Wednesday, July 20, 2016

First service day in Waithaka, Kenya

this is an extremely long email that you might not care about haha I apologize. I'm using my emails as my journal for now, so ignore it if you want<


Mambo! Today was the best day of my life! It was our first full day of service. We got to go to a school about a half hour away from our house and paint some classrooms (which was EXTREMELY needed) and play with the kids for a couple of hours. It was SOOO amazing. Words can't even describe how happy I felt to be with those beautiful kids.

I was proud of myself for staying decently clean... until I played with the kids! Haha but I loved every second. We danced with them and taught them the whip, they attempted to teach me some Kiswahili, and we got to teach them some math. They totally knew my one Kenyan song on my phone, Sura Yako! I learned that that means beautiful face.

One girl tried to steal everything of mine including my hair ties! She kept saying "yangu! yangu!" which means mine. I had to literally chase her to get my phone back haha! But it was innocent, she was young. All the kids were so respectful and sweet:)

I had this one boy who was totally making some moves on me haha! I sat at his "desk" with him and he had his arm around me the whole time, it was adorable. He kept lying to me saying he was 15, but I knew he was 12:)

My favorites were four 12 year old girls, Edith, Nancy, Faith, and Jen. They were gorgeous! I told Jen that was my mama's name and she totally got a kick out of it.

I did have one semi scary experience, not that I was in danger, I wasn't!! After the kids' first break, I decided to walk with these two boys to their classroom. Next thing I knew they pulled me in with surprising strength and everyone in the class was so excited to see me. The kids immediately left their desks and swarmed!! They would not let me leave! I was scared that the teacher would be mad so I tried to go but I literally couldn't. They were saying "teach us!!" I eventually fought my way through but it was insane.

I actually know the most Swahili out of our white kid group haha. They were all impressed with my one long phrase that I know even though it's pretty much all I know! I thought that was funny.

Our house is seriously the nicest building here, but by American standards, it's definitely not even close to luxury. We have very limited electricity and the water only runs sometimes, but we have wifi so that's awesome!

I slept really well last night and I was actually one of the first to wake up which really surprised me. Ruth and I went out to see the sunrise, but we had barely missed it. I'm still very tired though, those kids have a lot of energy! The only thing that's bugging me though is my foot. We have a little roof thingy at our house (with an amazing view btw) that we can climb and I jumped off and I think my heel landed on a piece of glass. I didn't even realize it until I saw some blood on my sock. It's a really small cut, it's just bruised too so it hurts to walk on.

The food is actually really good here! It's super flavorful. For dinner our mama made this Kenyan dish that's just like spaghetti but even better. I didn't really like lunch though. We thought that the corn flour and water was mashed potatoes haha so we all took huge scoops. But it was gross as you can imagine! And it's super bad to waste any food here, so we just wolfed it all down. And we had some strange meat that was like 85% fat. None of us dared to ask what kind of meat it was haha!

It's so beautiful here, nothing like I expected. It's actually super super green. On our drive from the airport we got to see a giraffe and two ostriches! It was an awesome way to start off our trip. Also, the airport was like a closet compared to the airport in Dubai. We got to exit the plane off the back on to the ground which I thought was cool! Haha I've never done that before.

One of our Agape guys drives us around on a bus and it's nuts. They are crazy drivers here and I feel like there are no laws haha just speed bumps to slow you down. But oh man! We seriously catch air on every speed bump, it's awesome. It's crazy how close the cars drive next to each other, even though it's not even necessary; they just do it! And our driver will literally just stop and turn around in the middle of the highway. He's done it three times now, and every time it just blows my mind. The only nice thing here is the roads. They're pretty decent.

I can't wait till my adventures tomorrow! Asante sana! Hope you all are as happy as I am :)

-Sydney
I thought this was a cool picture! There's this one tribesman that lives in this room connected to the house. He doesn't speak English and no one knows who he is or why he's there 😂

No comments:

Post a Comment