Thoughts on leaving Nairobi

Today is Friday, October 23 (Happy Mole Day everybody). I'm leaving for my internship in Ukwala at 5 am on Sunday morning. The last few days I've been thinking a lot about the upcoming move. All along, I sort of viewed the classroom phase here in Nairobi as a stopover in the bigger picture of my experience here in Kenya. Even before I left home I was a lot more excited for the internship segment. Now that the time to move has actually arrived, however, I have some mixed feelings about the entire situation. I am still unbelievably excited for what I'll be doing in Ukwala and I'm anxious to see another side of Kenya. But recently, Nairobi has become more appealing (or is it just less unappealing?) to me. This may be in part because of the arrival of the rains, which I mentioned in a previous post. For our first several weeks here in Kenya, everything was brown. One of my very first impressions of Nairobi was that the city was nothing but an expansive dusty brown wasteland. With just a few days of rain I've been amazed at how lush everything has become. I was on a bus home from the city center the other day and was completely taken aback by how pretty and green one of the big public parks was.

Another important thing: my host mother here is amazing. She and our houseguest, Rosemary (the divorced woman featured in a previous post) are so much fun to talk to. I finally feel comfortable sitting around and having long conversations with them and they've really helped me understand a lot about life in Kenya. When I first arrived at my homestay I was frustrated because I felt like nobody in the house ever wanted to interact with me. The most contact we ever had during the day was around the TV together after dinner. I've since learned how to take the initiative to form a relationship with my family and my efforts have paid off. On Wednesday night my mom took me to a bar in downtown Nairobi to see one of her favorite bands play traditional African music. The music was great but even better was the time spent with my host mom. She's something of a celebrity in the Nairobi music scene; she loves to go out dancing and a lot of the members of different bands know her by name and came up to greet us at the table where we were sitting. Oh, and it must be a cold day in hell because Emily Barker was the first one on the dance floor. Yep, my mom decided it was time to dance within ten minutes of the start of the performance. I tried to explain to her that I don't dance well and that I certainly don't dance when nobody else is, but she was having none of that. So we danced the night away, came home late and even though I was so tired I just wanted to collapse into bed, she made me eat some ndengu (a sort of lentil soup) before I could go to sleep. "I just want you to add so much weight before you go back to America" she explained to me.

Now might be a good time to mention that Kenyans express a lot of their feeling for a person through food. For the last week or so my mom has been sharing her love for me by making huge quantities of my favorite dishes. She always insists that I take about 40 times as much as the rest of the family combined. She claims to be concerned that my next host family won't feed me enough, so I figure she just wants me to eat enough this week to last the next month and half.

Today I had to run a few errands, so at the same time I said goodbye to my Jamhuri neighborhood. I've received a number of complaints (despite my earlier warning that I accept only positive comments) that there aren't enough pictures on this blog. Which may be fair considering there aren't any pictures. Let's see what I can do about that.

So here we have a variety of snapshots from my neighborhood and the area near my house. I walk around here everyday on my way to school, or downtown or anywhere really. Notice the dirt roads... it didn't rain yet today so walking was fine but when it gets muddy these roads become very chaotic.

If you look in some of the pictures here you can see a good deal of garbage all around on the grass and in the gutters. Solid waste management is lacking in Nairobi, so people throw their garbage wherever they feel is convenient, then every few weeks somebody sort of rakes it into big piles to be burned. Unfortunately this makes the whole neighborhood smell pretty awful.

After living in this neighborhood for an seven weeks I really feel at home here. I think it will be interesting to see how my perspective on this area changes after I return from my internship. My host mom told me I have to spend at least a few days with her before I'm allowed to travel when we all come back to Nairobi in December, so at least I know I'm not saying goodbye forever this weekend. I should mention that besides my human neighbors, I share the roads with the herds of cows the Maasai bring into town to graze. The most important thing to remember when you're walking along and you see a herd of cattle: the cows have the right of way, always.