is, my Daddy should be proud of my engineering skills today.

Then I made 78 chapati. (in case you forgot/never knew, chapati are flat, round bread-things…sort of like tortillas but with 500 times more oil and therefore 500 times tastier.) It was quite laborious, but I was complimented on being a quick learner…apparently the last mzungu MammaAlice tried to teach this art (it truly is an art) to failed miserably. We made dough in the usual way…water, flour, sugar, salt…and then kneaded it in a flat-bottomed basin using our fists to basically punch the dough into being mixed. There were 5kg of flour, so it was a lot of dough. Then we made the chapati the same way I made it last time and told you about it, but I was a much more active participant this time. The key, I learned, is to keep flipping it over and make sure it’s well floured, so the middle of the ball of dough doesn’t stick to the table… otherwise its harder to make it into a perfect circle. At first I was telling MammaAlice that she must be magical because hers seemed to just WANT to be circles, while mine wanted to be either amorphous or square. Eventually I figured out the flipping and flouring thing and it was better. Then I moved to the cooking them part, which always scares me because I have an extremely low tolerance for heat (right Heidi!?!?) and they often just grab them off the grill with their fingers. So a couple times I almost dropped it on the floor and one time had to use my leg to hold the rolled-out chapati because I had to readjust my hands so many times because I was scared I wasn’t gonna get the right angle to drop it onto the cast iron disc they’re cooked on. That one had a corner…so I ate it. :-P

Then we had dinner and I ate 2 chapati and spent more time picking the ends off green beans. I really had no need for another 2 chapati but I love them so I am full tonight. Which I figure is allowed since I’ve been avoiding being stuffed very well lately.
Thankfully, most of the beans are getting frozen so we might be able to stop eating them twice a day every day like I’ve been doing for the past 5 days.

My last blog post ever...if the world is going to end on Saturday, that is.

GET EXCITED!
In case you are not one of the TWENTY FOUR people who liked my facebook status informing people of this, I will tell you.
I have decided to do a masters of biomedical science starting this August.
I got an email from them Wednesday night saying I they reached a decision. So of course the email took like 4 minutes longer than it should have to load. I read it and saw it was just telling me to go to the application website to find my decision. SOOOO I went there and saw where it said “application status: submitted” and I don’t know WHY but that made my heart skip a bead with dread. Maybe because it’s such an institutional sort of phrase it felt like a “no”? But then I realized that that phrase meant nothing to me, and scrolled down to the place where there was a link to find out your decision. I clicked on that and it loaded me a PDF letter saying “we are pleased to inform you….”. I did a small happy dance (very small...I didn’t even stand up) and then called my mom. I realized it was Thursday so she wouldn’t pick up her phone because she’d be at work. Then I realized it actually wasn’t Thursday and she would pick up her phone. Which she did, and she was excited. Then I called my Dad and he was excited too. So while I was on the phone with him I decided to just stop prolonging the inevitable and do the online acceptance of the acceptance.

Because for the past couple of days I’ve reeeeeeally been leaning towards this program because…
1. 45 minutes to my house makes weekends, laundry, home-cooked dinners, brother’s athletic events, family birthdays, etc. SO easy to get home for.
2. Trimesters give me the opportunity to get grades out a month earlier than a semester system would
3. Guaranteed on-campus housing for that program
4. You take 4 of the 6 1^st-year med school programs, and then get the opportunity to test out of them and TA them if you go to the med school next year
5. And some other things but those are the big decision-makers.
As you see, the first thing on my mind really was being close to home..enough that I could just be there whenever I wanted to. Because after living 7 time zones away for 6 months, I really love that idea.

So orientation is the end of the 1^st week in August, and we start classes early, right after that. I might end up missing orientation or part of it to go to a friend’s wedding in North Carolina, but I’m so excited for the wedding and seeing the original old Cornell gang again that I don’t really care. J

