Getting Back to Normal

January 9,2008

I’ve gotten some great emails updating me the past few weeks from various people! Thank you for all those! They were really entertaining to me, especially in the intense boredom I’ve felt the past week or so. I had a great long blog written and was about to post it maybe a week ago and the power went out…so I lost it all. Grr. Anyway, things are nearly back to normal, at least in Nairobi. We had an exciting couple of days, front row seats to some riot action out our window. Michelle, Moni and I made a couple of runs up to the roof when we started to hear stuff going on. We are no longer under house arrest of course and the city is pretty much back to business as usual. We finally got our water back 5 or 6 days ago after not having it for 9 (NINE!!) days—while not being able to leave the house, mind you—it was getting pretty bad and we all rejoiced when it came back on by running around turning all the taps on for a few seconds and doing a water dance (ok, the water dance part is made up, but I did my own happy-we-have-water-again-dance). Other parts of the country are still encountering a lot of violence-Eldoret where Moni and Cheryl go to school is still pretty bad. Their schools have been closed indefinitely, so they’re not sure when they’re going back. Cheryl heard from some of her classmates that they were really worried their university is going to be burned down..I hope that doesn’t happen (obviously). Our Mombasa trip got completely canceled even though Stacey and Lisa made it there since they came by way of Zanzibar, but they said it really wasn’t fun at all-crappy beach, shallow water with coral so you couldn’t swim, absolutely nothing open, not allowed to leave the hotel and a night without food or power. The place where they were didn’t see any of the violence that was in the city, but it was still dangerous for them to go anywhere.
Anyhow, everyone’s back in Nairobi now and we all met up a few days ago for yummy expensive food and bowling at Village Market and shared stories. Today a few of us went out to the movie theaters and hawker shopping-which are really great right now because they’re all trying to get rid of their stock before the president kicks them all out. (I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but the hawkers that have been all over the place in the city the past few months really aren’t supposed to be there, but the president was letting them stay at least until the election was over in an effort to win over their votes…I don’t really get it, but hey, it’s really cheap stuff so I’ll take advantage while it lasts!) We got word from our directors that the University of Nairobi is opening on the 14th rather than the 6th like it was supposed to, so this week’s just kind of an off week. I’ve kept myself pretty occupied so far—hanging out with other people, shopping, movies, I got my hair rebraided this morning. It’s black this time and curly and pretty hot in my opinion! The other day Gloria, Dennis-another friend, and I organized a bunch of the kids in the neighborhood and went down to the YMCA and went swimming all afternoon. It was great!! There were about 25 of us and we played all kinds of games and Dennis had a video camera and made a DVD of the story of the Mamlaka Hood (Mamlaka is the street we live on) Gloria just got a digital camera so I got a bunch of pictures from her of it. I made a bunch of new friends that day. Sunday after church my sisters, Cousin Maxwell and I went to this volunteer thing for the Red Cross and packed up all kinds of clothes and food for all the displaced people right now. I’m getting restless though and want to get the heck out of Nairobi and just travel especially since I spent the week we were supposed to be in Mombasa lounging on the beach in lockdown and all greasy-like from no water. There are plans in the works for an excursion next weekend to Lake Naivasha and Nakuru which are only an hour or so away from Nairobi so very easily done. We’re also going to make a trip to Hell’s Gate National Park-which you can rent bikes and ride around in! These are our immediate travel plans, with all the grand ones coming later. I got proposed to a few times this week (this isn’t the first time) and an invite to Tanzania (I’m not going, at least with this guy, rest assured) and got hit on by a record number of people (and that’s a pretty big record at this point considering Kenyan guys are relentless).
I’m getting kind of unenthusiastic about my ICRP…which I feel bad about because I was so excited about it at the beginning. But having lost yet another week to do it since our program’s not resuming until next week, I can’t see myself getting as in-depth as I really wanted to, so I can feel myself sort of mentally giving up on it a little bit. I want to instead focus my efforts now on traveling and just exploring…I’d rather do that at this point than spend my time in Nairobi on this ICRP thing. I’m not even sure how some other people are going to complete theirs since their ICRP’s are in Kibera—I’m kind of positive our directors won’t let them go back there at this point.