Right now I’m sitting in my living room watching international MTV, listening to the evening call to prayer from the loudspeakers of the mosque next door and smelling my Mama’s cooking from the kitchen. She says I’m not allowed to help tonight, but I know she’ll gladly let me wash the dishes later! I have no idea where to start, I need to write more frequently because so much happens each day. I’ll start with school and go from there:
Classes start at 8:30am each day so the 5 people that live in my neighborhood meet up outside our security gates at 8 and walk to school together. We walk along the dusty, rocky streets along with the young children in their school uniforms that shout “how are you!?” over and over again every time they see a muzungu (white person) – but imagine it in a little kid voice with the most adorable Kenyan accent – so entertaining. We’ve been testing out different responses which get different reactions. If we just wave back they smile, if we say “good! How are you?” they giggle and repeat “How are you?” back to us (we think thats the only English they know since they don’t learn English until grade 3). But if we respond in Swahili (“Nzuri sana! Na wewe?”) they look so confused and run away laughing – its wonderful.
Along with the adorable children, we walk to school as women with heavy parcels perfectly balanced on their heads walk towards their kiosks to set up shop for the day. Butchers and fruit vendors set up their displays and stray dogs, chickens and goats try to find whatever scraps they can. We are into our second week of school so the neighborhood seems to be used to us but the first few days we were definitely a spectacle.
Once at school we have our morning lecture, usually Kiswahili, from 8:30-12:30. We are broken down into groups of 5 and I love the members of my group. We spend most of our time laughing at the funny language and accidentally mixing in other foreign languages we speak, like Spanish or Hebrew or Arabic. Many of the words have Arabic roots as does Hebrew so its easy to swap in some words. Many of the verbs sound like they could be conjugated in Spanish and “si” means ‘yes’ in Spanish but it means ‘no’ or indicates the negative form of a verb in Kiswahili… Other than that the language actually sounds Asian or like Pokémon characters! Its entirely hilarious to learn this language and when classes go 3.5 hours long with one break we often get punchy and delirious. Our 5 rotating teachers all have distinct personalities and different teaching styles which keeps the rotation exciting. My grasp of the language is minimal right now but it will jump quickly when we do our rural home stay starting on Saturday!
After morning lecture we have a lunch break until 2pm. We usually go to the few restaurants nearby, an expensive touristy café called Java, a cheap and delicious Ethiopian restaurant and an Asian place I haven’t tried yet. The women in the house next door to school also cooks traditional Kenyan food (rice, beans/lentils and chipatti) and I’ve eaten from there the last two days, its cheap, tasty and convenient. After lunch we often head to the cyber café for a quick and often frustrating email check then back to school for afternoon lecture.
The afternoon lecture is either a society, health or development lecture by professionals in the field, often from University of Nairobi or a hospital or an organization based in Nairobi. The true health and development lectures haven’t started yet, they start March 9th and I’m looking forward to that. We’ve had mostly history and society lectures mixed in with randomly placed topics like “Informal Economies” which is crucial to understanding Kenyan culture since 70% of the population participates in informal income generating activities.
After afternoon lecture we head home to Kibera and often stop for some slooow internet for a bit on the way home. At home I help my mama cook dinner and then the rest of the night is spent on the couch watching news in Swahili or watching soccer, depending on which teams are playing. I go to bed so early here because there isn’t much else to do and I’m exhausted by the end of the day and wake up so early. There are no weekends or free days to sleep in either. In 6 weeks we have had two full free days which are spent doing homework or research for our independent projects or group research projects...
more to come! Internet is too slow to continue right now. ugh.
send me email updates! even just let me know what's going on in the world -- I'm so disconnected!
Elisette
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