The clinic:
There was a guy who came in moaning in pain holding his eyes and stomping his feet from pain. I thought he had something IN his eye but it turns out he was welding, and looked at that REALLY BRIGHT light the welding machine or whatever it’s called makes…the one my dad has informed me 5000 times that I shouldn’t look at or I could burn my retina. Welcome to Kenya, where OSHA doesn’t care if you wear goggles or not while welding. Because some other guy came in the next day with some eye issues because he’d gotten shrapnel in his eye a few weeks ago, had it removed, but was still having problems with pain and watering. WEAR GOGGLES!
There was a baby who had a seizure in the clinic…which was common for the baby, who’d gotten meningitis and since then has had a seizure…but I was on the other side of the curtain at just the WRONG time and only heard it and didn’t see it. When I went back in the room one of his eyes was rolling around not like the other one.
There was another lady that day who had pneumonia, typhoid, AND an amoeba. She got a LOT of drugs.
Speaking of, I think they overprescribe antibiotics here. They make sure they tell people to finish the doses otherwise you can create resistance, but I really don’t think half the things they give antibiotics for need antibiotics. Sometimes just the allergy meds are enough, ya know!?
There was a 46 yr. old woman who had not gotten her period for 8 years and then all of a sudden it came back..with a vengeance…the day she came into the clinic
Then there were these people who came and sat on the bench outside the clinic. I stuck my head out and told them to come in, they said they were just gonna wait a minute. Naomi was like “they just want to rest a little before they come in, it’s ok” and I laughed because I cannot picture anyone in the US intentionally waiting longer than they had to for…anything, and certainly not to see a doctor.
So after a full HOUR they left, came back, and finally came in. While I was asking the woman her name and such, a woman came in and went to the lab in the back, Jonah came in and ushered the sick woman into the lab, and me and Rachel and Naomi out of the clinic. I’m like ummmm what is going on?
Apparently this woman is HIV+, her husband is a drunkard, and she had a baby that died. I don’t know if it was stillborn, or died shortly after birth from AIDS, or lived a while and then died, but this whole thing was an intervention to get her to talk to a counselor.
I don’t know under what premise they got her to the clinic, because she’d been refusing to get out of bed, but we all just wandered around the church compound for a while and when we got back they were gone, so I don’t know what happened there, but that’s a sad, tough situation. :-/

Yesterday I got the following information from Danny:
I am leaving Limuru next weekend, the 28^th-ish. I’ll go stay at their house for a couple of days until June 2^nd, when I will go stay with someone named Kathy for 2 weeks while I work at the new clinic that’s being built. The 2^nd week of that stay there’s going to be a team from Chicago coming to do a week-long free clinic at the new site, so I’ll be involved in that. Then that weekend (June 19^th-ish) We are all going on a Safari! WOO HOO! And then I will come back and I think work at the other clinic in Nairobi for a couple of weeks before a team from Australia comes and we go camping in the REMOTE bush in the middle of nowhere in the desert of northern Kenya. I’ve been told by another Kenyan “the people up there are so primitive they don’t even wear clothes” should be an interesting “last hurrah” experience, because a week after that I LEAVE to come back HOME.
now…it’s still 2 months away, but the fact/realization that I can break up the rest of my time here into a few short chunks of time (2 weeks here, 2 weeks there, la de da) makes it seem SO close!
This is one of those times of life where I have to concentrate on the right now because there are still SO MANY more awesome experiences to have each day before I get to the big things like the safari and camping in the bush and coming home.
Also, apparently Kathy is a missions administrator…I don’t know if she’s a missionary or Kenyan…I’ve not heard the name Kathy here so I think she’s American but I don’t know. I’ll let you all know when I find out. :-P

Yesterday and today when the light got turned on at 6am when the kids woke up, I had the same thought: “I am facing up. Why am I facing up?” (wed) or “See!? (I don’t know WHO I was telling to “see…)I’m facing up again. Why am I on my back?”(today). I don’t know 1. Why I keep winding up on my back when I cannot ever remember waking up on my back before…especially when I can never fall asleep while lying on my back no matter how tired I am and 2. How I actually have the presence of mind to notice and wonder about these things in such a state. Although maybe my “such a state” is why I wonder about these things. I am so strange…

If the world ends on Saturday this will probably have been my last blog post, so I hope you enjoyed it. If not, I might just make another post on Saturday night, depending on how eventful the day is.
Today I was told “you white people say crazy things” because the guy who was on the news trying to convince the world that we were going to end was white. I didn’t disagree with her, because I have heard some crazy things come out of white people’s mouths. :-p

In which I get STUFF in the MAIL, and eat it.

