Hujambo!

3964I went to Fourteen Falls with Pat this past weekend. It’s about an hour and a half drive from Tala via the Thika road route. The road isn’t too bad as long as you sit in the front of the truck (they only use modified pick-up trucks on this route for some reason). The fare was 100 shillings, which isn’t too bad. The other option is to go to Nairobi (150 shillings) and then to Thika (150 shillings), which takes you on a nicer road but eats an extra 400 or so shillings and a few hours of your time. There hasn’t been too much rain lately, so the water was a little low (and green…), but we still had a nice time relaxing with some snacks in the shade.

You can find the rest of the pictures here: http://thefro.org/gallery2/v/2009/fourteenfalls

I just realized the other day that I only have eight months left here in Kenya. Not that I’m counting down, but because I arrived in October, 2007 I should be leaving in October, 2009 I guess. I haven’t decided if I will leave early or extend a bit. Since I came back from the evacuation after last year’s post-election violence I have steadily become a full-time lecturer at the college. That’s important to note because we will have a semester beginning in August/September or so, and if I leave in October I will leaving more-or-less in the middle of the semester. Not cool! So we’ll just have to play it by ear… whatever that means, haha.

I’m very used to life in Tala these days. I walk around like a local and it shows. When I walk into any of the cafes I can just make some small talk and then say, “Kama kawaida” (“like usual” in Swahili) to get my tea and chapati. Even my afternoon students know that after class I’ll either be going to eat chai/chapati or Kisumu ndogo. Kisumu ndogo, which means “small Kisumu” in Swahili, is a place in Tala where you can eat delicious fried fish. It comes in small pieces, served with ugali (corn meal staple food) and some kachumbari (kinda like salsa fresca). Tala’s a funny place, a few months ago I noticed a new place called Kisumu kubwa (big Kisumu), which serves whole fish. Kisumu, by the way, is a town in Western Kenya on Lake Victoria, and the people there are known to eat a lot of fish.
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Nobody wants to be the last one holding the hot potato when the time is over; that’s kinda how I feel about electronic waste. E-waste is a really, really big problem. There is a village in China, for example, where people crouch over fires of melting electronic components (mobile phones, motherboards, wires, CRT monitors, etc). Children have sores all over their bodies, mothers have breast milk with heavy metals, cancer rates are through the roof. All of this just to reclaim a few ounces of gold, silver, or who-knows-what other precious metals live inside that 21st-century trash.
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Last week I was reading about the evolution of Latin languages in Western Europe and it made me think about Swahili here in East Africa. Swahili is the official language of Kenya and Tanzania (and apparently Uganda, but I’ve been there and I didn’t hear much). The thing is, while most Kenyans do speak Swahili, everyone knows it’s not the sanifu (“pure”) brand you’ll find spoken in Tanzania. After independence, Tanzania’s first president was all excited about forging a strong national identity, and part of that was pushing for the adoption of Swahili as the national language. I read in Paul Theroux’s Dark Star Safari that one independence-era government official’s words were: “English is the language of the imperialists.” Sure enough, traveling in Tanzania is hard if you don’t speak Swahili because English is by no means pervasive!
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Whenever you think that things couldn’t possibly get more busy/stressful/expensive/whatever, they do! Here’s the deal, I posted a few weeks ago that our semester had started and that I was teaching four classes; it turns out that I’ll be teaching five!

A student came last week saying she failed a class in 2005 and she wants to come sit for the class again. The thing is that it’s my favorite area, and I’m really the only one at the school who can teach it. The course is Operating Systems II, basically Unix/Linux system administration. It’s not really terrible, it’s just bad timing because we’re already in the fifth week of classes.
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