Guava. It is a green golf ball with a ghostly interior when raw, slowly giving way to, at it’s best, a yellow baseball with a pink center as it ripens. I walked down the mere two steps it takes to enter my abode not five minutes ago from what I like to call “Guava Hunting”. Despite the guava trees being nearly endemic around these parts, the locals fear climbing the trees. Oftentimes, the guavas are left on the treetops to become an incubation sac, of sorts, for the maggots. Alternatively, they become food for the birds or the monkeys that take up their residence in the nearby bush a mere five minutes walk away the opposite direction from the daily route I take towards the school. The route towards the bush is the same route I must take every week to reach the market for any food (besides these guavas, which are now coming into season!!) You can tell how excited I am to be having these fruits just there for the taking. I’m having the time of my life just climbing the trees’ sturdy branches. Not even the giant black ants pinching at my calves deter me from obtaining my bounty. Today, I climbed one of the trees nearby where I weight-lift and met an angry mama weaver bird trying to protect her beautifully woven nest. Imagine a common nest, looking very much like a sideways ‘c’. Well, the weaver bird’s nest is like that but with the addition of a larger sideways ‘C’ on top of the smaller sideways ‘c’. There is a small gap between the little and big C’s. That’s where the bird enters the nest and in the cup of the smaller ‘c’ is where the eggs are. The larger ‘C’ atop is to protect the nest from predators as well as the hot equatorial sun. Ingenious little birds. Anyway, mama weaver squawked loudly at me on a branch opposite where her nest hung in an attempt to distract me. I smiled and slowly stepped down, after taking my yellow baseball of course.

Prior to my treetop adventures, I was playing volleyball with my students. They really are improving and I am shocked at how good of a coach I am. Considering the fact I have almost zero volleyball experience, I’m still able to coach. Throughout most of the game, Chase Burton, whom I almost always as a consequence think of when I think of or play volleyball. Hunter Beck and the days I spent watching the brothers of Lambda Sigma Pi play IM Volleyball slide in and out of my mind. At one point during the game, quite literally, I turned to a student and asked them to smack me in the head. I asked because I was thinking of all the wasted opportunities I had to play volleyball. Currently, I’m trying to teach the students the importance of teamwork and the team spirit as well as how to properly hit the ball from overhead (rigid hands in the shape of a bent 5) and hit under (hands ‘fisted’ together or held together in the shape you would sign for money). As you can tell, I don’t even know the proper names for these things. Any volleyball tips y’all have for me, I’ll GLADLY take.

There was a point in the day where it became unpleasant, but I’ve thankfully learned how to let things like this slide off my back. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t have my temper rise a few degrees. One of the teachers was telling me about how it’s ‘AFRICAN’ (I DESPISE when Kenyans call themselves ‘Africans’ or say ‘this is how we do it in Africa’) for African men to beat their wives like cows when they are being unfaithful or unwilling to present themselves to their husbands for sex. That topic somehow led to rape and I pointed out to him that since husbands beat their wives for sex, it is a form of rape. All the male staff, of course, disagreed while the female staff simply sat in silence. I wanted to hear no more of it so I just nodded my head for the rest of his rant. Eventually, he got the gyst and just stopped spewing.

I can hardly believe January is nearly through. It seems just like yesterday I waved my parents off to the Jomo Kenyatta Airport. Here’s to a wonderful 10 months remaining. (AHH!)