For once my Saturday wasn’t a huge adventure. I quite enjoyed it, actually. For one thing, the weather decided it would be GORGEOUS again, and whenever we didn’t have a patient in the clinic I sat outside and even got a little bit of a sunburn. It was awesome.

What was not awesome is that I missed my Daddy’s birthday. I talked to him on the phone for a while but then he started getting yelled at because he hadn’t gotten in the shower yet. When I called the house to say happy birthday I was told he was in the shower, and talked to my Grandma, whose birthday it also was, and my Grandpa, and my sister while waiting for him to get out. Then Emmy went to see if he was done and he was still not even in. The same thing had actually had happened a couple of weeks ago. Obviously, I get my tendency to procrastinate from my father. I love you!

Recently in the clinic I’ve seen:
A lady with a 1cm diameter, 1cm deep hole on her inner right shin from getting pricked by a poisonous thorn…I love to watch peroxide bubble inside a wound. :-P
and (well this one I heard) a guy with really bad pneumonia, it was all over both of his lungs. This one was a good learning case. I FINALLY figured out WHAT Naomi has been saying, relative to the way things are already labeled in my mind. She’s been talking about “crepitations” and I couldn’t figure out what she was referring to by them. I’ve heard many times there are ONLY three official lung sounds: rales, ronchi, and wheeze. At first I thought she was using crepitations for ronchi, and then I thought it was rales. And she said something about putting the stethoscope on your hair, and paper. She said “when you put it on your hair, that’s the cause, and when you put it on paper, it’s the finding” and I’m like…what on earth does that mean? That doesn’t make any sense to me. If hair is the cause why are we listening to the cause with a stethoscope? If we can hear it, isn’t that the finding? And since when do the lungs get hairy? I know there’s those tiny cilia…but you can’t hear THEM, they’re microscopic and only in the trachea!?!?
So we got this pneumonia patient and I hear that “something is not right” as Miss Clavelle would say. So she asks me “how is the chest?” I said “I don’t know what to call it. It sounds hollow and echo-y” and she listened and said it was crepitations. And I am like….ok. Explain this whole thing to me again because I don’t know what you’re talking about. After a few minutes of her talking and me asking questions I finally figured out that she was saying hair is COARSE crepitatins and paper is FINE crepitations. AHA! (Gotta love accents…) Now I don’t know why she calls either of them crepitations, maybe it’s just the British system way of referring to rales, which is what you’re supposed to hear with pneumonia…but anyway, it’s been figured out and now I know what she’s calling things for future reference.
At least I know when there’s a problem? Knowing what exactly to call it is a special bonus I guess. :-p
We’ve had several people with malaria, typhoid, and intestinal amoeba…
Oh yeah, and there is a man who had a stroke and Naomi goes to his house (like 5 minute walk away) every 2 weeks to change his urinary catheter so I went with her this time. It was my first time walking around in bright daylight so I quite enjoyed the walk. For some reason the lab tech and the pastor who keeps the books came with us, and when we got back everyone else was winded. I’m thinking….it’s a 5 minute walk. So I asked how far she usually walks to work? About 20-30 minutes. So why was this walk winding? She said she thought it was the speed we were walking. So that I guess is the secret to the African ability to walk everywhere you need to go…you just walk as slow as you feel like, and you can do it forever. Also why nobody arrives on time for anything. :-P

Mentioning Naomi’s accent reminded me of this: There are many different Kenyan accents, depending on which tribe they are from and which language is their mother tongue. Most of the time I’ve been among people from the Kikuyu tribe (they are the most common people in this area of Kenya) so I’ve gotten used to their accent. Their English is difficult to understand because Kikuyu doesn’t differentiate between the letters “l” and “r”. So they will say “blight” when they mean “bright” and you can’t tell when they mean “load” or “road” except by context. Until you get used to it you have to take a minute and wonder what they mean before you get it. But I’ve gotten used to, whenever I hear something that doesn’t make sense, stick an l or r wherever they put the other, and often that does the trick. Naomi’s accent is different because she is a Kisi, and I haven’t gotten used to her particular “dialect” of English yet, I guess. In Naivasha Nancy was telling me there’s one tribe whose language doesn’t differentiate between p and b…and so it goes on.

