I know I promised an update some time ago to some of you. Here’s the promised update – I apologize for the wait.
Um, where do I start?
When I last updated, I was sitting in my palatial room at the Kenya Continential (it’s palatial in comparison to anywhere else in Kenya, okay?) wondering what the future would bring for me in Hola. To be honest, at the time I was still 50-50 on either going to Hola or taking the Interrupted Service. I was to meet my supervisor, Enos, on Monday with my final decision at the Peace Corps office.
On the eve before my meeting, my yellow IDEOS smartphone buzzed with an SMS from Nuru, the Safety & Security Coordinator. I was intrigued with what Nuru had to say because I knew that a Frenchwoman had been kidnapped at 3am on Saturday. When the message turned out to be a warning message for all Volunteers to halt any non-essential travel to the Coastal areas of Kenya, my heart skipped a beat. Does this mean I’ll be forced to go home? was the most repetitive thought flying through my mind. I wasn’t ready to leave Kenya, not really. Anxiety over Monday’s meeting crept over my body and I started pacing the room just trying to think about something else. Luckily, there were other Volunteers staying at the KenCon. I went out and joined them. One thing led to another and we ended up going to an Indian restaurant named.. to be honest I forgot what its named but it’s hidden away under a parking lot garage. No one would ever find it if they didn’t know it was there, which is pretty odd considering it’s a restaurant. It’s considered to be one of the things you must do while in Peace Corps: Kenya so we all went. We were the first ones to be seated at 9:00pm. There was a stage that rose pretty close to the ceiling and plenty of tables, all facing the stage. A fully stocked bar gleamed next to the entrance. Just as I began to wonder what kind of place this is, a steady trickle of Indian women made their way down from the entrance. The women were dressed casually in a Western fashion – some wearing jeans, others skirts that reached just short of the knees. The women all made their way quickly around into the back room. I could see hands reaching up, pulling shirts and dresses over unseen heads through the upper windows of the back room. Soon, the hands stopped and then came a steady trickle from the back room itself onto the stage. Each woman that exited the room wore shimmering Indian style dresses of different colours. Green, red, blue, white, black. I felt as if I were watching serene-faced Aes Sedai come to life from The Wheel of TIme series. Brian, Andrea and I were still the only people in the restaurant. We unshamingly watched the women as they gazed into the mirrors, attempting to beautify themselves, or maybe it was just their egos inflated to ridiculous levels – who knows. 9:45: we finally decided on what to order – most of us ordered some variation of a paneer dish. Right then came a stream of men and soon the room was filled with spectators. The music started and an Indian man and woman took to the mic and the shimmering women started dancing. The dancing was.. pretty amusing considering how deplorable it was. Kudos to them for their bravery though. After some time, we left – I, mostly to get some rest before the big meeting the next day.
Monday – I arrived at the Peace Corps office and I tried to explain to Enos that it would be inane to send me to such a place as Hola considering what had happened over the weekend and that I didn’t want to leave Kenya just yet. Enos sat there, letting me drag it out a good ten minutes before he interrupted and said that I won’t be sent to Hola. He had called a potential site that could receive me (pissed me off because when I asked for a different site alternative, he was adamant that there was no others and poof! magically, one comes out of thin air after a Frenchwoman is kidnapped) and that I should stay at the office until closing in case any news comes up. So I stayed at the office the whole day. Waiting. 4:15, the call came and I was told that I would be going to Komotobo School for the Deaf. A Peace Corps vehicle would escort me to my new site the following day but I protested, saying that it was all so sudden and I needed time to think (and research). Enos wouldn’t have it though – he wanted a decision right then and there. Reluctantly, I conceded and we were off on Tuesday. It was a 7 hour drive from Nairobi, passing through Kisii then Migori (my closest banking town) then a 65km bumpy ride on dirt road East towards the Masai Mara and the Tanzanian border to Komotobo.
