Day 10 v2.0

Last night I left the internet cafe and went to Chinese Galaxy Restaurant for some spring rolls, fried noodles, and vodka with passion fruit juice. I was so drunk after 1.5 that I left the other half of the second one and chugged a bottle of water. I think it's the heat/lack of calories/lack of drinking, but even though I've become a lightweight over the past few years, that's the lightest I've ever gone. And they bring you the alcohol separate from the mixer here (so you're sure of how much you get) and the pour was normal, so it wasn't from too much vodka. I'm just an even cheaper date now.

I was reading Evelyn Waughn's "Scoop" while eating and came across a line that I thought was very fitting in my situation. In reference to the countryside (which I substituted with Mombasa), "...the kind of place where you never know from one minute to the next that you may not be tossed by a bull or pitchforked by a yokel or rolled over and broken up by a pack of hounds." That's pretty much Mombasa.

While eating I saw a man with the most exotic and beautiful coloring. He looked like he was maybe 1/2 black and 1/2 Indian or Pakistani with salt and pepper hair that was 90% salt and 10% pepper. I can't think of a proper color to describe his skin tone, but it was fascinating- a color unlike any I'd ever seen before for human skin. Imagine a blend of the aforementioned coloring and then add a light coffee to it and then make it tan from the sun. It was incredible.

People have a hard time understanding me here, so I'm pulling a Madonna and using a fake English accent. I feel like a jackass doing it, but I never have to repeat myself when I speak like that whereas when I speak normally I often have to repeat myself. "Teacher" has become "teacha", in fact anying ending in "-er" has become "-a" and so on and so forth. I worked very hard for many years to get as close as possible to mid-Atlantic English and now I'm using a horrible fake accent to communicate. When I hear myself, it's such a bad British immitation I almost start laughing. It reminds me of the episode of Sex and the City when Samantha is getting kicked out of the Soho House for not being Annabelle Bronstein.

Today was the first time ever that I helped wash the children. Still no water at Dickson so we used a pail of drinking water that Beatrice would dip in and out of. Also, as of 8:30am there was no electricity, and it didn't come back prior to my leaving. But back to washing. Manu, Mwangi, Moses, Yvonne, Marion, and Milka need to be washed; the rest of the children do it themselves. Watching Beatrice wash the kids was like watching child abuse. She was scrubbing the children with washclothes as though she were not scrubbing delicate child skin but rather like she was scrubbing tile. And the kids were just laughing and blowing bubbles and splashing the water. I couldn't believe it. I could HEAR the scrubbing sounds. Burke Williams doesn't offer full body scrubs like this. An American child would be HOWLING, just howling if they were scrubbed like that. It's seriously ridiculous how not fragile children actually are.

My job was to dry the kids and then Vaseline them up. As if handling the little ones wasn't hard enough, today I was handling little, naked, greased up, wriggling, Kenyans. These kids were squirming so much and of course I couldn't hold them steady for shit because they were just slipping and sliding all over. It felt like one of those county fair things where you're trying to grab a greased up pig.

So Marion is a little fucking bitch and Milka does almost everything Marion does, so it was a rough morning. Making it even rougher was that the housemoms and Jurjanne have their weekly meeting for 3 hours and I'm the only volunteer until Saturday, so I was left alone with the kids. All the older kids are at camp so they couldn't help, so I was running around all morning. But back to Marion. She takes the job in games that no one wants. For instance, she'll offer to swing the rope when we're doing jump rope games and then just as the game gets going, she fucks up the rope to ruin the game. Or she'll be the ball collecter if we're playing dodgeball and once she has them all she'll horde them or throw them in the opposite direction. She rats people out during hide and seek and is just a fucking whore. Then, Milka takes after her, so after Marion messes up the game enough times that the other kids starting beating her up, Milka steps into Marion's spot. But then, Milka starts to mess the game up. And of course kids are stupid and thus the other children fall for it every day, so it's the same thing over and over and over.

We talk about the negative attention often and are told to just ignore them, but that's really hard. Further, I know they're children (little children at that) so I can't exactly hold them that accountable for it. It's quite a test in compassion to treat Marion and Milka like the rest of the kids when they're acting out like that. I won't reward them, like I'll give everyone some candy and leave them out, but if they need to be tended too or protected from getting beaten up by the other children, I have to step in. I can't just hold a grudge against a 3 year old. So, although I would like to see Rukia hit Marion with a stick, I obviously have to stop it when I see it. Perhaps I should drop a load of sticks into the yard and then go upstairs so that I can't see it.

I had a few heartbreaks today. The first was when I was sitting with Rukia. I was playing her my Swahili lessons on my cell phone. My old cell phone has iTunes on it so I put my Swahili lessons on. We were listening and practicing together when she asked me if I liked Swahili. This is how the conversation went:

Rukia: Una penda kiswahili? (Do you like Swahili?)
Me: Ndiyo. Mimi penda kiswahili. (Yes, I like Swahili.)
Rukia: I hate it.
Me: Kwa nini? (Why?)
Rukia. I want to be a mzungu. Black is ugly.

Black is ugly. It was like someone reached into my chest and pulled my heart out. This is what our world and media and advertisers have taught her. That black is ugly. I just kept holding her and telling her over and over that she's beautiful, that black is beautiful, that Swahili is amazing, but of course it all fell on deaf ears. This self-hate is instilled all over the world and it kills me. There's this air of inferiority to white people- EVEN IN AN ALL BLACK NATION- and it's fucking ridiculous. I was actually really surprised last year to see that a lot of the advertisements here feature white people and there are often articles in the paper chastizing the papers, magazines, and commercials for featuring all light skinned and thin Kenyans. Never a larger one and certainly never a very dark Kenyan. It's such bullshit. To have this little girl who has had the worst nightmare of a life you could ever possibly imagine hate herself, her language, and her skin color (at age 7 mind you) just breaks my heart.