When I left Nairobi a couple weeks ago, I knew I had some packages in the post office but couldn’t get them before I left. So today, Danny brought them up to Limuru when he had another errand to run. I love you guys. J
Package 1 was from the Pandolfos and package 2 was from Danielle at Cornell with cards from several of my chi alphans and I love every one of you because you all make me smile and laugh and just made my day. My taste buds are thrilled at little tastes of America. Also, I don’t think anyone around here has seen a marshmallow before, especially not in the form of a Peep, so it was really fun to watch the kids eat those.

Chi Alphans you make me laugh, a lot, and a giant piece of me is in Ithaca still, wishing I was having illegal bonfires with you guys. And here is a shout out to Justin Kerekes. Does it diminish the shout-out if I mention that you asked for it? Sorry if it does…I guess it’s too late. :-P I’ll make up for it by saying kudos to you for writing TWO cards. Though one was mostly about Jon. I was about to say I miss watching you two torture each other, but really it only goes one way.

Anyway, so as much joy as it brings me to get tastes of home, it makes me MISS everyone a lot. I see stuff on facebook from the people who are still at Cornell, or my family members, and I almost get mad that I’m not there because I feel like I should be there! If it didn’t cost a bazillion dollars and wouldn’t set me back another 4 years in my life plans I would go back and get another degree from Cornell in Italian or something, just so I could be there longer. :-P

Anyway.
This is a good time to announce that since it’s past May 12^th there are officially less than 2 months left in this journey. If a few specific people would move to Kenya I would never want to leave this place but because they’re in the US, I am excited to go home…but still very, very much looking forward to the rest of the adventures in store for me here. J

Also, I just ate a whole pack of fruit snacks. Not the little kid-sized ones. The big, Welches ones like you see in vending machines. I don’t think it was healthy but it was delicious.

In which I cut and eat someone else's birthday cake?!

Remember how I mentioned that I washed my clothes on Sunday afternoon? Yeah well my sweatshirts were not dry until Thursday morning. That’s almost 4 days. It’s cold here, and really damp.
EXCEPT for today, which was sunny and warm and gorgeous. I think because one of the missionaries brought a team of 20 people from Texas here, and God knew they wouldn’t a. have a good time or b. be able to handle the cold and rain if it was like it usually is. :-P It was nice for me to see them, among them was the missionary I met at the World Missions Summit in December 2009. He’s been back in the US for a year and just came here with this team for the couple weeks. They got a tour and I tagged along since I never got an official tour of the place. I learned something very interesting.

There’s a gas stove in the kitchen (this I knew) , fueled by….cow manure. (this I did not know.) Apparently a few years ago the missionaries did a project where they dug a huge put and put in a huge tank. Into this tank they throw a few buckets of cow manure every day, and the bacteria break it down into methane, which is piped into the house to fuel the stove. Apparently all you have to do is mix it with water to get the right consistency and in it goes. The next step is to use it to heat water for the house. They’re also in the infant planning stage of getting a system like this for human waste in the slum of Mathare in Nairobi. THAT would be awesome. It would solve the waste problem, as well as help with the deforestation problem Kenya is facing as tree after tree is cut down for cooking fires. (they don’t build with wood, termites are way too abundant).

Thursday afternoon we found out that the above mentioned Americans were coming so there was some frantic thorough cleaning done. The good thing about not being able tobuild with wood is that everything is made with concrete, which is extremely washable. The kids just got a bucket and started washing the windows and the walls with soapy water and a rag. It all dripped on the floor and was used to wash the floor. To rinse, they threw cups of non-soapy water at the walls. I tried to picture myself doing that in my house but all that image brought about was how much trouble I’d be in when my mom caught me dumping water all over her hardwood floors. :-P
I spent almost 2 hours with a wad of steel wool scraping the goop from the smoke off the metal window bars in the kitchen. They were black where they used to be (and now are) yellow. One of the boys was scrubbing the smog off the formerly-yellow-but-recently-black-and-currently-yellow-again walls, the contrast was ridiculous. And I still have steel dust or something in my nail beds from that, but it was fun. You know, scraping and peeling, my specialties

Thursday evening I had my interview with one of the masters programs, and it went well, I think. I was really antsy for it to start while I was waiting for them to skype me but wasn’t really nervous. There was nothing special about the interview itself, it was just the questions you’d expect. We talked a little bit about my predicament with trying to make the timing of re-applying work so that I don’t have to take an extra year off, and they gave me hope for 2 reasons…1 being that this program has trimesters, which would get me a transcript a full month earlier than any other program if I did it, and 2 was that in general, their school and they thought other schools, would have no problem delaying a decision about my application until I could get in a first-semester transcript. This is a slight disadvantage because the general feeling is the earlier the better, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take to avoid another year off. So I now have even more information that I’m not sure how to act on. God give me wisdom pleeeeeeeease and thank you!

