Christmas in Kenya

After spending a week and a half on the beach, I returned to my village to find not much had changed. The small children I live with were beyond thrilled when I got home. Lucky and Carol, the two little girls who are pretty much my best friends, had attended their first day of nursery school that morning and they were so excited to tell me all about it. Oh how I missed them.

There were a few things that did change. First, the wire mesh was put up around my house to keep out bats and other small critters. This has caused a significant decrease in the amount of lizard poop I find in my house but it surprisingly blocks a great deal of the air flow so my house doesn't actually cool down until about 11 pm now. But I'm willing to sacrifice an hour outside of my blanket at night if it means bats will no longer be visiting me. Second, one of the dogs on my compound had four puppies. Now, I was planning on getting a kitten after the first of the year but with four puppies readily available, why would I not just take one and call it mine? I check on them everyday to make sure all four are still alive. So far so good. I'm just excited that my mom and sister will not be able to tell me, "No, Laken, we're not naming this dog Atticus." The only other thing that changed was the rain has stopped and people are getting concerned that drought and famine are around the corner. Crossing my fingers and saying more than a few prayers that that doesn't happen.

Oh yeah, the beach. It was glorious. I truly did absolutely nothing for a week and a half besides wake up, eat, take a nap, eat, go to the beach, shower, go out dancing, sleep, repeat. The food was incredible. I had fresh fish, fresh calamari, and at least 3 giant burgers (yes, I ate hamburgers) but Lee Ann and I still found ourselves craving traditional Kenyan food every now and then. Christmas was strange without snow or even cold weather. It was hard to even grasp that it was in fact December 25th. New Years Eve, on the other hand, was not as strange given that there were parties up and down the beach but it was a lot different than last years New Years when I was freezing my butt off in Chicago. Regardless, it was still a lot of fun.

 Sadly, I'm drawing a blank on anymore entertaining stories or witty comments. So I suppose I will leave it at that. But as a side note, the 21st of January marks six months at site meaning I only have a year and a half left in Kenya. Crazy that I've been away from good ole SV for almost a year...