The adventures of Julie and Sawyer

Sawyer is a mouse that lives in my room. He is small and gets into all kinds of trouble. Naturally at first sharing a space with a mouse made me uncomfortable but sawyer, as mice go, is nice enough. These are some of his adventures. The first time I met sawyer it was very brief. I was moving my curtain over the window in my room. I grabbed one end and yanked and out popped sawyer from the top of the curtain. He tumbled to the couch in a furry ball sat there a moment and took off. God knows how sawyer got to the top of the curtain or why he was there at the exact second I decided to close them but there you go. He is always doing crazy things like this. Why the other day I was simply looking through my drawers when there popped sawyer right among my socks, which was inconvenient to say the least. It seems sawyer had been stuck in there some time so I guess it is safe to say it was inconvenient for both of us. Once on my way to the bathroom we met in the hallway and did one of those cute little dances people do when one person tries to go one direction at the same time the other person does, going back and forth until one person, sawyer, decided the whole thing was too much silliness and turned around. Over the last few weeks he has gotten cheeky, he ran over my foot in the kitchen for no particular reason at all, and then he ate my nuts that were carefully hanging 4 feet off the ground, because apparently he can also fly. I should have known considering how we met. We have only had one real falling out. I closed a door on him, by accident, though he never did believe me about that. I thought perhaps I had injured him but he was fine, but out for revenge. This manifested as pooping on my table. I forgave him though; it was only fair after all. Now in further reflection it might seem strange to befriend the unwelcome, and perhaps it has something to do with the fact that my host family has been playing Cinderella nonstop, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for the past 4 months, or perhaps it is a bizarre coping mechanism for what might otherwise have driven me crazy. Either way I will miss Sawyer when I am gone, and wish him the best in what must surely be the first is a long line of adventures with future interns.

Updates

As my time in Kenya comes to a close I am saddened by the fact that I have only seen a small portion of the country and all its wonders. Last week I went on a safari and finally saw what the west of the coast looks like. The animals were surprisingly fascinating as was the whole “Safari Culture”. I have never seen so much Khaki clothing in one place before. Nevertheless the scenery was incredible differed from one mile to the next. The animals were so close to the road at some point I could have reached out to touch an elephant.
In the past month I have been working on several different work projects, the biggest one ending with a large community HIV education outreach which was extremely successful. I leave my internship with a feeling of accomplishment, however small.
My host family is still as welcoming as ever. The kids and I have developed a kind of routine. I come home they jump on me. I carry them inside where we all pass out on my bed till dinner. I will miss this, and them.
The last thing I have planned for my trip is a final project to be approved by my work and then I leave the plans in coworker’s capable hands, hopefully inspiring more sustainability than if I had just made the event myself. So hopefully I am leaving with having made some kind of difference but who knows.

Goat Slaughtering Party

The best thing about a party where you kill a goat at the beginning is that it can only get better from that point on. When my friend Adria had her going away party recently the goat in question was featured prominently, swinging from a tree. I won’t go into the gruesome details except to say that skinning a goat is rather harder than it sounds, and that intestine is really not very tasty. The rest of the party was extremely fun. After the goat was prepared we made Pilau which is rice with spices and potato, and had a grand time.