I’d been invited to the pastor’s house for dinner Thursday night…but they didn’t ask until Thursday at like 6. So I told his nephew, who invited me, that I couldn’t because of this interview. He told me he could carry my laptop to the house for me. …. … … I tried several times to explain to him that that wasn’t the problem, my laptop was very small and it wasn’t a problem to carry it, it was a problem to be eating dinner with a group of people when I needed to have a quiet room to talk to the people in.
Apparently he didn’t tell the pastor that, because 10 minutes before the interview started he knocked on my door and said “why don’t we go” and I said “where?” and he said to his house for dinner. So I told him about the interview, and that I’d told his nephew…he was never given the memo. Ok sorry, maybe some other time. Great.
Then I finished and went out into the living room, and a few minutes later the nephew shows up carrying two casserole dishes FULL of food. They said if I couldn’t go there to eat it, they would bring the food to me. Hahaha. So I was (surprisingly and thankfully) assured by MamaAlice that I didn’t have to eat ALL of it, so I took what I wanted. I also learned just about that time, that the day was pastor’s birthday. The guy looks about 40 but he turned 60 yesterday. So along with bringing me dinner, I was brought a heart-shaped cake with rock-solid frosting that said “happy birthday”. I still don’t understand why he gave me the cake. So after dinner I cut it into 14 pieces, which was a feat because how do you divide a heart-shape into equal sizes? And everyone ate some. I guess he wanted me to have a piece of his birthday cake that bad? I don’t know. (To those who were in Kenya with me the last time, it was the same deal as my birthday cake was…not-very-sweet-cake inside with rock-solid brightly-colored frosting like a shell over it.) So that was interesting. Apparently visitor status is even greater than “its my birthday” status (Emmy you can have a heart attack now. :-P)
The really awesome thing about yesterday though was I had a chapati at every meal. One at breakfast (dipped in fried egg, like last time), 2 at lunch, and 1 with dinner. Score, 4 in one day!

I’ve been slacking on my running lately because it’s been rainy and I’ve been cold (yes, I know, running makes you warmer….) so I think I’m going to go do that now.

Update: the blog website was down so this was written Friday evening but posted Sat. afternoon

I dont feel like coming up with a title for this one. Just read it. :-P

Soooo last you heard it was Sunday. Give me a minute while I think about what I did on Sunday.
Well first I went to church. Actually, first I sat on the couch in the living/dining room for a full hour writing in my journal while I waited for everyone else to be ready, then we went to church.

I was supposed to speak to the kids before they split into their Sunday school groups, but since we were almost 2 hours late, and everyone else was apparently only 1.5 hours late, we missed the time when they’re together. So I ended up talking to just the little kids, which was bad because if I had to pick one group it would have been better for slightly older kids to hear, but whatever I made the best of it.
Today the senior pastor asked me to speak to the young adults class on Sunday…and even though I’d already told someone else that I didn’t want to, I couldn’t think of a good excuse on the spot to give to the pastor. So once again his reason was not that anyone thought I had any good word from God to talk to these people about, he told me he wants me to talk to them so they can hear someone from another country speak. Awesome. I’m so valuable as a fun new toy…it doesn’t matter what I do, I just need to stand there and look…white. He seems to think my telling them “I want to be a doctor and that entails being in school for a long time” will inspire mid-20s girls to not abandon their life goals and marry the wrong person just to be married sooner, and that man will abandon them and their kids in a few years. I wouldn’t put that much weight on my influence….

