Yes, All is Fine

Well, it's time for me to get a note out to all of you. I'm beginning to get emails asking if everything is all right. The answer is yes. Frankly, things have been a little boring so I haven't had much to write about. I have been doing EMPOWER on and off this week, so I can right about that today.

The group is actually fairly close to the farm. That being said, it's still pretty far into the interior. It's being held in a very small church with small windows and a tin roof. That should be read as little breeze and heating up like an oven in the midday sun.

There are a LOT of children at this location. More so than any of the other classes I've been to. Not only are there a lot of kids, but there are a lot of kids that are absolute brats. They love to play with the Prado by standing on the running boards, kicking the tires, etc. What this means is that they keep setting of the car alarm. Doing that means that the alarm first tries to call Reuben's phone. If his phone is shut off, then it calls my phone until it gets an answer. What this also means is that it went off 5 times the other day and interrupted class repeatedly. It took the class organizer to threaten them with something bad, because when he came back in the had gone away and stayed there. I'm not the most patient of persons and was ready to get the "big stick" as they say here and go after the children. They definitely believe in threatening with the switch, and so usually you don't have to use it, just show it. One girl in particular was always at the car and giving a defiant look.

The class has been good. They were quite late one day and that's when they realized that we marked them absent for being late. This means that they have to make up the class before they get a certificate. The 4 that came late (only by 10 minutes or so) stayed for the class anyway. We've decided that as long as they make it on time for the rest of the class, we'll give them the certificate as long as they pass the exam. One of the problems is that this is planting season and so they are all out in the fields before coming to class. We've moved the start time back a bit to accommodate this.

We headed down to Kisumu yesterday so that one of the volunteers could get her visa extended. It always ends up taking the whole day, but we got it done. We also picked up some fish for dinner. Kisumu sits right on Lake Victoria so you can get Nile Perch and tilapia. There's a difference between the two but I have no idea what it is and which one we got. All I know is that for about $16 we bought 5 huge fish to take back for dinner. I've done this before, but I have to say that this fish was the best I have ever had. Definitely fresh from that day.

The one problem with eating fish is that I have picked up this terrible pickiness (sp?). It comes from my mother who loves to fish, but can't eat fish if it tastes the least "fishy." My favorite picture of my mother is when she was 6 years old and had gone fishing with my grandfather. She is dressed in bib overalls. My grandfather is at one end of a bamboo pole and my mom is at the other end. In between them are a number of fish, hanging from the pole. This is way off track from Kenya, but you'd think that she'd like fish for as much as she loves the process of fishing. Course, it could be the fact that she broke her arm as a child when another kid hit her hard with a dead fish. But, enough of that.

Basically, I'm getting back into the swing of things on the farm. There is a lot of work to do to get things back up and running for the onslaught of summer volunteers. It looks like we'll be at full capacity in July. June and August are just about full. This is all good for the sake of the programs being run. ICODEI provides a great service to the community and that community has been lacking care since things were shut down in January.