Saturday we went to the Safari Sevens rugby match. Now this is an international professional match, so of course the traffic was bad. We were on the road for about an hour. But we had tons of fun. There were people (vendors) walking around traffic selling things from scarves to hats to food. Ashley bought really nice sunglasses and I bought a scarf. We were stuck in traffic when Ashley was negotiating the price for her sunglasses. She had them in her hand when we started moving, so the vendor [...]

  We met the other MSID students who were here a month earlier for the pre session Swahili class and we all climbed on a bus and were on our way to a week long orientation to Lake Nakuru. It takes about 3 hours if I’m not mistaken. We stopped to view the Rift Valley and got to see some beautiful “souvenirs”, which I unfortunately didn’t buy at the time.  Boys and bunnies. We arrived at Lake Nakuru and stayed on the camp grounds. Here was where we really got [...]

Hello there! Yes, I am safe and sound in Kenya. I arrived Monday (Sep. 3) at 9 p.m. My flights were rather scary, especially the one from Dallas to London. This was the first time in all my many times on the plane that I truly thought I might die in a crash. Lots of turbulance. Lots! Well as I said above, I’m safe. While looking for my bags I met the other two girls (Alexiaa and Mollie) on my flight from the program. We were the last ones that [...]

Days in Kenya. I have not been in the United States since July—even just writing that sentence is strange. Tonight at midnight I will board a plane back to my country after living for 142 days in a country so different from my own, with people who don’t look like me or talk like me. After 142 days of being in the minority, of being the mzungu, of walking through parts of Nairobi and Mombasa and feeling like ALL eyes are on me, just waiting for someone to yell at me, [...]

Mambo vipi wote! So once again I slacked big time in updating my blog over the past month. But here’s to giving you a snap shot of the last month: My time living on the Kenyan coast wrapped up really well. My internship at the Wema Centre slowed down in the final week—since my students went home for holiday break. Saturday, November 26 was a highlight because this was the day that dozens of students, parents and teachers gathered for Wema’s graduation ceremony on the front lawn. My Kindergarten 3 (KG3) class [...]

My new room in Bamburi–a mosquito net is an essential. So there are some distinct differences between living in Nairobi and living here in the coastal Mombasa region. First off, have I mentioned that Mombasa is hot? Cause it is. It’s stinking hot. The only time I’m not sweating is the 5 minute period after my 2x daily showers. To make matters work, everything I eat is hot: from hot morning tea at home with my host family, to hot mid-morning porridge with the kids at the school, to hot lunch, to [...]

Greetings from the coast of Kenya! Apologies for the long delay in posting, but so much has happened in the last 4 weeks. I will try and capture it all in the following post. Around October 23 I moved from Nairobi (the capital of Kenya—where I had been living for 3 months) to a coastal town called Bamburi, just 25 minutes north of Mombasa—the main port city on the coast of Kenya. I am now in the internship portion of my program, where every student works for 6 weeks at a [...]

So as I type this I’m literally surrounded by cute but screaming watoto (children) at the school I’m interning at for the next 5 weeks. They’ve never seen a computer before, they’re fascinated. I’ve actually been here for about 1.5 weeks, and a lot has happened, so I’ll try to make this brief (and organized!) Sunday: Arrived at hut compound, met family, and realized I don’t have a pillow or a door.  Monday: Host sister (also boss), took me all over town to her school, the clinic I work at on [...]

…of the classroom phase of the semester! Our internship starts next week, so we have our Swahili finals tomorrow and Wednesday, and the rest of the week off. It’s been more than 6 weeks since we arrived here, which is hard to fathom.  I decided to spend the last weekend in Maasai Mara (there are pictures here), and it was amazing. Well worth the cost, and we even got to step foot in Tanzania for a little while.  As for the business end of things, the research proposals are almost done, [...]

Habari zenu! The semester here in Nairobi is really flying by. I have about two more weeks here in the city before I move to a rural coastal town north of Mombasa for a 6-week internship at an orphanage. More to come on that in the near future. This past weekend I had the opportunity to travel to my third African country—Uganda. There was so much packed into the three days we spent in Uganda, including white water rafting down the Nile and bungee jumping over the river as well, [...]

Not a bad parking spot Last weekend I made the trek to Hell’s Gate National Park with a few friends. Hell’s Gate is about an hour and a half from downtown Nairobi via Matatu, near the town of Naivasha (one of the central locations of the post-2007 election violence actually). Sheer rock face that we biked up to the base of On Friday morning we left taking two matatu’s to Naivasha, and then a motorbike from Naivasha to our hostel which was a beautiful backpacker’s place on lake Naivasha. The rest of [...]

So on Monday, I decided after not being able to run or exercise outside of house aerobics (squats down the hallway are a blast) that I needed to get a good workout. I pulled a random circuit/muscle-building workout off the internet and went to the nearest, cheapest gym, which happens to be 5 minutes from my house, outside of Kenyatta Market. It’s only 250 shillings a day for students, and 3000 a month (the exchange rate is about 102 shillings per dollar right now).  It was a great workout, but [...]

I can’t remember if I mentioned this, but my house got broken into a few weeks ago, so my mom decided to tighten security a bit. Formerly, we had a glass door with a sliding metal grate, and a solid metal door that opens (it’s about 7 feet tall). There was a space of about 8 inches between the top of the metal grate and the cement above the door that wasn’t secured, and that’s how the thief got in.  She had a metal grill put in above the metal [...]

This is how one governmental leader described the series of events over the last week here in Kenya on the news last night. Though a formal conflict has not broken out in the country, the seemingly endless death toll that has emerged in the last seven days has been heart wrenching. But even more frustrating than the series of events themselves is how preventable each accident could have been with better regulation by the Kenyan government. Many of the Kenyans that I’ve talked to, rather than showing sympathy, have expressed [...]

We got out of class very early today, so I decided to come home and change into warmer clothes (it was very cold today) before going out to get tortillas to make quesadillas for my family. The paper was on the table when I got home, so I sat down and started reading it. When I turned the page, I saw an article that really pissed me off, and I’ve actually been pissed off for several hours now. Looks like the quesadillas are going to have to wait.  This article [...]