Anyway…There was a pastor visiting from Uganda (I miss Heidi) and he was quite funny. He was reeeally short, and just had really funny mannerisms, and couldn’t decide whether he would speak in English or Swahili (which he learned from Tanzania, cuz most Ugandans don’t speak Swahili) He wanted a DVD player to play a CD so he could sing for us, because he’s made a CD, but there wasn’t one ready. So he started preaching, going back and forth between English and Swahili, until the senior pastor got up and asked another pastor to come up. The visiting guy, David, goes “why, does he have a DVD player?” Pastor says “no, to interpret for you” Haha. Because half the congregation doesn’t know English. He mostly preached in English and had the translation in Swahili, which he chose over Kikuyu, the local language, because he wanted to know what the interpreter was saying. Apparently one day he was being translated and the translator had a big problem with the congregation and used that opportunity to give a message about his issues with the church instead of translating David’s message. Afterwards people were angry and he was confused until he found out why. :-P
Every now and then he’d correct the translation. “no, what I said was…” or, he’d start talking in Swahili, and the other pastor would translate to English. It was like a circus. :-P He was speaking about "where your treasure is, there your heart will be" At the end he told everyone that if they came up and promised to help pastor fix the car that I told you about, with the clutch problem, that he guaranteed God would give them whatever they had been asking God for, this was the reason they weren’t getting it- because they weren’t putting their treasure in God’s work aka the pastor.
Now…I’m all for the idea of the church coming together to help the pastor fix his car, and blessing the pastor…but for someone to say “I know my God, and I guarantee” that God will do anything you want…that is a bold statement, and one I don’t agree with much. We don’t know God’s will. God has reasons completely beyond our understanding for moving or not moving. God could be waiting for one of 20000 other reasons before he does what someone’s been praying for. Maybe what they’re praying for isn’t even in God’s will and he is planning on never doing that thing. We just don’t know, and THAT is faith. “God I want this, but if you don’t want me to have it now, or not ever, then that’s really want I want, so do what you want” is so much better than “Lets make a deal. I’ll give money to the pastor, and since I’ve proved myself to you, now prove yourself to me”. Meh.

Theeeeeen I came home and had lunch, and decided it was time to do some laundry.
I hate laundry.
I have always hated laundry.
I especially hate it when I have to hand-wash things and my forearm muscles get exhausted from wringing things out so many times, and no matter how many times I rinse things out I can’t seem to get the soap out of them, and I can’t really rinse them as many times as I’d like because the water in the house cut out for a day so it had to be carried in buckets into the house from the tank outside…..so I think my clothes are clean…there is definitely enough soap still in them that they at least smell clean. :-P The sweatshirts take at least 48 hours to dry in this cold dampness, so I had to be careful to save one sweatshirt and not wear it until laundry time so it would be clean at least until the other 2 dried.

at one point I left the last thing, a pair of jeans, soaking to give my hands a break and called my various mothers for mothers day. One of the girls said she wanted to help so I allowed her to go wring out those jeans. It took about 30 seconds but it was nice not to have to do that myself. :-P
Then we were playing around outside, and I was teaching some of the kids how to do cartwheels, which was highly amusing…even spotted a couple of back walkovers…and by “spotted”, I mean, I did all the work and they just let me throw their legs over their heads. Oh well. :-P

Then I STILL don’t know why, but MammaAlice came outside running and laughing (and she is a big lady) and we were all like …what? So we followed her, running. (the kids ALWAYS want to run now…every evening they’re like “Daniela, are you running today!?” ) anyway. Someone said she was going to the store so 6 or 7 of us decided to follow her. It was pretty dusky outside but I just followed the crowd of kids and we got THE funniest looks from people on the street…to see a mzungu running through the streets of the tiny little town with a group of kids…it even made me laugh. So somewhere we lost MammaAlice and it was just the kids, we would up at Pastor’s house but he wasn’t home so we said hi to his daughter and ran back. I don’t know what possessed us to do it, but it was funny. When we got back I changed into my usual running attire and actually ran for 20 minutes like usual, with my usual companions. Then we ate dinner and went to bed, I guess.

Oh, AND, in between writing the Saturday blog post and actually posting it, the water went back on. So I only had one day of bucket showering before I was blessed again with an overhead stream.

