Habari? (How are You?)

I do miss the choruses of everyone saying hello, whether it was the children screaming "how are you? how are you? how are you?" in English from the side of the road, or the chorus of "jambo"s as we walked down the street.

It's really hard to believe I've been back for two and a half weeks already. As you've probably guessed from my absence, life has been... a little busy. It's also been difficult to know where to start - so today I decided to start from the beginning.

I left San Francisco that Wednesday in a blur, steeling myself for the 10 hour solo flight until I met up with the rest of the volunteers in Amsterdam. We all managed to make our connections (barely for some) and before I knew it, all 12 of us (11 volunteers plus the wonderfully helpful Sister Catherine Madigan) were on our final flight to Nairobi. We arrived in Nairobi around 8:30pm on Thursday, most of us completely exhausted from the inability to sleep on a plane. The Daughters were waiting to greet us with open arms, and soon we were being whisked away - the Kioo group stayed the night at the Nairobi house, while the rest of us got started on our journey by staying the night in Thigio about an hour drive West.

Departure time was 7am - and we stepped out the front door to see the matatu that would be taking us to Kitale. Matatus are essentially passenger vans, and are one of the most common forms of transport from one city to another. I remember leaving from Thigio, sitting in this rickety van, thinking that the gravel road was going to be a looooong 8 hour drive. Thankfully, the gravel was only for the first hour or so, until we hit the paved "highway" that goes through the Great Rift Valley. I say "highway" because it was so full of potholes and grooves, that sometimes we actually drove in the ditch because it was safer!

The drive through southwestern Kenya was stunning, in every sense of the word. I was overwhelmed by the astounding beauty everywhere I looked - cliffs, mountains, lush foliage, wild zebras running amongst a herd of cattle - it was some of the most beautiful landscape I've ever seen. But, I was also stunned by the poverty. Tiny shack villages that have spurred up on the side of the highway, just a series of shacks one right next to the other, with women sitting along the roadside selling food or wares. A small solitary child tending a herd of goats, seemingly miles from civilization. Crumbling stone buildings, I can only imagine to be remnants of an era when wealthy British colonists populated the area.

We arrived in Kitale around 3pm, and the Daughters fed us a very hearty, and very long anticipated, lunch. We said our goodbyes to the Chepynal group, who then headed another 3.5 hours further, up a completely different kind of "road"... but I didn't experience that until week 2, so I'll save that story.

We did our best to get our bearings, even though we were all very tired and jetlagged. That first night was a blur, and we all went to bed shortly after supper.

When we awoke the next morning, we got our first proper taste of Kitale. Most of us went to mass with the Sisters that morning, in Kiswahili of course, and then afterwards came back and had what would become our staple breakfast for the next month - toast and peanut butter. Then it was off to my first big project as coordinator - going to the market to stock the volunteer house with food. That morning was an experience I'll never forget!

The market was a fascinating place. In some sense, it was a typical open air farmers market, with tons of individual shops. Many sold similar foods, such as avocados, tomatoes, and corn. Mangoes and bananas were also very easy to find. There were plenty of things I'd never seen before, and Sister Josephine (a native Kenyan, and our translator/guide for the day) did her best to try to figure out what my curiosities might be called in English. The market was similar to what I would have expected - shack-like structures, muddy, buggy, full of children running around without shoes. What I wasn't expecting was the supermarket maybe a 5 minute drive away. Kitale is a very large city, and it has several streets of modernity, including supermarkets, clothing stores, phone shops, and the like. I learned how to order meat in kilograms at the butcher, and that milk and yogurt cartons look almost identical. I also learned that green beans do not exist. It was a fascinating  and exhausting morning, and by lunch time we were all thankful to be going back "home."

We got back just in time, because about half way through lunch, the rains started. That first day was thankfully the only day it rained so hard, because all of the buildings we would be using for camp filled with water during the flash flood that afternoon. Being from Oregon, I thought I knew rain... but I've never seen rain like that, where you look outside the window and it looks like someone is just pouring water out of a large bucket. The rest of the day was caught up in the aftermath of the flood - thankfully it just made a mess, and didn't cause any major structural damages!

The next morning was our first full experience of a Kenyan Sunday Mass - and that's enough for a post all by itself :)