October 27, 2011

It looks like this

I arrived, safely, in northern Kenya on Tuesday... town name redacted for security purposes (Because-- as they always say-- better to exercise half-hearted paranoia than to be kidnapped at gunpoint or grenade).  But I can say that it looks like this in the late afternoon sun:


And I think you can see that it's quite a lovely place.  There was rain a few weeks ago, so the grass has sprouted a boisterous green.  Duration of greenery unknown.  

Our lifestyle isn't half bad either.  I currently have my own room with 3 beds, which is the perfect amount: one for sleeping, one for semi-dirty clothes (the things you've worn once and don't need to wash, but also don't want to put back in the closet to contaminate the truly clean things), and the third for miscellaneous items of the day (notebooks, bottled water, mini-fan, bag-full-o-medicines).  

The place we stay is oriented around a small courtyard with a table and chairs under flowering trees, and we have a kitchen to cook in and a sitting room to sit in.  And everything is neatly labeled.  I like that.  

Usually you have to OPEN the door to identify a corridor.  Not so here!  

As far as settling in goes, I'm acclimating to eating cooked cabbage twice a day and not carrying a wallet.  I also left my jeans and make-up back in Nairobi, whence flights only come twice weekly, so if I miss them I'm plum out of luck.  

And the cucarachas fly.  Which transports me back to evenings in our ground-floor apartment in Athens, placing overturned laundry buckets over those ones that I was too afraid to kill but willing to entrap in a plastic prison for slow death.  Or until someone else took care of it.  Perhaps a first in cockroach nostalgia.  

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