Remember back in December when I promised that it wasn’t my last post? You thought I was lying, that I just left you hanging. That implies that my life is interesting enough to have cliff hangers, but anyway…
SURPRISE!
I’m back. The transition back home wasn’t bad and I had minimal culture shock. I already feel like a normal “American” again.
Now on to exciting and blog-relevant news:
I’m going back to Kenya this summer!
After returning to college, I applied for something called a Heston Internship. It is run through the public service center at my school. Over the last few years, the internship has sent students to Nicaragua and Uganda. This year, they switched from Uganda to Kenya.
The internship is through an organization call KMET, located in Kisumu. If you remember (also from the last post), Kisumu is a city to the west of Nairobi located on Lake Victoria. KMET is one of the coolest organizations I’ve heard of as it seems to do everything.
Click to see more about KMET: http://www.kmet.co.ke/
Kisumu is a predominately Luo city. If you remember my Nairobi homestay family was Luo. While labeling isn’t really my thing, figuring out what tribe is dominant in the area is helpful. Chances are, there’s going to be a little anxiety going on while we are there. There has been a lot of discussion about the next presidential election. The last one didn’t fair to well for those in Kisumu. While a lot of the post election violence in 2008 was in Nairobi, Kisumu was hit almost equally as hard since it was a conflict between the Luos and Kikuyu. Luckily for us, the election date was pushed back to March 2013, making our time there a little less worrisome. Though the constitutionality of moving the date is under scrutiny, so who knows, they might move it again.
Knowing that Kisumu is predominantly Luo is also important because it means that many of the locals will speak Luo. So after months of Swahili (most of which I have forgotten), I will be back to square one as far as not understanding. All I know in Luo is my name, but even then I wouldn’t know when to say it since I don’t know basic Luo conversation questions. So I won’t know if someone is asking my name. So whenever someone asks me something in Luo, I’ll just respond “Akini” to be safe.
“Can you pass the salt?
“Akini.”
It will work well.
I am going with three other students from Gettysburg. We actually get to pick what program we want to work with within KMET. Origionally, I want to work with home-based HIV testing and counseling as that is what I did my ISP on. However, the program was taken over by the government so I can’t really work with it. Not a problem though, as there are at least three other programs I would love to work with. Once we get to Kisumu, we have a week to tour the KMET facilities and figure out what we would like to work with.
Facts you may want to know:
I leave May 27th, luckily out of JFK. Hopefully without a three-day delay this time. Our layover is in Dubia this time, which is also kind of exciting. We land in Nairobi and then almost immediately get on a plane to Kisumu. This will be completely different from my last trip to Kisumu. I’m hoping it is less painful, but it won’t be nearly as exciting.
We are there for 2 months. We fly back to the states on July 29th.
We are expected to do some kind of project with whatever program we work with. More on that at a later date.
We will be living with homestay families again. I don’t know if I get to know about my family before going this time. That would be nice since I went into my last homestay without a clue.
Kisumu is safer than Nairobi (or Nai-robbery as it sometime called. Not much competition with a name like that). The student who lived there during ISP often spoke about going out at night, something we Nairobi kids didn’t get to do. So that will be nice.
Weather wise we are there during the shift between the “long rain” season and a dry season. During July the temperature begins to drops. Kenyan “winters” are in August, so I guess our time there is technically “fall”.
That’s all I have for now. Words cannot not describe how excited I am to go back, and even more excited to be in a different city. Nairobi had its perks, but Kisumu seems awesome.
Ninarudi Kenya! (I don’t even remember if that’s right… I need to start studying again)