My second heartbreak came in the afternoon. We took the kids for a walk and coming back Milka was being really lethargic so I asked her if she wanted me to carry her and she nodded and waited for me when normally she doesn't ask and just attacks me. I carried her and she was just resting her head on my shoulder and limp in my arms. When we got back I told Ruth that I think Milka is sick and Ruth said that she had been complainin of an earache and if it persists they'll take her to the doctor. Even though she's a fucking cunt, when she's not a fucking cunt, it's really heartbreaking. The thing is, Milka is a fucking cunt. That's who she is. So for her to not be a fucking cunt must mean that there's something really wrong with her and it made me really sad. Then later, I let her play with my notepad and she wrote "Milka is pain whit ear and leg" (she spelled with like that). It was the saddest little note I have seen.

Joe and Josie came in the afternoon. Josie volunteered at Dickson last year and is now in Kenya for a month with her boyfriend, so they've come to visit a few times. They're really nice and good with the kids, so it's great having an extra hand and the kids like having them around. Me, Josie, Joe, Jurjanne, and Chris (her husband) went to the restaurant for lunch today; it was an ugali day at Dickson. We were sitting at the restaurant when I felt a bug on my leg. I feel phantom bugs all the time- phantom as in I feel a bug but there is no bug there- so I ignored it. Then I felt the bug crawl up my leg. I thought "Hm, that's strange. A mosquitoe does not crawl that fast. A fly does not crawl that fast. A spider does not crawl that fast. A grasshopper does not crawl that fast. What kind of bug could this be crawling on my leg?" I look down and it's not a bug. It's a fucking lizard. A lizard was crawling up my leg and would have been going into my shorts if I had not been wearing my AMAZING size 6 women's Express jeans that I had made into capris. They're so tight no lizard could crawl into them (I barely can). I jumped up and shook my leg and the lizard went flying and that was that. It's amazing I didn't scream like a girl, but a lizard is not a rat. There's not much damage it could do. It was just really shocking and just way too much of a wilderness experience.

Speaking of wilderness, here's something I didn't mention yesterday (I'm telling you, there are so many gaps and stories in my posts it's ridiculous.) I was walking down the driveway to Dickson when I noticed a monkey on the wall of one of the neighbor's houses. Then another. Then another. Then I looked up and saw about a dozen monkeys in the trees all staring down at me. I started to walk very slowly, my heart pounding. The monkeys here aren't really afraid of people, are riddled with disease, and were all looking at me. It was like the last scene in Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" when there are birds EVERYWHERE, and the humans are just slowly making their escape. These monkeys were surrounding me and my heart was beating a mile a minute. Luckily (obviously) none of them attacked me, but I had flashes of getting killed by monkeys at the gates of the orphanage in Kenya that my dumbass just had to go volunteer at and they were not pretty. But, they didn't kill me, so all's well that ends well.

The children were making fun of my capris today. They kept saying those pants are for girls. I should have just said "yes" but I defended myself by saying that boys in America wear capris. I left out that it's predominately Europeans and raging homos, as well as the fact that my capris are indeed women's.

I hate lying. I hate, hate, hate doing it. I especially hate doing it about my sexuality, but everyone keeps asking me if I have a girlfriend or a wife. I say no and they begin to pry and I keep deflecting and playing the pronoun game but have had to lie a few times. Another lie I told today was when Ruth asked me to go with Milka to her room and pray to God to heal Milka's ear. Um, I don't really know how to do that. I said Ok and took Milka to the little kids' room and told her to say the prayer, but she didn't and I of course don't know how to pray Christian-style and didn't want to confuse this poor girl with my own half-assed version of what I think a Christian prayer should sound like, so I just bowed my head for a minute, thought "God, please make her ear better" and began singing in my head until I thought an appropriate time had passed and looked up. I have faith. I believe in a God. I just don't like to ask God for every little thing and certainly don't want to bother God with problems that simple antibiotics can take care of. So ya, I fake Christian prayed today.

The mutatu driver tried to charge me Sh50 for the ride even though it's Sh35. He raised his eyebrows as if to say "Where are you going" and I said "Ni na enda town" (I'm going to town) and he took my Sh50 and didn't give me any change. I said "Wewe, thelthini na tano" (Hey, it's 35) and he kinda looked at me and everyone laughed and some guy said "Yeye sema kiswahili" (He speaks Swahili) and I said "Mimi sema kiswahili kidogo" (I speak a little Swahili) and everyone laughed again. I think it's really telling of white people and white culture that the locals are so surprised and shocked that I speak really simple basic Swahili with a vocabulary of less than 200 words. To me, that means most people don't make any attempts, otherwise they wouldn't be SO shocked and wouldn't LAUGH in shock when I speak Swahili. I guess I'm to assume that no one even tries, which is kind of sad to me. I tried to learn simple words and phrases in Italian for a 5 day trip with Nick. Isn't it kind of rude to show up in a foreign country without even trying? Here mzungus can barely eek out "jambo" (Hello) or an "asante sana" (Thank you very much). Sad.

So, now that I've once again put myself on a pedestal for being awesome, how can I end this blog without seeming like a total narrcissist? My body aches from the 20 minutes of ho-ing I did yesterday. In America I can ho all night and not tire out. Hm. That was pretty lame. Well, they can't all be winners.