Today there were basically NO patients (actually, there were like 5 but they were all really quick in-and-out “I just need my blood pressure checked” sort of things) and we were all bored out of our minds all day. I think I spent the ENTIRE day playing free cell on the old desktop computer they have. Is it bad that I don’t even remember if I did anything else all day? Maybe a few games of solitaire. Anyway. The computer has a good stock of worship music and sermons that came from I don’t know where, and the pastor turned on a sermon in the morning and it just went through the playlist…so I heard like 6 sermons today all by the same guy. Which was actually nice, because I really liked the pastor and it felt like home to hear an American accent and all these American cultural allusions…I kept thinking “I don’t know why these Kenyans have this pastor on here, they probably miss half the illustrations and all the jokes because they’re so cultural”. But for me it was good.

The lack of wood stove in the house has allowed me to spend a lot more time out and about in the house hanging out with the kids, helping them do whatever little things they’re doing, and being more accessible…I can tell they’re more comfortable and familiar with me even after 2 days of it, and I like that a lot. Only downside is it’s colder now that the stove isn’t pumping heat into the rest of the house along with the smoke. I think I’ll take being cold over lung cancer though. Slightly colder than comfortable doesn’t cause damage, smoking KILLS. :-P

In which I spend an afternoon harvesting potatoes, and kill a chicken (my present from the owner of the potatoes!)

So, like I said in the last post, Saturday was both awesome and full.
It started out with an interesting breakfast. I’ve eaten LOTS of chapati here…even some for breakfast. I’ve eaten lots of eggs here, some fried, and for breakfast. So when MammaAlice told me she was going ot make me an egg and chapo, I thought I would get an egg, and she would then heat up the chapo she was holding at the moment. When she handed me the place I saw that I was wrong. There was fried egg stuck to the middle of both sides of the chapo. I guess she put it on top of the egg while it was cooking and then flipped it over? Idunno. I’ve never seen that before, but it tasted good, so no complaints. J

Sooo then I went to the clinic. We never have any patients in the first hour, (it’s too COLD to leave your house unless you HAVE to) so I decided to play with the lab’s microscope, since the lab tech wasn’t there. I took a slide, a toothpick, and scraped some cheek cells out of my mouth and put them on the slide. I let it dry then stained and counterstained it and let it dry again, then stuck it under the microscope, went up to the oil immersion lens which I believe is 125x? I forget. but I saw my cheek cells and it was awesome. Then I tried something that I wasn’t sure would work, but it DID- I stuck my camera up to the lens, zoomed in, and got a picture of my cheek cells. Pretty cool. I showed Naomi and Pastor Jonah but I don’t think they were as impressed with me as I was with myself. :-P

We had maybe 3 patients before I was told that Pastor Simon wanted to take me…somewhere. I didn’t know where it was or what we would do there, nor did I remember the name 4 seconds after Pastor Jonah told me, so I wasn’t particularly excited. So he came and wanted his blood pressure checked, so I did that and then we left. I found out we were going to visit his mom, who is 85 and absolutely adorable and still quite active and he looks juuuust like her.
Before we got to his mom’s house, we went to visit pastor’s farm, about a half hour up HIGHER into the mountains. Somehow, this 27-year-old car has an altimeter, which reads ~2100meters in Limuru but got up to 2500m on the way to the farm. There is a woman named Ann who lives on the farm and is paid to take care of it and run it for pastor. We had lunch at the farm and I took some pictures because it was GORGEOUS up there- SO green, with tiny lakes here and there, puddles and mini-rivers along the road and in all the low spots in the fields…I loved it. In the house was a calendar with 10 different pictures of Obama next to a poster of Obama that said “from Kisumu to the President of the United States of America” with a bunch of pictures of him, one of which was a one dollar bill with HIS FACE on it INSTEAD of George Washington! Blasphemy! :-P So I took some pictures of THAT. The house was made of planks of wood not quite touching each other, going vertically, and tarp on the inside to make the wall continuous. The sleeping room shared a wall with the sitting room but you had to go outside to go from one room to the other, and the kitchen was a few feet away. There was an outhouse sufficiently far away. They have a few hectares of land and grow mostly potatoes, so we took a sack of potatoes with us when we went on our way. The village is called Njabini- which is the Kikuyu word for the sound you make when you squish through wet grass- that’s how much rain they get there. Pastor said it gets the most rain of anywhere in the country, or close to it.

