Here I am sitting outside at debrief wondering where the last few days have gone. This month was our longest month; practically 6 weeks, but it just flew by! Maybe it's because I was out sick for 2 weeks or maybe it's becuase time is funny like that. I need to apologize for my lack of blogs this month. Honestly, I have just been unmotivated to sit down and write. I do have lots for stories so I wanted to fill you all in. There is a little phrase you must know first…T.I.A. This Is Africa.
We met a Maasai family with 3 young boys who stole my heart. One day Angie, Nikki, Haile, and I took the 2 older boys to the animal orphange. Soleematay (I spelled it the way it sounds) is 5 and Anteaon is 3. THe cutest boys you will ever meet. We saw baby lions and cheetahs and many other animals. We were all admireing the ostrarich when we heard a loud bang followed by other noises. Baboons. Wow those things are big, but it looked like they were behind the fence. Nope about 2 seconds later 3 baboons ran through the open gate and ran towards us. Nikki's mother instincts kicked in and she screamed and sorted hearded the boys up against the ostraich pen. The baboons gave us a werid look and continued on their way hopping and running about causing ruckus. [[T.I.A]]
Angie and I set up a Skype date to talk to our families…finally. We walk to the closest internet place with 20 minutes to spare. No power. Walk to the next internet place and get there with 5 minutes to spare. No power. Walking back to the church to try to decide what we want to do when Angie goes rogue on us and runs into a Auto Repair place and asks to use their internet after telling them about our adventures. He says yes so we quickly send messages to our families telling them that we still want to Skype and we are going to take a Matatu to Nakumat Galleria to get internet it should be 20 minutes tops. Done. We walk to the stop to take a Matatu 15 minutes to Nakumat Galleria. It takes 2 hours. 2 hours because of the traffic. We finally get to Nakumat Galleria and try all 16 different connections. None are working. So after that big adventure we decide to grab some food before going back. We place our orders and get our food about 30 seconds before the power goes out. It's dark outside and pitch balck inside. The power comes back on about a minute later only to go back off a minute after that. Eventually Alana pulls out her headlamp and turns it on saying in a loud voice "Don't worry guys, I got this. I got this" She would turn it off when the power came on and then repeat the phrase and turn it back on when the lights went off. This is how we spent our entire dinner. [[T.I.A]]
We became close to a few people at Deliverance Church and one of those people is Rachel. Rachel is a seamstress and so we took the opportunity to ask if she would make us some skirts and dresses. She did and they turned out beautiful! However a mzungu wearing an African skirt gets aome pretty weird looks. [[T.I.A]]
We went to Kiberia (the largest slum in Africa) to play games with the kids. Many of them haven't seen white people before and they really examined our skin. As you know I have freckles and most to all of my teammates do not haveany. Well 3 boys were looking at my arms and touching my skin when one boy notices my freckles and starts to poke my skin. Then he would look at his finger and rub my arm. When I asked what he was doing he said he didn't understand how I had "dark spots" He thought that every time he touched me he lost a little bit of his color and it ended up as a spot on my skin. haha. [[T.I.A]]
Yesterday most of our squad went to a rugby game but a few of us stayed behind. Dinner time comes around and we find out that it's not going to be until 8 because the rest of our squad won't be back until then. So 5 of us decided we will order a pizza to hold us over until then. We place our order for delivery at about 6:45 and they tell us it will be here in less than an hour. Two and a half hours later our pizza arrives and it isn't the one we ordered. [[T.I.A]]
