September 5th
Two months since Ive been away from home and counting. I landed in Kenya on the first and am living in a little village hours outside of the first city big enough to have internet. I don’t even know where to begin. Ive been here only five days but already feel so saturated that I barely have anything to say, like when your bladder is so full that when you actually go to the bathroom, you can just get a tiny trickle out. So Ill just start talking in the very formulated, bullet-point mode of organization that completely contradicts how this entire society is run, but may help me regain a small feeling of western control.

-To get to Nanyuki, the town that I am in now, I piled into a dirty van this morning with nothing written on the outside except for “Maximum: 14”. I squeezed into the front seat and was handed a little boy who was to sit on my lap. I gave my money to a man wearing khaki pants and a huge pink down jacket despite the heat. The driver, who cant get enough of the name “Cookie”, was the same cheerful smiling Kenyan who drove me and my friend Dickson to the village on my first night here. On that ride, the van was so packed that after the fifth person piled into the front bench seat, I found myself scooted over until I was straddling the stick shift, every shift of gears establishing a closer relationship between the drivers hand and my inner thighs. But he was oblivious to it anyway, as he jabbered on his cell phone, opened the door while racing down an ill-kept dirt road to check on the underside of the car, and joked in Swahili with the my Maasai warrior friend on the opposite side of me. Today, he had been wearing a heavily beaded and accessorized tan hat that jingled when he walked, and a shirt that said “Everyone has to have something to believe in. Right now, I believe I’ll have a beer”. Before we left, he had to get out of the car and hold people in as he closed the door, similar to how you close a closet door really fast after throwing the last few things in there that there is obviously no room for. An hour later, when everyone piled out of the van to crouch in the shade while the driver opened the hood to replace a few parts that had fallen out along the way, I counted twenty men and women, seven small children, one nursing infant, and one large chicken. Despite the crowded, hot, long and bumpy ride, no one complains. The baby didn’t cry once and the two five year old boys sitting on my lap didn’t utter a sound except to point out to each other the elephants moving past our window. Im not sure what keeps them so quiet, whether it’s a constant mild illness numbing their motivation to complain or fidget, a general acceptance of the way things work, or whether it’s the cultural lack of any desire to work to better itself that has frustrated me since the minute I stepped off the airplane and into an airport lacking any organization whatsoever despite the teeming mass of people who had no idea what they were supposed to be doing or where they were supposed to be going. Either way, the obviously sick boy sitting faintly on the ground with a chicken on his lap and staring into a plastic bag ready ready for him to vomit into, casts shame on every American parent to a whiney kid who throws a hissy fit at the supermarket when his mom wont buy him the flavor of ice cream he wants. “Nzuri?” I asked a woman sitting next to me, who I assumed was his mom. (Is he okay?) She nodded at me confidently, said something to the boy which sounded something like “hey, sit up and stop passing out. You’re scaring the white girl”, repositioned the baby in her lap, and continued to stare out the window.

-My house is a room in a long cement building with a tin roof, separated into rooms with a small area in the front to make a fire and cook, and a room in the back with a table, chair, bed and a window. Light comes from a propane lantern and water comes from a pump 5 minutes away. And for those of us who arent immune to the countless diseases transmitted in the sitting water that feeds the pump, drinking water comes from a bottle. Maybe that explains why people here drink very little water and a tons of tea- which has been boiled and so is safe. But I think the tea isn’t so much for hydration, its more for the spoons and spoons of sugar that they put in each cup. The bathroom is a cement building a few hundred feet away with a hole dug in the ground with no toilet paper. Im not sure if everyone brings their own or if Im the only one who does that.

So much more to say but sitting down in front of a computer for a few hours to write has been pushed to the back of my priority list and has been replaced with beading with my favorite old lady friend Grace who looks ancient but is surprisingly spunky and agile. She speaks about 10 words of English, all of which Im proud to say Ive taught her, and I speak about the same in Maasai. I wonder how old she is but she has no idea. Other things that have replaced computer time: futile attempts to clean my feet, fetching pales of water, drinking tea and staring off into the distance, playing with focusing and unfocusing my eyes, washing laundry, learning swahili, and roasting goats.