Sunset

So here is a view of the sky at sunset from my yard. I love the thorn tree!

My Guard Lizard

So today I got a guard lizard! Well, it’s really a baby skink that I found at school. But I love lizards and most Kenyans aren't particularly fond of lizards. When I picked it up at school, my teachers freaked out- it was great! They always freak out when we play with the chameleons and skinks! So it’s a watch lizard! Better then a watch dog any day! It eats bugs! It scares off intruders! Well maybe not the last one, but I named it Mnung’unikaji after my class’s favorite Swahili word of all time: kunung’unika (to complain). We call our school Darasa la Wanung’unikaji (the Class of the Complainers). So I’ll either call him that, or Sid.

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I LOVE Ethiopian food!!!

After church yesterday, we took some of our friends to our favorite Ethiopian place for lunch! YUMMY!!!!! This is my friend's daughter's first taste of Ethiopian food! She loved it!

Punda Cart Surfing

Ok, I have to get a picture of this sometime, but until I do you will all just have to settle for a verbal description.

So as you go down the roads of Kenya, you will see pundas (donkeys) EVERYWHERE!!! They are used to pull carts and all sorts of other tasks. But the thing that is the most fun to watch is the young guys who are punda cart surfing. The carts that the pundas pull have 2 wheels, so they kind of teeter-totter back and forth if they aren’t balanced and they usually are piled high with TONS of stuff (everything from produce for the market and fire wood to people's possessions). So sometimes you see guys standing up on the carts, balancing like a surfer as the punda is running full speed down a huge hill (and pundas can run remarkably fast!). It’s absolutely hilarious. It also has to require a great amount of skill. And I think it would hurt a lot more falling from a punda cart then it would falling from a surfboard. But like I said, I have to get a picture of this- it’s way cooler when you can see it!

A Month After the Elections

So things are rough here again. It’s complicated and big and crazy. I struggle to understand all of what’s going on and why it is, so I’m not exactly sure how to explain it all. But this was a hard week for Kenya. We had thought that we were starting to see an end to all of this, but this week changed all that. There was intense fighting in various areas of the country, but this was more then just the political protests of a few weeks ago (not that all the fighting a few weeks ago was strictly political either, but this was much worse). Thousands more people are displaced - (some had started to return to their places only to have to move out again, some were forced out of their homes and towns as fighting came to their communities). UNICEF is reporting at least 300,000 internally displaced people in camps around Kenya, 80,000 of which are children under 5. Friends of mine are displaced. Displaced seems like such a small word for what’s happening. I don’t know what the word is that accurately describes this, but displaced isn’t it. Displaced is to clean. Too easy. Devoid of emotion.

So keep praying for Kenya. When I ask friends what needs to happen in Kenya, they always say the same thing. They don’t know what will fix all of this, but they say “Mungu anajua”. God knows.

On a more positive note, in the midst of this crazy week, I managed to get a 97% on my Swahili mid term. I was pretty proud of that!