Yikes, I definitely didn’t mean for a week to pass before I wrote another post, sorry!  And it has definitely been an eventful week… so here we go!

Tuesday was quite the day.  I walked to class with some girls that live near by me, and first thing in the morning we had Swahili.  We realized that three people from our group were gone and that they all walk together, but we just assumed they’d left late.  Well, an hour and a half later, we realized that definitely wasn’t true and then the three students got to the SIT office.  They had been robbed on the way to school- one girl had her laptop stolen, another had a camera taken, and everybody lost the bags they had with them.  They were very shaken up, but everybody was fine, thank goodness.  The rest of the day was a little off, while we still had a lesson in the afternoon a lot of people were distracted (and understandably so!) and then we spent a good chunk of time figuring out how to safely get us all home and how to safely commute for the rest of the semester.  Our program decided that it was no longer advisable for any of us to carry bags of any kind to or from school, because that is obviously a target.  So that night, one of our academic directors drove us all home because we all had bags.  Starting on Wednesday, I have just been stuffing my bra full of all of the most important things: my phone, money, thumb drive, etc., and then just carrying a notebook and pen. 

           

Wednesday and Thursday were fairly uneventful, but still interesting.  On Wednesday we didn’t have Swahili and instead we had two lectures from guests.  In the morning we heard the political history of Kenya (which was a little bit of an information overload, but still very interesting!) and then in the afternoon someone who works in the human rights sector in Kenya came and spoke to us, which was very interesting.  On Thursday we had a broad overview of Islam and more specifically Swahili Islam culture, because the village that we will be going to at the end of this week is Muslim.  And then it was back to Swahili!  We have been learning a LOT, and while I am actually enjoying it more than I thought I would, it is really difficult to retain as much information as they are giving us on a daily basis.  Anyway, evenings at my homestay have been very pleasant but low key.  I have been getting home around 6pm and there isn’t normally anyone home except Flo, who is my family’s house help.  So I tend to study some Swahili and read a bit and then spend the evening with my family once they all get home around 7:30 or 8.  We eat dinner fairly quickly after they all get home, watch a little tv and visit, and then we are normally all off in our rooms by 9pm to get ready for bed.  It is funny going to bed so early, but it does give me a chance to journal fairly regularly, get some reading done, and get plenty of sleep.  While our program doesn’t give us a considerable amount of homework (at least up to this point) we are all still completely exhausted at the end of the day because everything is so new.  Our classes are taught differently than they are in the US, our home environment is foreign, our commute requires a lot of attention and pretending that we know what we are doing… basically everything is new and we are learning from everything, so even though going to bed before 10 is ridiculous given what a normal night at Wooster is like for me, here it is kind of necessary to make sure we are still getting the most out of our experience!

Friday was a whole other ballgame.  We met at the SIT office like normal, but on Friday morning we had our first site visit: we went to see WOFAK, or Women Fighting AIDS in Kenya.  We had a lengthy drive to their office, which is right on the outskirts of the second largest slum in Nairobi.  When we arrived, we gathered in the small office and spoke to Helen, who is in charge of the office.  She gave us a background on WOFAK and what they do.  WOFAK was founded more than 20 years ago by an HIV positive woman who felt that there needed to be services and a support network for women with HIV in Kenya.  Now WOFAK provides counseling, support groups, home care, meal programs, and more for women, men, and children affected by AIDS.  After hearing from Helen, we all split into small groups of 3 or 4 to walk into the slum and meet some of the women that WOFAK serves. 

I went with two other girls from my program, Mama Mary (who is from SIT) and Helen, and we didn’t have to walk very far to reach the home we were visiting.  With only a curtain as a door, we entered a one-room home.  When we arrived, the woman we were supposed to be visiting wasn’t there, but her two daughters were, so Helen spoke to them and we sat down.  The home was miniscule: there was a twin bed, a couch, a coffee table, and some trunks that were stacked to make a shelf, and on the makeshift shelf there was a tv.  As we looked around, we realized that there was a third child in the house that we hadn’t even seen when we walked in, he was so small.  We later found out that he was in fact a 10 year old boy with cerebral palsy, but he could have easily passed for 5 years old with how small he was.  He couldn’t support himself at all, his sisters were helping him bathe and get dressed, and he just looked like a rag doll.  While Helen told us he can hear and understand people, he has virtually no control over his body and he can’t speak.  But boy oh boy did he have a big smile when Helen told him he had visitors!! We sat and spoke to Helen for a while about WOFAK and AIDS in general, and then the mother arrived.  We had been fairly quiet and somber up until that point, but that all changed when she walked in.  She is a large woman with an even bigger smile and she happily shook all of our hands and then sat down. 

