Happy New Year everyone! I hope all your Holiday and New Year celebrations were everything you imagined it to be. I know mine was! I celebrated an early Christmas with my parents and the actual Christmas with my Headmaster at his brother’s house with thousands of his extended family members and New Years in Komotobo with my community members!  

Well, this is an attempt to have bi-weekly updates with what’s going on in my life. I would prefer not to put this on the blog but it really does make everything easier in the way that I can post it in one place and not forget about anyone’s emails or whatnot. The only downside to this is that if I send this via email, the people I want to hear back from will hit ‘reply’. On the blog, this rarely happens.

So, this is a formal request from me to you: upon reading this blog and if you feel like you have something to share or tell me, SEND ME AN EMAIL! It’s Josh.Josa@gmail.com if you don’t know it or don’t have it on hand.

It’s mid-January. I can hardly believe it. It should be impossible that a month ago, I came back to Komotobo from the most amazing vacation with my parents in Mombasa and the Seychelles. It was indescribable. Yes, that was a month ago and the month before I left this place for December vacation, I felt like time was crawling by and I was nearing death in one form or another. Now, everything seems rejuvinated. I’ve come back to site from vacation with a fresh attitude and peace of mind. I have many projects that I want to start on top of the classes I’ve gotten for this term. My classes are Kenyan Sign Language to Class 7 and 8 and Maths for Class 6 and 7.

Let me drift aside for a bit before I forget this story I’d like to share. About two weeks ago, I woke up and started looking frantically for the missing hearing aid that should have been resting peacefully besides my left hearing aid. An hour passed and I deduced that the black thing resting in the place of my missing hearing aid was in fact a RAT’s PELLET. A rat stole my hearing aid. I never thought this would happen to me but it did. There have been occasional rat attacks through the dead of the night onto my tomatoes, mangoes, and especially the potatoes! (What is it with rats and ‘oes?!) The hearing aid was just the latest attack but I didn’t expect it to be ABDUCTED! “This is war!”, I thought to myself. I opened up the trusty Peace Corps issued cookbook and looked up “Karl’s Super Rat Death”. The recipe is simple: all you need is equal parts of cement powder, flour, and Royco (a Kenyan meat flavoring powder), put it somewhere the rat will be sure to find (in this case, directly under the chimney opening I KNOW it comes into the house through) and ‘hope it doesn’t crawl back up to die’. Luckily, in the morning I found a lifeless beady-eyes creature. It reminded me a bit of the character from Ratatouille but images of my missing hearing aid immediately pushed aside any sympathy I felt for the panya (rat in Kiswahili.)

Because of the rat incident (and because the ‘professionals’ at the hearing aid center I went to for Mid Service Medical in December did a poor job of my hearing aid molds), I went to Nairobi to get new earmolds. I went to the center and they claimed they did a perfect job *coughs*. Well, thanks to their inaptitude, I was able to remain in Nairobi from Sunday, January 7th all the way up until Thursday, January 12th. It’s always great being in Nairobi where there’s a guarantee of good food and just a general vegging out. Monday, January 8th, there was absolutely no vegging out of any sort that’s for sure. A PCV from the Coast province and myself were picked up from the office around 9:00am and went to the PC office. Not 5 minutes after we got into the office, we cowered to the sound of gunshots. THREE intervals of multiple gunshots. It was scary. The office became abuzz with what had happened and in the heat of the moment, more than half the office exited the building to see what had happened. Directly in front of the office on the street, we saw Kenyan policemen still standing with their guns armed towards the crime scene. Eyes adjusted and soon I saw four dead bodies lying on the street, facedown. I hadn’t felt happy to be alive in a way that I felt that day in such a long time. The story came out later. Apparently, the 4 deceased were thugs and the police had been on their trail for some time. The police yelled for them to surrender and lie facedown —- this is where things get suspicious. One story says the thugs surrendered and lied down. The police then shot them anyway. Another story says that the thugs refused to surrender and tried to make a run for it. This being Kenya, either story could have easily happened. Moving on.

