Day after turkey

Ishirini na tatu Novemba
23 November

Today was a really good day. Some days up until now have been either Oh my god! This day was so amazing! Or Oh my god! This day sucked (there really weren’t too many of those) but today, and the last few weeks in general have been a pretty consistent, contented, non-sporadic Good. My sister Monique came home from boarding school this morning and is home for about a month. She’s the 15-year-old, I really like her. I wrote a really good paper this morning about development issues we witnessed on our Kisumu excursion. It was supposed to be 5 pages and I was close to 10…then I took out a few things, widened some margins, you know…this is a problem I don’t often have. I had a really good time writing it. Then I hung out with Rachel and Erin and then a few others wandered in after they got done with their internships for some good day after Thanksgiving chats and hanging out under our tree.

Thanksgiving yesterday…so much fun. The 10 of us got our afternoon classes canceled yesterday (I didn’t have any anyway) and got to go the Pan Afric hotel where we got our own little room and everything we’d ordered for Thanksgiving….so so so yummy. However, my stomach has definitely shrunk since I’ve been here. I ate as much or maybe less than I usually do on Thanksgiving and felt completely stuffed to the point of exploding for at least the next 6 hours. I ate nothing for the rest of the day. So yeah, what’d I eat? All the best stuff… We’d written up our ideal Thanksgiving menu about a week ago and the restaurant made nearly all of it. Stuffed turkey that would probably rival most of the turkeys you folks were eating, soup, salad, mashed potatoes, gravy, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, chocolate cake, ice cream and yes, mac and cheese!! And cheese and crackers (I have been quite cheese deprived these past months) The mac was so delicious…I never really eat it in the US but I’ve been craving it these past few months and this surpassed expectations. Ok, I’ll stop raving about the food, I was pretty stoked about the cheese though. I had everyone do the thing we used to do on Thanksgiving where we wrote on little pieces of paper what we were thankful for and then read them all anonymously during dinner. It was sweet and very thanksgiving-y. Then we sat around the table chatting for 2 or 3 hours feeling the genuine Thanksgiving vibe. Then that night after I gave the Aboks the hand-turkey card I made for them, Mom (katika US) called and I got passed around the Leonard-Revis thanksgiving table. Oh happy day.

On another note:
These are a few things I know I’ll miss about Kenya, or at least that make me laugh:
-Flowers flowers everywhere in every single color and vibrancy you can think of
-Baboons walking along the road (not downtown but on the way out to Karen I’ve seen a boon or two, zebras and the occasional ostrich too on our drives to Mombasa and Kisumu

-morning downpours out of nowhere, gorgeous afternoons
-dressing rooms in 2nd hand stalls where the vendor holds up a sheet for you to try on pants behind
-messing up Kiswahili words and somehow having the meaning always be something bad!
-hawkers tables with 18 movies on 1 disc for 150Ksh ($2) or earrings for 10Ksh
-our tree on the quad at the university
-grilled mahindi (corn) sold on every street corner for 5Ksh or less
-chapati na dengu
-chaotic matatu stages, like the one on Tom Mboya
-relaxing on rooftops, in parks, in pubs, in the K room
-Mangos
-scrubbing my feet before bed every night
-the look of surprise when you speak Kiswahili, or jump into a kiswa conversation people didn’t realize you understood

Matatus (Or ma3’s since tatu is 3 in kiswa and they used to cost 3 shillings to ride) I love them! They’re big white 14 passenger vans often with a yellow stripe painted on the side and the number route they drive. After dark it’s unsafe to drive in them because the drivers are occasionally drunk and can drop you off in the middle of nowhere (I haven’t done this, no worries, just heard stories) but they do have blacklights on the inside at night. They usually have meaningless words written in big letters on the outside like “The Hulk” or “Sparkletown”-I really don’t think anybody knows what these mean. Or they have pictures of famous people, usually American hip hop and r&b singers, or, in the case of a matatu I saw a few weeks ago, Barack Obama giving 2 thumbs up! Inside you’re always packed in, I’ve been in a matatu with 25 people riding at once (they’re supposed to hold 14) The music inside usually blasts your ears out, can be offensive and/or really terrible but always has a catchy, sunny beat, (usually because it’s reggae) and can be extremely entertaining-like when it’s a reggae version of Jesus Loves Me This I Know or This Little Light of Mine. Sometimes you make friends when you and the people next to you are singing the words. When you go the same routes consistently the matatu drivers know you and look out for you. They drive crazy, you sometimes think you’re going to die and the drivers of the different matatus fight over you because they all want you to ride in theirs. And they’re cheap and everywhere.