June 13, 2007

We’ve been in Kenya for just about two weeks now. Our first week of work was a little hard to get use to, but now we’re in the swing of things and understand how the people work over here. We went to work Monday and Margaret was actually in Rongai for the day, so we didn’t have too many duties to tend to. There also weren’t as many children that morning as they’re usually are, so it was an easier day. We stopped at the Boma on our way home as we usually do, and James, the young man who works in the orphanage office, was there. He was very kind and at first I didn’t recognize him, but finally Will told me who he was. We were just heading out the door when he tried to stop us (we told him we had a curfew) because apparently he’d ordered a t-bone steak from the mystery kitchen in the bar and wanted us all to try it. We had no time to chow down on the beef, but the boys tried it and then kindly told James that we’d have to do that for real sometime.

On Tuesdays and Saturdays in Nairobi there is a large Market. From traveling abroad with Semester at Sea, I got use to the whole ‘market’ extravaganza and figured there wouldn’t be anything that interesting there. So we went to Nairobi on Tuesday, got some more Shillings, paid for our Mt. Kenya trip (hiking adventure in 9 days!) and had a delicious meal at Trattoria, the nicest looking restaurant in the city. We’ve been eating African food for a while, so we treated ourselves to some spaghetti, delicious pizzas and tasty bruschetta. Then we headed to the Market and it was pretty much what I expected. Lots of stuff that people really don’t need, and a lot of vendors pretending to be your best friend and offering you ‘good price’ because you’re a student or because you’re a special person. I bought three bracelets for 200 shillings (he wanted 500) and Will bought a Djembe for…too much. I got upset with him because he’s not good at bargaining and just too nice of a guy to haggle with the vendors. He needs some lessons I think.

Although Nairobi is only about 30 minutes away, we were coming home during ‘rush hour’ and I was a bit nervous about getting home on time. I didn’t want to upset Esther again, so I was a little tense on our way back. We didn’t leave Nairobi until about 5 PM, and we had to catch a Mutatu to get home. Mutatu’s are vans that run back and forth from the cities and they’re basically like a very fast and crazy carpool adventure. You just pick random people up at different stops, and each van only holds 14 passengers. Will, Wendy and I had to catch one just as it started to rain and as everyone was rushing home. It’s a tough process, but kind of fun because you gotta be aggressive so people know not to push you out of the way. It took a few minutes, but we finally found a van and were able to get on. Fortunately, we got to Rongai around 6 PM and walked back home from there, beating sunset by almost an hour.