Jambo Kenya

Jambo! or i guess i should say Sopa now i am Maasai, i tell you it is very confusing so many different languages are spoken and they chop and change between them all!! It is Saturday and i decided to make the trip into Karen (named after karen blixen of "out of Africa" fame) to update this blog as i realized alot of what had been written is quite negative and i am having the most amazing time and i wouldn't want you to get the wrong impression! Yes there is corruption here and i arrived to a lot of drama but this is africa and that seems to be the way it is, the amazing with the nasty all together so you don't know what has hit you!
This morning i woke up at 5am to get the matatu here, and imagine my surprise when i went to the toilet and had to fight off a bat that seemed intent on nesting in my hair! My toilet i should explain is a small tin shack a few feet square at the end of the garden with a very small hole in the ground, there is no window or any form of ventilation so it isn't my favourite place at the best of times (i've had a nightmare about falling in) let alone when a bat is trying to nest in my hair. However i emerged unscathed and caught the matatu to town, which is an adventure in itself. It is a truck with a frame over the back that peole can stand/sit on. Today i counted 26 ppl just in the back, not the most i've had but squished is an understatement, there are literally people hanging from every corner of the truck. Which is fine for the first 20 mins but with my boney bum i am in agony by the time we pull into town an hour and a half later. The worst is if you catch one on market day, you really don't know what you are going to be sitting with, goats, chickens, sacks full of machetes, i once travelled with an old maasai mama sitting on my lap the whole way home, i couldn't feel my legs at all when i arrived and had to wait for the feeling to come back before i could get out the truck.
This last week has been great (except on the home front, but more about that later) school is amazing i really love teaching and the kids are soo funny. I teach 3 classes. Class 4 English, class 5 and 7 Science which i really love. I forgot how much i loved science when i was a kid and getting to teach it now is awesome. My students love me, i am like a celebrity at school (well the whole village for that matter) when i arrive in the morning i have a crowd of children around me all wanting to carry my stuff and touch me or my hair, they all shout Namunyak (my maasai name) ow r u? and they have taught me all these crazy handshakes (think Cher and Dion in clueless) that they line up for me to do with them. They are soooo great, whenever i give them assignments and i let them use coloured pencils or stickers or anything they can't believe how lucky they are, yesterday we were studying plants and i made then do leaf rubbings with crayons and they were so happy at doing anything other than copying the board. When i was marking their books later they had written god bless you Namunyak, and we love you , inside their school books, how cute is that!!! i wish i brought out more supplies though, there are children who have no pens or pencils and they have to supply their own so if they don't have one they don't do any work that day. It is amazing just how poor everyone is out here, the school does what it can but there is practically no funding from the government, and i know the teachers end up paying for a lot. At lunch time the kids eat Maize, it looks just like the corn on the cob we have for bbqs but tastes awfull the maize is soo hard it is like chewing rubber, thats what the kids eat every single day all year!!It makes you think about how we complained about school lunch! Last week while it was being cooked i heard a huge BANG, what had happened was a child had found a bullett in the field and had thrown it in the fire and it had exploded, luckily no-one was hurt, and luckily no one saw who did it as he would have been badly beaten. I have a really hard time with the discipline here, the teachers think i am the biggest softie but i cannot and will not beat a child (thats not mine anywho!) . They laugh at me when i tell them how we discipline children in school, writing lines, detention......they think i am joking, when i say they would be arrested for beating a child!
Okay so now the update on my living situation, where to begin..... The rains have started here in the evenings, not just outside but in my bedroom too! I was none too happy when my roof started leaking soaking me in my bed, the kittens ( i have one cat and 4 kittens living in my room with me)were freaking out, as when the rain hits the tin roof it is so loud you have to yell to hear someone right next to you. I mentioned to Mama Nashipae in the morning that she might want to fix it, she said no problem, however the cooking fat that she shoved in the holes only lasted about 5 mins in the next downpour and needless to say i wasn't impressed to be soaked again and covered in animal fat!! The roof problems started when i came back from safari to discover i had no roof, i thought it had blown off in one of the wind storms that we get all the time in the rift valley, but soon found out that they were building an extension to hold more volunteers!!!! I couldn't believe it when they told me, they are being soo greedy, they already have 2 that shouldn't be there, they are soo corrupt but what goes around comes around. After the whoha when i arrived, i told VICDA just what i thought of them and told them that if they wished to keep sending volunteers to Saikeri they had to patch things over with the school and sort out where the volunteers would be living. so when the new teacher arrived the other day she went to live with one of the teachers!! not in our house ooohhhhh you should have seen mamas face when i told her, she is sooooo pissed she just spent money building this extension thinking that it would be paid off as soon as the next Vol arrived as they get so much money but now they are sending them elsewhere! She got straight on the phone to the guy at VICDA who has been doing this dodgy deal with her and i heard my name mentioned, whoops... She has been a right old bat to me and Adrian since, we have nicknamed her the wicked stepmother! We call ourselves cinderella as she trys to make us do all the cooking and cleaning! Adrian came home the other day and she threw a cabbage at her and said DO IT ( as in cook it 4 dinner) Adrian just said no, and we went next door to her rivals house and ate the forbidden (she has told us we cannot eat there)food, it was soooo good. Mama nashipae is a really terrible cook, one of the reasons i came to town was to eat somthing other than Ugali (flour and water) and potato's. Since we ate at mama marys she won't talk to us. It is actually quite hilarious, sometimes i feel like i am on a reality show and that this isn't really happening. i brought home onions they other day so we could add some flavour to our meals, but when it came time to cook there were no onions as she had sold them in her shop! It is so funny we are in this constant back and forth of pretending we all love each other then doing things behind each others back. It sounds awful but it is more funny than anything else. She says she will miss us when we go and i think she means it, we have certainly made things interesting, and secretly i think she likes the drama, people in town have told us she is crazy and i am starting to believe it.