Life is so easy in America--they drive CARS to fetch water from the river!!

Finally found some of that internet stuff again!! Welcome to Month #5. I’ve officially gone from counting days to counting weeks to counting months--the next logical increment is years. That’s kind of terrifying, kind of awesome, and makes me feel like I really haven’t done a whole lot to write home about yet considering I’ve almost been in this country for half a year now. Either way, there’s been a request for more information about what I actually do all day, so here we go.

I’m still in the “first three months at site” phase during which Peace Corps discourages starting projects. Basically my job is to just get settled in, make friends, and integrate. I’m also slowly but surely gaining confidence in Swahili and starting to be able to really get to know people in a way I couldn’t before. In the meantime, I’ve learned a lot about myself. For example: I don’t want to be a preschool teacher. It seemed like a good way to practice Swahili, but it turns out I have no patience and I’m really, really bad at controlling a room of screaming children. Another example: I am not a collectivist--my neighbors think it’s insane that I live alone and feel really bad for me because of it, but I rush home at the end of every day to enjoy my few hours of solitude. Political inclinations aside, living in America for 21 years instilled some serious individualist tendencies in me. I‘m slowly getting used to collectivism, though--if it’s 7pm and I haven’t got my charcoal stove started yet, I don’t hesitate to pop by my neighbors and guiltlessly enjoy her ugali. I’ve also been known to show up at Mama Hawa’s to ask for help with things like spiders, ant infestations, cleaning up the kerosene I spilled all over my floor, etc.

But if I’m honestly integrating, that concept has to go both ways, right? So last night a sixteen year old girl I’ve talked to a few times before showed up at my house with her one month old baby, saying she had been kicked out and had no where to sleep. She definitely wasn’t lying--I had heard from other kids that she had some serious problems at home, had dropped out of school to work after second grade, and had very little family left in the village to help her out. This was exactly the sort of “Lauren has a chance to be someone’s hero” situation that I was looking forward to. But when the time came, I am ashamed to admit I hesitated pretty seriously before taking the girl in for the night. In the end we had a peaceful evening, though she seemed very suspicious of the brown rice I cooked. I asked her what she would do if she had unlimited money and she said she’d build a three-room brick house with a tin roof and buy a plot of land near the river to plant cabbage, carrots, and green peppers (particularly lucrative crops here). Insert reality check here.

And now in no particular order, examples of the other exciting things I‘ve done in the past few months:

- Spent a day hanging out at the local water source talking to people as they washed clothes and fetched water. During this time a long group of kids came to stare at me and after about half an hour I finally turned to them and said, “I’m a human being, not a TV” and then they screamed and ran away. I also overheard my favorite quote so far: “That’s the new mzungu (white person). She lives in America. Life there is so easy--they drive their CARS to fetch water from the river!” This was followed by a very confusing attempt by me to explain indoor plumbing. I’m always surprised by the things I’m incapable of explaining… pathetically, it’s partly because I don’t actually understand how many of our modern conveniences work. Air conditioning, airplanes, the internet… as far as I know that stuff runs on magic.

- I hang out a lot with the local wazee (old people), talking about their lives and all the things they remember about the village. Lately I’ve been on a tree kick, so sometimes I ask them to take me around and show me their favorite trees and their medicinal and technical uses. The younger community members tend to know a lot less about these sorts of things, partly because the area has been pretty badly deforested so there just aren’t as many trees to use anymore. I think this might be the start of a good project that will involve collecting this information (maybe with the help of the school kids through the environment club I am slowly in the process of organizing) and putting it into a booklet type thing. The booklet will serve partly to educate people about their local resources and partly to demonstrate the importance of reforestation and of reforesting with native species.

- I’ve started a girl’s exercise club that mostly involves me attempting to teach yoga to a group of Mamas and girls who are falling all over each other and laughing hysterically at my instructions. Some things just sound bizarre when you translate them into a language you’ve only been learning for four months… I end up saying stuff like “Now you will start as a dog which has down and then slowly turn into a child.”

Besides that I pretty much just walk around and meet people, read a lot, practice guitar, and spend way more time doing household chores than you could imagine. Washing clothes by hand is a full-day job…especially since I live 2km from my nearest water source. I’ve also been doing a lot of running--there are a lot of beautiful trails through the hills behind my house that I’ve been exploring. I’m hoping to run the Kilimanjaro half (or maybe (big maybe) full) marathon in February. I’m mostly posting that here right now so I’ll feel social pressure to actually do it because I’ve just announced to the whole wide internet that I’m going to--so be sure to make fun of me if I give up.