I sh*t in a hole....

Hey everyone! It's good to get on the internet and update this blog because so much has already happened. I'm now officially living in LOitokitok with my host family and I can't begin to tell you how humbling it is to have someone take you into your home and basically show you everything you need to know to survive here. My mama is the strongest woman I've ever met. For one, she can touch hot coals with her bare hands. She teaches me to cook Kenyan food, clean the Kenyan way and ya...I sh*t in a hole (this is something I will never get use to). Us PC Volunteers have become very comfortable about talking about pee/poo considering we had a 2 hour session on diarrhea haha! My room at home is very small, but so cute! It is filled with lace all along the walls and the ceiling. My mama heats me up bath water over the fire and I shower out of a bucket. I'm actually quite proud of myself at how good at it I am. I've also become very brave at getting shots. They don't give you any prewarning about getting shots. You show up at a session and all the sudden they are like "oh hey you are getting a Rabies shot today"...great.

I have 2 kakas (brothers) and 1 dada (sister) that live with me too. I showed them how to play "Ring around the rosie", "london bridges falling down" and "patty cake" and now it's all they want to do. It is crazy how different childhood is here. I let them use my pen the other day and a huge fight broke out about who got to use it. I felt so bad because it was just a pen. So the next day I brought them another one and another fight just ended up happening. It makes me think about how at my law office Andrew will always ask me to email Henry for the super-duper crafty pen and all I have to do is shoot him an email and a week later the nicest pen you've ever seen shows up. Ya...they practically cut eachothers throat here for a paper mate haha!

Something I know Sean will be happy to hear, I've seen every single Bay Area sports team represented here so far. They get second hand clothes from the Salvation Army and Goodwill so I've seen the 49ers, Sharks, Raiders and THE OAKLAND A'S (ya baby!) all represented! The funny thing is that they have no idea that they are even American teams, let alone sports at all.

The other day I traveled with a couple of other volunteers to a neighboring village to speak to the Minister of Heath and the Chief Elder about what they do. I learned that right now they are focusing on getting all the families in the area an adequate place to defecate. The problem is many people do not want to use a choo (their form of a toilet which is basically a hole in the ground a mile deep) because they think the people who know vodoo will scoop out their poop and curse them so if they go in the bush they won't be able to tell whose poop is whose...crazy, I know. But these are issues that I will have to deal with as a volunteer in the field and so learning about them early will be good practice. Besides this, we have language practice every day and I'm learning a lot of Swahili, probably one year of high school Spanish and I've only been here a week. We also have cultural training and heath training. I had to administer myself a malaria test the other day and actually draw my own blood. I seriously almost fainted, but once again I surprised myself at how capable I really am and got through it.

I haven't felt that I made the wrong decision in doing this what so ever, in fact I feel like I'm exactly where I am suppose to be. The food is decent, the people kind and I feel so lucky to be able to have an experience like this. Of course, I do miss home a lot and often dream about what I might be missing out on (due to my malaria medication having the side effect of vivid dreams), but at the same time, I am so busy during the week I have little time to think of the sadness that is associated with these feelings. When I get home at night I am beyond tired, and before I know it, it is 6am and my day is getting started again.

Anyway, I am available through email on my phone. It is not easy for me to respond to email on the phone, but even just getting a hello feels good. If you comment on these blog posts it goes to my email too so you can always say hi that way, otherwise my email is aflynnschneider@gmail.com and I look forward to hearing from each and every one of you. I have no pictures to show just yet because we were advised not to take out anything expensive for our first few weeks and although my camera is crappy for American standards, here is is an unimaginable luxury.

Love and miss you all!
Andrea