Daily Affirmations

Hey there everyone. I'm back with a few updates for you on life in Nairobi since my return 2 1/2 weeks ago. First off, I am so blessed that Jahna Lundberg came to visit me! She is the first of all my American friends to make the trip and I'm so happy I got to share even a tiny bit of Kenya with her.

She was lucky enough to arrive on the same Friday as Kitwek Night at Carnivore Restaurant, which is when they play all Kalenjin music, serve Kalenjin food, and basically every Kalenjin in and around Nairobi comes. (For those who don't know, Kalenjin is my Nairobi family's tribe). When it's not one of the tribal theme nights, Carnivore is the ultimate tourist trap--they serve crocodile meat and ostrich meatballs at exorbitant prices to overexcited white tourists and rich African businessmen. But the tribal nights are fantastic and definitely worth going to. The funny thing is that, though I'm sure all the theme nights have great music, dancing and food, I have only ever attended Kalenjin Night. As my Kenyan friend put it the other day when I whined about being outvoted to attend Luo Night, "You need to realize we are tribalists in our own small ways. Indeed its the reason I didn't go either!" I'm learning more and more that any visit to Kenya will be shaped by what tribe your hosts belong to. Thankfully, I have family and friends who are from many different tribes, so I don't feel like my experiences are one-sided.

I arranged for Jahna and I to go on safari in the famous Maasai Mara, THE game park to visit if you want to see a lot of animals in a very short period of time. It certainly lived up to its reputation--we saw everything except for a leopard, which honestly is the rarest animal to ever see on safari. We stayed in a very cool campsite called Mara Sidai, which I would definitely recommend to anyone looking for decent budget accommodation, and we also made a visit to a Maasai manyatta (a compound of 10-20 huts with a central corral for the cattle and goats). These visits are good in a way because the extra $20/person goes directly to the Maasai who host you, and they have really gotten shafted by the Maasai Mara tourism business, but I have to say I didn't enjoy the manyatta visit at all. Even though we paid, it felt too much like exploitation to have this small community perform Maasai dances and songs just for us, show us how they make fire, invite us into one of their homes, and encourage picture taking. I've visited a manyatta before and enjoyed it, but it was the home of a good friend of mine so it was a totally different experience. I had hoped for Jahna to enjoy seeing this important aspect of Kenyan culture, but we were both just uncomfortable. In the future, I will just pay the money but skip the tour.

Other travel plans were thwarted by a lack of time/transportation issues, so we stayed in Nairobi, shopped for gifts, and made visits to the elephant orphanage and giraffe center, where you get to pet rescued baby elephants and feed giraffes by hand. As Jahna had to leave, my friend Tricia from Zanzibar came for a week's visit, and a couple days later I started my volunteer job at CDC-Kenya (courtesy of my Uncle Chris--thank you nepotism!). So far, I've been mainly assisting with preparations for a visit from Secretary of the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius. I'm drafting bios for all the public health big-wigs that are coming to the various events, writing invitations, collecting contact info, etc. I'm actually enjoying the secretarial work because I'm learning about all these important people who, with luck, I'll someday be working for or with! (#PublicHealthNerd) Starting this week though, I expect to start heading to various CDC field sites to start conducting interviews and collecting human interest stories to post on the CDC website. I'm actually pretty nervous because I have been given a huge amount of autonomy in this position (I'm kind of flying blind here!), but I'm trying to stay upbeat. I should write a list of daily affirmations and repeat them to myself in a mirror like Jessica: