The place I call nyumbani...

Sorry it's been so long. It's been tough finding a decent connection. The good news is, although violence has cropped up in more cities, people have a lot of faith in Kofi Annan and feel that these negotiations will be a turning point. Meanwhile, I got my internship assignment, and we've started riding matatus through the city (I came to school alone today and got nothing stolen - woohoo!). More on that next time. Here's a bit about my home in Kenya:

Our apartment complex, Njema Court, is in an upper-middle class neighborhood of Nairobi called Westlands. All the homes and businesses in neighborhoods like this are surrounded by high brick walls topped with spikes, barbed wire, and/or glass shards. There are guards hired to stand at the solid gate 24 hours a day. It's mildly hilarious, but not at all unusual for Nairobi. This city is full of very rich people as well as very poor people, who the rich try desperately to keep out of their lives. There have been no reports of any sort of unrest in Westlands since the election, so we can stay in this district and do out grocery shopping and clubbing right here if there's violence downtown.

Anyway, it's a fancy apartment complex. Inside the gates we have a gym, pool, dry goods store full of Indian spices and lentils, bakery (mmmmm...), boutique, and chemist (combination pharmacy/doctor). A woman comes to do our laundry several days a week, and a maid cleans every day but Sunday. I'm getting ridiculously spoiled, but these women are friends of the program who were trained to do housework at some of our internship sights, so I'm happy to support them.

I share one of our three bedrooms with Ayah. The beds are hard and the walls are still pretty bare (except for my collage of pictures). We have two bathrooms, a living/dining room with a TV that gets five channels, and a kitchen with a small oven and a gas stove, where we cook nearly every night. We also have a fridge, toaster, microwave, radio, and boiler in which we boil tap water before drinking. We pay for electricity, so we turn out the lights and cut power to the outlets when we're not using them. We turn on the water heater for a couple of hours every day before we all shower.

The water is a bit orange from all the red dust that blows around. It weirds you out at first, but you get over it pretty fast. There's dust pretty much everywhere. You just have to get over the shock of seeing brownish-red water the first time you rinse your hair in the shower every night.

We usually don't watch TV, except the local nightly news. Truly, we're all so beat (physically as well as emotionally, at times) by the time we get home from wherever we are, we just want to sit, listen to some music, and talk. I read quite a bit and write emails/blogs on my laptop, which I save on a flash drive and take to school or an internet cafe in Westlands. Sometimes we lose power, but not for too long.

At the moment I'm sitting on our little balcony with my feet up (cooling off after the bus ride from USIU, which is dusty and hothothot), thoroughly enjoying the breeze. Our balcony looks northeast over an empty field that is dotted with trees and is vibrantly green, except where you can see little patches of red earth. There's a hut made of corrugated tin standing in the field where three or four men live. We weren't sure they actually lived there until we saw them walk outside and stretch one morning. They burn their trash in the field a couple of times a day, and sometimes we see their dogs chasing each other around the hut. I wish I knew their story. Right now there are some people in suits and ties standing in the middle of the field and gesturing (as the men sit outside their hut). Not sure how to explain this one.

That's about all there is to know about the place I call home. I'll do a “day in the life” sort of post sometime soon. We can't wait for this mess to die down so we can have some freedom and get on with our lives, but things are definitely getting better. The Eagle did an article on us, also, if you want to check it out: http://media.www.theeagleonline.com/media/storage/paper666/news/2008/01/24/News/Students.Volunteer.Help.Kenyans-3165297.shtml