Shaking things up a bit...

The past few days have been unusually eventful. I spent most of my Saturday at the graduation ceremony for Rubanga Secondary School (stay tuned for more on that later), went to a goodbye party that night for a friend from IRC who's leaving this weekend, and have had lots of work to do in the office all week. Plus, as if walking sewing machines and Steelers games weren't enough to make for a memorable evening, a few minutes after I arrived at the IRC compound on Monday, my (mostly futile) attempts to make friends with the new kittens were interrupted by an earthquake. Discovery of the day: Kibondo's located on/near the Rift Valley fault line. Cool, huh? And to top off the eventfulness of the week, a band of little kids followed me the whole way home from work yesterday. I'd gotten used to them running to greet me at different points along my route, but they'd never actually left their yards before. I felt like the Pied Piper :-)

Only in Africa...

I've now spent a cumulative total of about 5 months in Africa and have gotten fairly used to seeing women walking around town with something/several things balanced on their heads. Full crates of bottled pop, enormous bunches of bananas, books, water bottles, it doesn't really faze me anymore. Don't get me wrong, I still find it pretty amazing. I wish I could walk around town with tripping over rocks or my own feet, let alone walk around town with several pounds of goods balanced on my head and a baby strapped to my back. So, pretty amazing - yes. But also so commonplace that I've stopped being shocked by it or even really noticing it.

Or so I'd thought.

On my way to the IRC compound Monday night (to go watch the last few minutes of the re-broadcast of the Steelers-Browns game...which we won...woo!), a young woman walked past me (down a bumpy hill, I should add) with one of these balanced on her head:

A Singer sewing machine. Balanced on her head. No hands holding it in place...just the sewing machine.......ON HER HEAD!!!

I couldn't help myself - I stopped in my tracks and stared.

PiAf Newsletter

This month's Princeton in Africa newsletter featured a short article by yours truly about life here in Kibondo. If you're interested in checking it out and reading about what other PiAf-ers are up to, you can find it here.

Enjoy!
-K

GO STEELERS!!!!

When I arrived at the office a few days, I found this card waiting for me in my email. A good friend of mine saw it and thought of me. As you've probably gathered, "my" football team is not "his" football team ... but that's one of his only flaws, so I'm willing to look past it ... plus, we opened the pre-season by trouncing the Eagles, and there's nothing like trans-continental gloating to keep a friendship going :-D

Luckily for my loved ones this year, there's a rather substantial body of water helping to put some distance in between them and my flailing "comeonnn!" arms/attempts to convert them into Steelers fans/grumbles about regional network coverage/and all those other cute and endearing behaviors that tend to surface during NFL football season. Like yelling at the tv and glowering anyone cheering for the opposing team. Like I said, cute and endearing :-P

Unluckily for me, there are roughly 7 time zones and 8,000 miles between me and even the smallest chance that I'll be able to watch/hear any regular season games this year, so it looks like it will be a relatively football-less year for me. The jury's still out on whether or not this will actually give my emotions/nerves a rest, since without anything else to do on the weekends, there's a slight chance I'll just spend Sundays driving myself crazy by wondering how the game's going :-) That doesn't seem like fun for anyone though, so for the next few months I'll leave the more extreme football-related antics in the capable hands of the rest of the best fans in the NFL and will have to make do with post-game coverage.

I won't be entirely deprived of the black & gold though ... I've seen this guy a couple of times around town! (I was taking the picture on the sly, and he turned right as I was taking it ... but believe me, it's a Bettis jersey! Ironically, he's the kanda (guy who collects fares) of the bus that's just outside the frame of the picture.) Granted, I doubt he knows/cares about American football, but it's still enough to make my day every time I see him in town :-D

And on that note, the regular season starts this weekend! GOOOOOOOOOOOO STEELERS!!!

Ualevu?

First, some relevant background:
A few weeks ago, I ran into a woman from the office on the way to work. I know her name, but I only succeed in pronouncing it correctly about 50% of the time and I can't even begin to figure out how to spell it. So for the purposes of this post, initials will have to do. D is kind of like the on-call Prisca for the office. When someone's staying at the guest house in the compound, she does the cooking/cleaning/etc., and the rest of the time she does odd jobs around the office. Odd jobs such as walking with me to the post office two weeks ago (I'd never been and it was surprisingly off the beaten path, so the escort turned out to be necessary) ... although usually I think the odd jobs are less like babysitting and more like filing fuel receipts and whatnot. But I digress. D is quite friendly and also very patient with my Kiswahili, and over the course of our walks to the office and the post office, she let me in on a few insiders-tips about Kibondo. And by that, I mean shortcuts! So now, when I leave for work in the morning, I don't cut through the Nkya's yard, turn right outside their gate, trudge up the hill to the main road, walk a ways down that road past the court and the district offices, turn off at the public works compound, and walk behind it until I come to our office compound. Instead, I walk out the bottom gate of my compound, turn left, saunter down through a small mango grove, up across two minor roads through someone's side yard (narrowly skirting their garbage pit), past the police compound, and down across a field until I come to our office compound. I'm not convinced that it actually saves all that much time, but D says it's a shortcut so I'll believe her. It is slightly more scenic than the old route though and there tend to be fewer adults shouting "giv-a me money!" with lots more small kids who happily shadow me part of the way, so it has become my preferred route to and from work.

A few days after adopting this new route, I was a little surprised when one of the adults I passed greeted me not in Kiswahili, Kiha, or English, but with "Bonjour! Ca va?" That's right ... French! What was even more surprising was that instead of choking on a linguistic brain freeze, I heard myself immediately responding with "Bonjour! Ca va bien." I still remembered some French! Nouvelles très heureuses!

Now, fast forward a few days ... same time(ish), same place(ish), different person (I think): "uko bien?" I must be getting better at handling new greetings, because I didn't even skip a beat and answered "bien!" This time, though, the self-congratulation was mixed with amusement. It would appear that I now need to have greetings in five languages at my disposal: Kiswahili, Kiha, English, French, and Frahili. That would be French-Kiswahili, as in Kiswahili "uko" (you are) and French "bien" (well/good) ... "uko bien" = Frahili.

That brings me up to this morning. Same time(ish), same place(ish), different person (this time I'm sure): "ualevu?" Consider my multi-lingual greeting proficiency bubble popped. Ualevu???? I actually stopped in my tracks as I tried (but failed) to tease some meaning out of that one, and my confusion was apparently quite visibly reflected on my face, because he took pity on me and finished the greeting in English. It wasn't until I was almost at the office that it finally clicked: not "ualevu?" but "où allez-vous?" ... "where are you going?" Right. So much for remembering some French. Apparently I either need to either revert to my original route to work or dust the cobwebs off my French.

And on that note, time to head home for the day. Usiku mwema! Mwidiwe! Bonne nuit! Good night!