Life

June 26, 2007

I taught the 3 youngest classes at school about shapes and chatted a bit with the older students about America.

Because of the lack of resources and educational system, everything they learned at school was done through rote memorization, drilling, and copying things off of the board. If they misbehaved or got an answer wrong, the teachers hit them with a stick. Having been taught to have a creative and nurturing classroom envioronment, this was frustrating and upsetting to me.

On a different note, the grandmother of my host family would make the most amazing juice (pronounced joo-ees). She would take fresh, ripe pineapple, watermelon, mango (sometimes other fruits too) and kind of squish it all together and strain the pulp. Then she added a little bit of water/sugar. It was the best! I helped make some.

Here is Dylan drinking some:

 By the way, I was living with a host family that consisted of a grandmother, her son (eugene) and his wife (Gina), and their two kids Cody, and Dylan. There was a house helper there named Wanja. I stayed on one half of the house with the grandma and Wanja and my roomate, and Eugene's family was on the other side. Dyaln and Cody would come over after school to play with me and ask me questions and eat dinner with us. It was a fairly nice house, with a kitchen and bathroom. There was no shower but we would boil water and take splash baths every morning.


June 26, 2009

My Kenyan cold had gotten worse and I spent the whole day laying around feeling miserable.

My Dad and I were staying at an orphanage and I was sharing a room with several other girls. The orphanage had no electricity and it was their winter so it would get dark around 7:30, usually before we had even eaten dinner. We would eat by a lantern light and read by flashlight and once it was dark there was not much to do but go to sleep. There was a tank of water outside and they had to bring any in that they needed for cooking/washing. In order to flush the toilet, we had to pour water into the tank and it did not get flushed a lot and smelled. Cold splash baths were rare, and hot ones even rarer.