So then we went on our way to the village Pastor’s mom lives in, called Mukiere- which means “one who wakes up early” apparently because the men used to wake up early to go to this place and sleep during the day. Ha! Pastor said, and I’ve noticed it too, that in Kenya, the women do the hard work. It’s common to see men alone or in small groups sitting on the side of the road, lying under a tree, etc. but you never see a woman relaxing. They are always at work in the shamba weeding or planting or harvesting, or if they’re on the side of the road they’re walking carrying some huge burden. I didn’t even really think about it that much until pastor mentioned it, but it’s true.
Anyway. The clutch on the 27-year old car decided to stop working on and off on the last road before his mom’s house and we juuuust made it to the gate to her house/farm when it completely died. We stopped the car and got out to open the gate, then when Pastor tried to drive the car through the gate it wouldn’t go, so we just left it there. We met his mom, who as I have said is adorable and old but active, despite her hard life of being one of two wives to an alcoholic, and raising 7 children (the other wife had 8) At some point we wandered outside, I made friends with a calf who licked my hand but didn’t step on my toe this time. I saw a cow with a ring through its nose for the first time in my life. Which was cool. :-P We wandered around to the mom’s shamba…the whole place was just GORGEOUS. Scattered houses among the hills and mountains and GREEN and MOUNTAINS and gorgeous GREEN and MOUNTAINS. So the mom is a potato farmer also, apparently. Pastor went off to try and fix the car, his mom went to get digging rakes and buckets, so pastors wife and I went into the shamba and she taught me how to find and dig out the potatoes. I thought we were going to take out only enough to make a dinner but soon realized we were actually going to harvest them. So we spent the afternoon digging for potatoes. It was AWESOME fun. There were not enough digging rakes for everyone so I used my hands. The soil was moist and heavy and rich and DARK and it was SO much fun just hanging out on my hands and knees pulling out giant chunks of weeds and then potato plants, then digging with my bare hands and finding potatoes, its like a treasure hunt. Everyone should spend at least one afternoon of their life digging for potatoes with their hands. I apparently impressed people with my potato diggings abilities because every time I dumped a couple handfuls into the pile they looked up and looked at me and said “Gai” (I have known for a while it’s an exclamation for surprise or anything you want it to be, but I just learned it’s Kikuyu for “God”. So of course I’ve picked it up, but now I decided to stop saying it, but I need something to replace it with in order to do that successfully….still trying)
So we did that. Then pastor came back and said it was time for us to go, the car was all better. So we went and washed the giant amount of dirt off ourselves, and then we went over to the chicken pen and a girl caught a chicken and then pastor’s wife told me it was for ME! I’ve never owned a chicken before. So that was pretty cool. :-P It got its legs tied up and I was told to eat it tonight, so it went into the trunk and we took it home. Of course the car decided to break down a couple more times on the way home but we managed. :-P
When we got home, I was excited to tell everyone about my chicken. They took a roster from the pen here, and both were eaten for dinner. I requested, and was granted, to kill my chicken and pluck its feathers. So after watching one of the boys slaughter the rooster, I did the same to my chicken. I’ve never directly taken the life of anything larger than a bug before, so it was a momentous occasion in my life. :-P So the chicken was laid on the ground and I stepped on its feet like I was shown, then the other foot goes on the wings, then you hold the head with your left hand (I didn’t want to hold its head. I made the boy who was showing me how do that) and then you just slice the neck with your right hand. They don’t have a lot of blood, they’re small. But they TWITCH for a LONG TIME even after you take the whole head off and THAT was just strange. :-P So then we put it in hot water and pulled off all the feathers. We brought the two inside and the boys gutted them and disarticulated them into the edible parts. I was told whoever slaughters it has to eat the stomach but vehemently declined the “honor”…all the innards went to Dennis, who is apparently the only one who likes them. I have a video of him eating intestines, then cracking the skull open with his teeth and eating the brain. Blech.
Anyway. So the meat went into the pot and just boiled for way too long. It was nice to have meat but chicken doesn’t taste all that good when it’s overcooked, but I was eating a chicken that was MINE and I KILLED so that was pretty awesome.

Then I went to bed.

Sunday had some cool things happen too but this is getting too long so I will add them to a post on Monday or Tuesday.
I always do this to myself, and wind up having TOO MUCH to write at once. Weekends are always an adventure around here!