30 July 2011

Finally, summer break!


The end of term has finally has arrived and in the teaching aspect, things are definitely rolling more smoothly. Unfortunately, I learned about many frustrating and disappointing information dealing with my school, which was kept hidden from me last term. Nothing much I can do except roll my eyes and continue teaching.

Anyways, I started a few small projects with another teacher and some students. I co-started a Young Farmers Club where we taught some students how to grow bag gardens (when you don’t have much land), learned how to make organic fertilizer (which is a smell I will never forget), taught them how to make paper charcoal, helped plant 43 moringa trees around the school compound, and gave out over 250 seedlings to the students to plant at their homes. These magic trees will hopefully contribute to a healthier diet and promote planting trees, but I hear they do not taste that great. We have harvested about 5kg of sukuma wiki from the bags, and sold 40/= worth of paper charcoal to the parents at 5/= for 2 pieces. YAY!

I also started a Red Cross Club. Unfortunately, this club is not going as smoothly as the Young Farmers. We met maybe twice this whole last term due to the games schedule and I only taught them how to stop bleeding, and clean cuts and lacerations. Next term I want them to build some type of permanent hand washing station near the choos to promote hygiene. If anybody has any good ideas/fun activities to teach proper hygiene, first aid, public health, etc. I’m all ears.

During games, I was the girls football coach, and coaching here is SO much different than in America. Besides a select few, the majority of the team refused to do more than one warm up lap, any of the drills, listen to my advice about not kicking with your toe, and basically did the opposite of everything I said. However, they played much better than I expected. Next term, I’m hoping to gather the more serious girls for smaller practices (instead of 50 girls showing up with one ball) so that for next year, they can help me coach the mass of girls who just want to get out of school for games.

Besides school, I guess the most exciting thing I did this term was participate in a sheep slaughter. They eat EVERYTHING. Intestines in Kenya are not like in Chinese restaurants. They taste like crap, literally. Cleaning of intestines include running a dirty fingernail through to push the leftover poop out and then rinse it with a little water. A couple of pieces were ok, but after piece 5, I just started swallowing without chewing. Spleen and pancreas has a nasty texture and taste, but lungs and stomach are pretty good. They have an “African Sausage” consisting of cooked blood and random pieces of insides contained in part of the large intestine. It looks scary, but actually tastes kind of good. They also have the sheep head/hooves soup where they crack open the skull to let the brain diffuse out and boil it for a couple of hours, which is a little oily, but tasty. Slaughtering of the sheep was not as traumatic as I thought it would be. I was more disgusted with the swarms of flies. If you let them be for 1 minute, the whole carcass and cutting station would be covered with layers and layers of flies. I’ll put up some of the bloody pictures sometime.

Tomorrow I’ll be going to Camp GLOW (girls leading our world) with 2 girls from my school and help out as a counselor, which I’m real excited for! The following week, my brothers, Theresa and Patricia are coming for two weeks! After a short stop at my site for a first aid demonstration, we’ll be going to Uganda for white water rafting and bungee jumping, Masai Mara for the wildebeest migration, Hells Gate and then chilling at the beaches of Watamu! I’m so excited, it’s hard to sit still.

That’s it for now. I hope everybody is enjoying the last month of summer back at home. Somebody eat some crabs for me and take a nice Ocean City trip! Btw, I’ve been seeing Ocean City, MD t shirts and MSI t shirts worn around in town, which brings a smile to my face!

02 July 2011

Quick Pictures


Here are a few pictures while I'm in Nairobi, too lazy to write a post now.

*WARNING* There are one or two pictures of blood, from a sheep slaughtering I helped out in, but I did not put any pictures of a bleeding to death sheep. Just before slaughtering and after killing and cleaned of blood. I also have a few pictures of the areas that the sheep was slaughtered with the blood just because it reminds me of Dexter, but they don’t seem to be too gruesome.

CLICK FOR PICTURES