Tuesday, October 2, 2007

It's october already?

I can’t believe it’s already October! September flew by with out me even noticing!! October’s going to go just as quickly I fear! Especially because we have two class trips planned. Man, it’s going to be December before I realize.

This last weekend was a blast! On Friday we went to the top of the Kenya International Conference Center to see a bird’s eye view of Nairobi. It was really cool to see how everything fit together, and to see the different parts of the city from up above. Afterwards we went to the memorial park for the bombing of the US embassy. It was pretty powerful.

On Saturday we went to Art in the Park, which is kind of what it sounds like. Basically in the middle of Ngong Forest Sanctuary a bunch of artists made really awesome art out of different things found in nature. A lot of the art focused on the need to protect nature, such as old tree trunks that were stuffed with dried grass to make smoke stacks called “global warning.” In general it was pretty awesome. There were a lot of school children that were running around the forest. It’s really interesting because people in Nairobi live around so much nature, but they never see it because it’s so expensive to get out to it.

Speaking of which on Sunday, we took a day trip to Lake Nivasha, which was fantastic!!! At first we were a bit skeptical of what the trip would be like because when we left the house (at 6:30 in the morning) it was raining and gross. It started clearing up during out hour drive to the park, and it actually turned out to be amazing, because the clouds made the day slightly cool which meant there were a lot of animals out and about. We did a walking safari through Lake Nivasha national park, called Hippo Lake. We walked through an open field, and through a clearing of trees, and all the sudden there were a ton of animals. No lie, it was like a scene out of the lion king. There were water bucks, impalas, giraffes, water buffalo, and zebras. We got pretty close to all of the animals (with the exception of the water buffalo. You don’t go close to those), and it was awesome. We then went to the lake and saw so many hippos. That was pretty awesome. We saw a baby hippo, baby giraffe, and baby zebra. We had the park pretty much to ourselves which was pretty cool, except at one point a group of about 8 small boys ran through the park. Totally random.

After the walking tour we took a boat tour of a different part of Lake Nivasha, and we saw more hippos, and we went by Crescent Island which is an island where animals are brought in to live, probably for tourists, and we saw more of the animals listed above plus wildebeest and gazelles, and pelicans. In general it was an amazing day.

It was really nice to get out of city for once, breath some fresh air, an see wild animals. We felt like such tourists, but considering how we spend most of our time, we didn’t feel too bad. It was so awesome to be around all of the animals, and so peaceful.

In other news...

I think to a large extent I can sum up my time in Kenya as such: I never expected to miss the US so much. (that may just be culture shock talking) This revelation has been hard for me, because my goal in life since I can remember has been to leave the US as soon as I graduate and not look back.

I also didn’t expect to miss AU in particular. For the majority of sophomore year I pretty much hated AU. I don’t even know the number of times I considered dropping out, or transferring, or taking time off. It was on a pretty regular basis. That all changed at the end of sophomore year, but it took me the entire summer up until now to realize that.

I know that most of you probably only want to hear what types of experiences I’ve been having, but for me it’s hard to separate the events of the past weeks with the internal experiences that I’ve had. For every experience that I’ve had in Kawangware, or at USIU or anywhere in Nairobi, I’ve had an equally important moment of self revelation. And as much as I want to tell all of you about all of those actual physical experiences it’s also hard because I know that there are so many things that I’ll leave out just because to me it seems normal. And frankly, life here is so completely different that, not to be mean, you’ll never be able to understand entirely what the experience is like. Maybe that’s a little harsh, but I don’t know how else to put it.

Every thing that happens here has a direct impact on the rest of my life, and frankly that’s exhausting. I’ve spent so much of this trip just being so so tired, and I think that I’ve finally understood why. My brain can’t process all of it, so it takes it out on my body.

I’m not saying any of this to complain. I hope that it helps you all understand, I can completely understand now how I will be a completely different person when I come back, hopefully a much better person.
Miss you all! See you in a few months!

miriam

2 comments:

AU Abroad Kenya said...

there are always ups and downs, and until you get used to them in an international context it's gonna be rough. but you will get used to discovering new things every day that will add value to what you already know intuatively. keep reflecting and you will keep growing...

Christy said...

hey hey! i'm going to get to your email here soon but wanted to let you know, i slept soo much in kenya. i seriously would go to bed at 10pm and then get up at 9am. never slept better in my life and those njema beds are hardddddd. miss you!