Helen introduced us to her in Swahili, and one of the only words I picked out of what she was saying was “Obama”.  I laughed, and when they looked at me, I said “Oh, I just heard ‘Obama’”, and Helen said she had told the woman that we came from Obama’s country and that the woman said we were all from the same nation, then, because Obama is Kenyan.  After the introductions, we asked some questions and learned a little about this woman.  She was diagnosed as HIV positive 11 or 12 years ago, and although it is common for men to leave their wives when they contract HIV, her husband didn’t leave.  However, 10 years ago when she gave birth to a disabled son, he did leave her.  So there she was with four children (there was an older daughter also, who we didn’t meet) and HIV.  Now she pays $6 a month in rent for her one room house, and I’m honestly not sure where all five of them sleep.  The bed is half covered with stuff, and there is a couch, but I can’t imagine more than one person fitting on the floor.  Anyway, this woman makes chapati and chai and sells it in the morning to people who are on their way to work and she makes about $2 a day doing this.  $2.  She has to support herself and four children, one of whom requires a lot of attention and extra resources.  She is not sure if she will be able to send her daughters to high school, because high school isn’t free in Kenya.  She says what she wants more than anything is a special chair for her son so he can be taken out of the house, because right now he is essentially housebound.  She said the stigma of having a handicapped son is even greater than the stigma that goes along with her HIV, yet she is still ridiculously upbeat and optimistic.  I can’t quite fathom why, but she still wears her wedding ring, and everything else she and her children are wearing is riddled with holes and covered in dirt; I watched the two girls put a baby onesie on their brother as a shirt with the snaps between the legs undone because he’s small, but he isn’t quite that small.  After asking our last questions, we said goodbye to the woman and thanked her for talking to us, and we walked back to the office… and we were pretty quiet the whole way. 

Everyone else in our group met incredible women as well.  One of them was taking care of her 6 children and 8 grandchildren.  One had 10 kids of her own that she was taking care of in addition to her HIV.  It was a very humbling visit and while it was important and in many ways inspiring, it was also very hard to see.  After thanking Helen for her hospitality, we loaded back on the bus and drove back to the SIT office where we all had lunch.

After lunch we had Swahili, where we had a HUGE quiz.  Oh goody, just what everyone wants on a Friday afternoon.  We learned a lot of Swahili this week, but it was still a really difficult quiz and we were all taken down a couple of notches after finishing it as best we could.  We still had a two and a half hour Swahili lesson, and by the end of the day everybody was a little on edge and tense.  It was the end of our first real week, we had had a good but rough morning, and then we had all just bombed a quiz.  So we all headed out of the office pretty quickly.  Two other girls and I ran to an ATM, and then soon after that we met several other people at a little local bar for a couple of drinks.  It was just what we all needed.  We just unwound a little bit, laughed a lot, and discovered a fabulous local drink called Snapp- a hard, sparkling cider. Yum.  Anyway, at about 7:45, I split a cab home with two girls in my neighborhood, and I was home in time for dinner.  After a good meal with my family and chatting for a little bit, I headed off to bed because we also had activities bright and early on Saturday morning!!

On Saturday we all met at Java at 8am to take our bus to MYSA, or the Mathare Youth Sports Association.  We were all very impressed by the organization: they are a community development initiative that targets youth through soccer, arts and music, and library programs.  They work in low-income areas and their services are free to kids.  They have impressive facilities and very dedicated and welcoming staff members, and we had a great visit.  We went to several different branches and at one of them, we got to see a short dance performance, which was really neat. Except then they made us all dance with them, and I DON’T DANCE!!! Oh well, all the kids watching got a good laugh, I guess.  After the visit, we all had lunch at a little hole in the wall restaurant (among the people at our table, we found rocks, plastic and hair in our food, but whatever, we didn’t et sick!) and then the bus dropped us back off at the SIT office at about 2pm.  A few of us walked to Java and chatted and had smoothies, and then around 5:30 we all walked home. 

We all planned to go out around 8:30, but we didn’t want to be gone all day, so I came home and spent some time with my family, had dinner, got changed, and then a couple of the girls came and picked me up in a cab.  Went downtown to a bar called Galileos, which had fabulous (and distracting) lighting and VERY loud music, but 6 of us sat there for a couple of hours, talked, had a couple of drinks and enjoyed our first Saturday night out in Nairobi J  Around 11:30 we headed home, and one of the girls came home with me and slept on the floor in my room since it isn’t safe to go back to her neighborhood late.  We stayed up and chatted for a while, but finally went to sleep around 1:30. 

This morning we got up, had a quick breakfast, and I walked her out to the main road so she knew where she was, and she walked home.  As of this morning I still hadn’t done laundry, so I was finally able to spend an hour or so washing almost every article of clothing I brought with me and hanging them up on the line to dry.  After showering, I had to finally face my first real homework I’ve had here.  I had to write two short papers, and even though they are due later in the week, I wanted to get them done so I can just work on my Swahili this week.  We leave for the village on Friday night, and they don’t speak any English, so I definitely need to focus on some language stuff this week! We’ll see how it goes…

Anyway, now I think I’m off to skype with a couple of people from Wooster (yay!), and then it’ll be dinner time, quickly followed by bedtime!!  I’ll try and write another post before we go to the village, because otherwise it will be 3 weeks or so until I write again.  So, bye for now!