well, here i am in kenya.

John and Julia (MCC Sudan), they are great. And they also pay attention to things like Clothes, and How to Look Professional. They helped me find some Professional Clothes that Suit Me at Toi Market, which is a big ol’ used clothing market here in Kenya (see blog on used clothes. yes, i am benefiting). Not only did they help me pick out clothes, but they told me why those clothes were proper and good for me, and why others are not. Unfortunately, I didn’t take notes, and it was all a little bit overwhelming, but i think i’ve remembered the main points.

It occurred to me that I may not be alone - an MCC volunteer trying to be taken seriously but not quite able to show up dressed appropriately for meetings with other NGOs and the like. I’m thinking...new MCC position! Travel the world, helping MCC volunteers dress from their local used clothing markets.

The French cultural centre in downtown Nairobi turns out to be a great place! Promoting French culture, yes, but also Kenyan culture. Friday night I went there for the first time and heard a Kenyan “fusion” band. And while I have at times perhaps implied that the less “fusion” music in the world the better, this was actually a great band which really did fuse sounds together to come u with really good music!

woo s. the letter between o and q has stoed working on my lato. this has haened before, and it eventually came back.

it came back! super!

So, the band was Ijiali, or something like that, and featured lots of interesting Kenyan instruments as well as an accordion played by a white chick named Gisele. We think she was french maybe, but she sang along in Luo, Kiswahili, and English, and she even danced a Luo dance at one point. The band sounded really great and put on a great show as well.

The French centre has an outdoor courtyard with a stage and plenty of room for sitting or dancing. There were West Africans, Kenyans, French ex-pats, and somewhat obnoxious peppy young UN types. All in all, a good time, and it was fun to be downtown at night. I intend to return - free movies (with french subtitles) every monday!

about an hour ago i looked around and saw colors again. I got out of bed, brought in my (twice rained upon) laundry from the line, bought some cards to go with presents that have been sitting on the floor for months, cut my fingernails, tidied up my guesthouse room, and finished off the copies of the Mennonite that need to be passed on to the other Mennonites in the Nairobi reading chain.

I feel like I’m a passenger in a bus that just came out of a fog bank and now we can all see the mountain road on which we are driving. I may not be in the driver’s seat, but at least I can concentrate on the road, which somehow has a way of making me feel like I’m helping the driver and influencing what’s happening.

yep. depression = not a good time.

At the end of September I left FATNEA. The week after leaving I spent doing errands, moving out of my apartment and putting furniture and whatnot in storage, and finishing up a literature review I had promised I would do before leaving. Then I went to the coast of Kenya, south of Mombasa, for about a week to sit in the sun and watch the ocean and sometimes frolic in it. Got back Monday noon (overnight train!) and since then I'm at the Mennonite Guesthouse in Nairobi. Not sure what exactly I've been doing...a little bit of work and fretting about the future, a little bit of relaxing under flowering trees and reading good books, and a little bit of dealing with the collection of sand fly bites I amassed at the coast. I guess that sums it up. I wrote some blogs the other day!

Still don't know what I'm going to do next...can't seem to figure out how to start thinking about it, and for whatever reason still don't feel like I have the energy to face figuring out what happens next. ah well. I'm giving myself more time, and my country representatives are being very understanding.

i was talking with a Kenyan friend about safety in Kenya, and she said, “See these tight pants I am wearing under my skirt,” (pulls down skirt a little to show rim of underwear) “Many Kenyan women wear them. They make it harder for men to rape you. It takes them more time, so you have a chance to yell for help.”

I am sitting on a lounge chair on the Guesthouse grounds. I’ve been reading Snow, the sun comes in and out, and 20 yards away 2 american missionaries are agreeing with each other about Bush’s role in the war on terror, that he is Christian and hence it is unimportant if his actions are unpopular. Because there is a shifting breeze, and because I am reading, I only catch phrases - “rebel forces in the mountains,” “Christianity is”, “Muslims want”. This morning i was wearing sandals, and as i walked out the gate i managed to walk on a bee that stung me in the middle of my left foot. ruth gave me an ice pack and gary said baking soda might help. the ice pack has lost its iciness, so while i lounge halfway in a snow covered town in Turkey swirling with love and art and political islam and halfway in a corner of Nairobi where men are discussing political christianity and christian politics, the middle of my foot is waking up and radiating a pain that a few minutes ago didn’t exist, is now a soft, slow thing, and is threatening to become something harder and brighter altogether.

I want to be a Good Person, who is Interested in the World, and Open to Learning, and it has always seemed to me that part of such a person is reading non-fiction books. Seems like the most expeditious way to learn more about cultures and science and phenomena of the political and social type and all. I get excited about the titles of non-fiction books. In college and law school I tended to check out large numbers of such books with interesting, challenging titles. And then those books would sit on the floor in piles while I read yet another novel.

So the same thing happened when I got to Nairobi. I raided the MBEA and MCC Kenya bookshelves and picked out books on the MauMau revolution and the upcoming Third World revolution and pastoralists and agriculture in Kenya. And I’ve ended up reading novels. Only a few African ones too, and I’m ashamed of that. Instead I’ve been escaping into snow-covered places, landscapes populated with revolutionaries and norse gods and anglican priests.

i recently picked back up one book (A Short History of Islam, by Karen Armstrong), continued reading in one book I borrowed from the MCC Uganda library in Kampala (Tales from a Thousand and One Nights), and chose another from the Guesthouse bookshelves on a whim (Snow, by Orhan Pamuk). For the last week I’ve skipped from the one to the other depending on my mood, and they are each really beautiful and together are even better. I got the Short History of Islam because I’d read a memoir of Karen Armstrong and since I’m even less likely to read a memoir than I am a non-fiction subject book, and because reading the memoir was an engrossing and moving experience, I figured maybe I could get myself to read a non-fiction book about something i really Want to Know about and really Don’t Know about if it was written by Armstrong. Turns out it isn’t helping me understand African islam particularly, but in general the world is making a whole lot more sense now. The role of belief and practice, of politics and history in the Muslim religion, the rise and fall of the communities - I don’t know, man, having a bit of a better understanding of helping give some sort of context to all sorts of things about life in the 21^st century. It also helps interpret the 1001 nights and the Caliphs and prophets who populate the stories, and the expressions of faith and outlooks on life that make them so different from German märchen. And Armstrong’s telling of the secular and religious revolutions in the East are adding to the richness of Snow, a Turkish story in which Turkish secularists, Kurdish Islamic revolutionaries, religious high school youths, atheists, Socialists, Communists, and poets are engaged in a small revolution in a small snowbound city in Turkey.

(ps - the author of Snow, Orhan Pamuk, just won the Nobel Prize for Literature! I feel very cutting edge!)