The KP Chronicles

After two weeks of running around like a crazy person from school to school and farm to farm and meeting to meeting, we finally have a day off. My professor and the Farmers Helping Farmers liaison both flew home Friday, and the nursing students all went to Sweetwaters to go on safari for the weekend so it’s really really quiet here. We went from living with 10 people for a week down to just the two of us. We wasted the entire day Friday doing nothing but getting extremely incredibly sunburned and reading. I’ve gone through 3 books already since I’ve been here which is awesome because during the school year I never get anytime to read at all. The bad news is that I have finished all the books I brought here to read, but luckily the nursing students each brought like 12 books so we have an entire bookshelf full of random things to read. So I am about to start book number 4, and will probably have it finished pretty soon.

This morning, to break up the monotony of the weekend, Christina and I went to church with Jennifer’s brother Sammy. The key to Kenya is to embrace the awkwardness of doing random things with random people you don’t actually know. It turns out that Sammy is pretty cool and very easy to get a long with. When it came time for the service, Sammy ushered us into the building and sat us down on the bench beside him. A few minutes later, once the rest of the congregation had wandered in, we look around and can’t help but notice that there are no women on our side of the church and no men on the other side of the church. It turns out that the church actually divides itself for service, with women on one side and men on the other, and we happened to be sitting on the wrong side. Sammy assured us it was fine because we were guests but I can’t even count the number of weird stares we got. It may have been that they were staring because we were also the only white people there but who really knows. Half way through the congregation, we hear the minister slash priest slash reverend (what ever he was) say the words ‘visitor’ and ‘say a few words’. Since he had a severe Swahili accent, those were basically the only words that we could make out. Next thing we know, he’s looking in our direction holding a microphone out. We kind of looked at each other and then to Sammy to figure out what was actually happening. We were ushered onto the stage with no idea what the heck we were supposed to be saying. This was especially awkward because I didn’t actually understand more then 10 words the preacher dude said the whole service and the entire congregation was starring at us expectantly. Finally we introduced ourselves, explained what we were doing in Kenya and then thanked them for inviting us. I thought we were done, and so I handed the microphone back to the preacher man but he was still looking expectantly as if we were supposed to continue with a something religion related. We kind of handed back the microphone and slinked back into our bench on the men’s side of the church thoroughly embarrassed and still not entirely sure what was going on.

Today I organized my entire timetable for classes next year and am all ready and am pumped to register next week. It will be potentially my last time picking courses ever which is both terrifying and super exciting at the same time. I have some room for electives this year and I have picked some really awesome ones that are pretty much completely random but hopefully easy and interesting.