Settling In

I have spent the last few days getting my bearings and settling into life in Nairobi. I am glad that K gave us at least a little bit of a heads up about the types of psychological adjustment it would take going into one of the “harder” study abroad sites (ie not Europe or Australia) and it’s made me feel a lot better to know that the other people in my program have also felt the psychological turmoil of the adjustment to Kenyan culture, or at least the lives we will be leading for the next 6 months. The pre-study abroad orientations told us about this “W-curve” we would go through emotionally while on study abroad. This includes starting out on a big emotional high, full of anticipation for all the things we’re going to do and gradually going down to a low in the middle of our program where we want nothing else but to go home, but ending on a high again once we learn more and have begun to put all the pieces of this experience together and figure out where it fits in with us as people. Does that make any sense? This is only half of the “W”. The other half occurs after we go home and the adjustment process to American life once again.

Anyway, I’m glad they gave us a heads up, but the “W” is all wrong. It was exciting basically on the plane anticipating it. Then we got there and I was plunged to an emotional low for a few days. I just know that I couldn’t call home and talk with dry eyes. And I think I’ve discovered some sources of my initial frustration.

Study abroad is so built up to be this life-altering experience and so I went in with such high expectations for it to be absolutely perfect from the get-go. It’s not that the experience has been bad at all, but it hasn’t been that “perfect study abroad scene” I’ve envisioned quite yet. After coming to that low right after arriving here, it’s been getting better every day. I’ve been here over a week now and don’t wake up surprised about the room I’m waking up in anymore. Every day is a little bit of a “W curve” with ups and downs all over the place, but the ups are getting more and more frequent. Another reason for my initial turmoil is that I was really feeling the magnitude of being here for 6 months, not just a vacation where I get to go back to the place that’s familiar soon. Leading a normal everyday life without some super exciting thing happening every day was an adjustment. Also, I had a good discussion with one of my host-uncles a few days ago and we were talking about life in the modern city of Nairobi compared to the traditional tribal life that is more and more becoming extinct from modernization/Westernization/Americanization/whatever you’d like to call it. That was my biggest frustration of all, that we are in the center of Nairobi-the largest, most modern city between Cairo and Johannesburg. And honestly, it’s not too much different from being in downtown New York or any big city-it’s modern. And my expectation for coming to Kenya was that yes, it’s going to be A LOT different, and it frustrated me that it really wasn’t, or that the American way of life has become so engrained into the culture here that it’s hard to see what’s “purely Kenyan.” On that note, let me tell a bit about my experience here thus far: