“Sleep”over

I tried building a fence by putting little sticks in the ground but the chickens paid no attention and walked right through; guess I’ll have to try harder. There is something planted in it at least. I separated the hunk of lemon grass in my courtyard and moved half to a garden berm hoping there’s enough roots for it to survive.

In addition to pancakes today, I made coffee cake so I could take it with me to Kristen’s tonight, who is a PCV (Educ) in Endasak. It only took approximately 1.5 hours to walk there with her after I got a lot of use out of the unusually fast internet today. Kristen showed me the path to take so I don’t have to walk the longer and slightly more dangerous way by road. She and Dana also find it to be a good path to run. Along the way, I learned just how lucky I am out at my site but also to be more cautious. Although just a little lower in elevation, Kristen has mosquitoes – not many but I still think one found me tonight. She has also seen 2 small black mambas in her courtyard. We aren’t supposed to have snakes but it turns out that the just aren’t really common (they are killed as soon as people spot them). They are still here and we need to keep an eye out for them (they are very poisonous). Honestly though, I prefer the snakes to mosquitoes because they are less annoying and easy to avoid…there just isn’t any repellent for them.

At Kristen’s we made pasta for dinner and watched the movie “Sherlock Holmes” (but not on her computer because she *doesn’t* have one). Then we met up with her counterpart (another teacher at her school) and his wife to go to a church. Different people would get up and sing, the pastor talked for awhile, and I struggled to stay awake. We “rang” in the new year and shook hands with the people around us wishing them a “Happy New Year” (Heri ya mwaka mpya). Of course no one has the same time on their watches so there was no countdown. It was just, “hey, it’s 2011 now, happy new year”. There was more singing and around (after?) 0:30 (12:30am), they had the guests introduce themselves. I was tired when we got there around 22:30 (10:30pm) and now had to speak in Kiswahili. Great. I stumbled through it but we left soon afterward so I soon collapsed happily in bed.