The first thing I saw was a church compound. The second was my headmaster pointing to my new house, which was sporting a hole where the lock should have been. I was unsure of what to do but I thought I should just go ahead and give it a try. We unloaded everything into my new house while someone hurried away to get some locks for the door. They turned out to be pencil-sized dead-bolts of a sort. There are two that I can use to lock on the inside and for when I’m gone, there’s another deadbolt that I can put a lock through. The house itself isn’t too bad. The living room is huge- bigger than the one I had in Meru but the bedroom is much smaller. There’s two cupboards, one armoire, one altar-looking thing, two couches and a coffee table along with a bed and matress.
All in all, it isn’t so bad. I lost the luxury of a Western toilet with my new squat choo. I replaced the ability to watch hours on end of TV Shows with approximately 20 hours by charging my laptop to maximum from the electricity available on Wednesdays and Saturdays from 7 to 9pm. I’ve worked up a chicken-scratching totaling to 26 for the number of cockroaches I’ve killed thus far on the bathroom door. My new roomates are the rats live in my chimney and ceiling, the mites (or are they lice or fleas?) and the clouds of mosquitoes. I refuse to call the roaches my roommates because they’ve gotten their eviction notice the day I moved in whereas with all the other roommates, they’ve got their month’s notice. (For those of you that don’t know me all too well, I lived in an apartment for many years on the first floor with my bedroom window being directly above one of the main stairwells entering the building. This set of stairs had a lightning-bolt shaped crack about the size of a man’s arm in the middle of the concrete. It is from this gaping maw that roaches fornicated, bred, and crawled forth in the Summer months in Van Nuys. Some nights, they would have desires of cross-species… something or other. I’m not sure what they wanted exactly. I diligently try to erase memories of them molesting my body and place in its place memories of a twelve-year old Josh spraying Raid! down the hole followed by hundreds of black dots fleeing for safety only to be met with splats. Moving on.) It’s good to have female friends once again (only female mosquitoes fly thus only the females can spread malaria) as they’ve become a rarity among Kenyans. (PC Volunteers don’t count)
The first week I slept horribly as the bed frame was loose at the end, so I was literally sleeping at somewhat of a 40 degree angle. One day, I finally arrived home early enough to see my bedroom with daylight (no electricity, remember) and saw that I simply had to tie the ends together to make them tight. Now, I just sleep on one side of the bed as the matress is slightly too large for the bedframe so the side closest to the wall tilts up, gently rolling me over to the other side. (It seems that ever since Apartment #101, fate has been pushing me away from sleeping against the wall. Every single bed I’ve had since then has not been able to be against the wall. I love snuggling up against a wall during sleeping. Jennifer and Karen, you know that all too well :P )
The house also came with a stove. A very old gas stove that had millions of roach droppings peppering the stovetop. Today, I finally had the chance to go to my banking town of Migori, the one that’s 65km away and the beginning of the tarmac road, and fill up the gas tank that I could hook up to the stove and cook for myself. (The neighbours have been super nice and feeding me dinner and I have lunches provided by the school. It’s almost always ugali (corn flour and water) and sukuma wiki (kale) which gets tiring.) I woke up at 4:30 to catch a 5am taxi that went to Migori and came back around 1:30. I immediately hooked up the gas and tried the stove. To my dismay, it didn’t work! Livid, I bumped open the top to inspect what the potential problem could be. Squeak. Yep. A family of rats scurried out, leaving me to clean up their nest of plastic bags, paper, and feathers along with the droppings of both the rats and roaches. (Apparently, THEY’RE willing roommates.) After cleaning, I discovered the problem. The place where the gas escapes into the burner was blocked so I cleaned that. I tried it once more – success! I can cook for myself now! Happiness! :)
I like where this blog is going. I’ll stop for now and update more on the ongoings of Komotobo School for the Deaf, or Komotobo Special School for the Blind and Hearing Impaired as they call it. More next time!
28/10/2011
I’m writing now in Kisumu, the second largest city in Kenya. It’s an amazing place but unfortunately it’s usually a seven hour travel from my site. Still worth it in coming here. The situation with the al Shaabab and the Kenyan war against them is escalating with the first military conflict happening yesterday. We will see what happens in the coming months. I hope everything will be okay for my parents to come visit in December but I have a gut feeling that Peace Corps will be evacuating us out of the country. We’ll see.
Homesick more than ever but enoying my time in Kisumu.