On Friday the 13th, I hopped onto an Easy Coach (bus) to make the 9-hour journey from Nairobi to Migori. Looking back on times where I lived in Meru, the 4-5 hours it took to get to Meru is peas compared to what I endure now. Strangely though, it doesn’t seem to affect me at all. I’m really curious to see what life’ll be like in America now that 12 solid hours of traveling doesn’t seem to affect me anymore. (Greyhounds, here I come!) I was a bit worried about this trip because I had a bag full of supplies from PC and Nakumatt and a box of 30 Muringa Trees. I made it to Migori without any issues. I found a vehicle going to Komotobo without any hassle. The plants and bags were placed carefully into the vehicle and an agreement was made for them to take me all the way to my front door. Whew. The 7 passengers filled up and the driver started the car and away we went. (This is a normal vehicle, mind you, like Karen or Jennifer’s cars that normally fits 5 people. 4 in front, 4 in back.) We stopped at Kehancha, the main town in the Kuria district of sorts, as always and waited for more passengers as some disembarked. After 20 minutes, we were on our way again. Once we arrived the turnoff for my house, I pointed for the driver to head that way frantically but to my shock, the driver stopped the car and put all my stuff on the side of the road and told me to board the other car that was waiting for me. I told the driver to make sure the other driver knew of our agreement but the driver just looked at me and said, “What agreement?”, with a hint of malice. I was beyond pissed. The driver hightailed it out of there leaving me with the other driver. “200 Schillings.” demanded the driver. He was demanding 200 for what should have been 30-50 schillings. Furious, I picked up all my bags and box and started trudging downhill (thankfully, not uphill) in the waning light. The walk is a 30 minutes walk and about 10 minutes in, my arms were burning from holding the box of plants. 5 minutes later, my shoulders and back started burning from the backpack. I willed myself to keep going because I knew if I stopped to take a rest, I would not be able to make it back home before it became completely dark. I drew upon all the energy and might I had and eventually got home. Woot. Admittedly, I did collapse onto my front porch and found some chicken poo-stains on my trousers today.

Onto the projects I am wanting to start here in Komotobo.

1) Plant Muringa Trees. It’s not really so much of a project but the trees are a sort of miracle plant. It’s native to India but will pretty much grow in any climate and in any soil. What’s truly remarkable about these plants is that gram for gram, they contain more Vitamin A than carrots, more Vitamin C than oranges, more potassium than bananas, more iron than spinach, and more protein than milk! Pretty amazing. The project, for me, is to ensure the plants’ survival (adjusting to the soil and making sure the kids/locals don’t go batshit crazy over the benefits of the tree and just rip it right out of the soil) and to educate the school and locals regarding the benefits of the tree.
2) Building with Plastic Bottles. For those of you that know me, you’ll remember that I’m sort of closer to a die-hard environmentalist than I am a neutral environmentalist. I still am. This time, I’m aiming to ELIMINATE plastics from the environment by building buildings with them. No, this is not an imaginary idea and yes, I’m angry that I wasn’t the first one to come up with this ingenious idea. The idea comes from a Peace Corps Volunteer in South America but I’ll admit that I DID do a Google search on it because the idea came to me on its own. Basically, it’s a community effort and there’ll be massive trash-pickups. We will be using plastic materials only. Plastic bottles will be cleaned and then packed with cleaned plastic (plastic bags, plastic wrappings, random bits of plastic floating around on the streets, etc.). . We’ll use the packed plastic bottles in place of bricks as an inexpensive building material. The use of cement, iron, and wood will still be needed.
There are a few other projects I want to get my hands onto but these two are my primary focus for now, aside from teaching of course.

Oh yes, the water had gone off in the entire mission area the day after I left for Nairobi and had just come back on today! Lucky me! I think I would have freaked out without water for 5 whole days. There is a river nearby, though. It would have been quite the experience to have to go up and down the steep hill, lugging water. Imagine that!

Shoot me an email – send me updates on your life.It’d mean more than anything to me out here.