Well it's only Wednesday but this week has already been quite interesting...
At about 1 am Monday morning, as I'm sound asleep, I am woken up by the beautiful sounds of a drunk man singing (screaming) at the top of his lungs as he's walking down the road outside my compound. After the chorus he apparently realized he was near my house and decided to start calling for me. As I laid motionless in my bed and hoped that he stayed on the road, he eventually decided I must be sleeping and continued on with his singing and wandered away. Fortunately for me, he was bound and determined to greet me so at shortly after 7 am that morning he came onto our compound (still drunk) and walked right up to my living room window, stared inside, and began calling for me. Again, I stood frozen in my bedroom hoping he would just go away but he was quite persistent and refused to leave until one of the mamas I live with yelled at him to leave. What made the situation even more entertaining was when I arrived at the office a couple hours later, half the people in town already knew about my visitor and informed me they were going to find him and beat him. So not only do I live in Kenya's version of Stillman Valley (because of how quickly word travels), these people are clearly quite protective of their token white girl...and I love it.
Now last night, I was pretty much expecting that drunkard to return to the compound because no one was able to find him that day and tell him to stay away. Sadly, he did not make a return visit but instead I had a small, winged creature who was very fond of my mosquito net pay me a visit. Now this bat was either incredibly fascinated with the net or with tormenting the human underneath the net. Since it was no where to be found this morning, I suppose I'll never know which one it was but I'm leaning more towards tormenting me because after entering my house and making a quick survey of the house, it swan dived directly into my foot and scared me into the fetal position in the center of my bed. After calming my heart rate, I discovered the bat was simply laying on the outside of my net either sleeping or dead after impact with my foot. My solution was to throw a book at it. It fell off and hit the floor and I only heard it's wings flap twice so I assumed it was dead and I would just dispose of it in the morning. But this little guy was resilient and not only was it not dead but it began to favor the area of the mosquito net closest to my head. At one point I'm pretty sure I yelled at it but I was sleep-deprived by this time and I really can't be sure. Regardless, I continued to hit it with the book until it stayed off the net long enough for me to fall asleep. Thankfully, but also unfortunately, it was no where to be found this morning so I'm just crossing my fingers it doesn't make a return visit this evening.
In other news, I was actually able to sit down with my supervisor yesterday and go over the outline I had wrote up for her about proposal writing. We were able to make decent progress with it and I told her I would throw together a rough draft and then we could add more to it before we submit it to the donor organizations according to their individual guidelines. Hooray for baby steps! Sadly, I think there is still a bit of a disconnect in regards to why I'm here but as long as she's happy, I guess I'm happy too. In addition to this minor success, I have also been able to meet or arrange to meet with all the principals of the schools in which I'm doing the library project to put together what types of books they want to order. Side note, I contacted the people from Books for Africa about sending books to their warehouse to be put on the container and they informed me that people will most definitely be able to do that but not until the fundraising phase is complete. So in the meantime, if you have books you want to send to me, just hold on to them until further notice. Also, keep in mind further notice may not be until well into next year and please accept my apologies for jumping the gun a bit on requesting you to send me books.
Finally, next week I will be going on a much needed vacation to the coast with some of the other volunteers for a little under two weeks. We are planning to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day on an island near Malindi and then head down to Diani Beach (refer to photos in previous post) for the remainder of our vacation. I'm beyond excited to be away from site for two weeks, with my friends, and not be doing anything Peace Corps-related but I know that by the end of it, I will be more than ready to return to my community. But as a side note, I'm pretty happy that the weather is still so warm here not only because it means no snow but also because I tend to forget it's almost Christmas and I won't be at home with my family. Just so all of you Werckles and Rippentrops (and all my other families) back in The Valley know, I am missing you very much and it's definitely going to be hard to not be spending Christmas with all of you but remember, it's only two years!
No comments:
Post a Comment