One other interesting experience on Wednesday I forgot to mention was going to a gym with Patrick's brother Anthony. After my run we jumped in a matatu and headed into the kind of town center of Buru Buru, the area of Nairobi where the Otienos live. We went through a small group of shops and entered into what looked like a converted garage that was not much bigger than your typical American suburban garage. Old weight equipment was crowded in there and a couple of pretty intimidating big Kenyan guys were already lifting. I've never been to a public gym, but the atmosphere seemed similar to what I would expect in America, just in a much smaller space with older equipment. It was interesting to see a similarity like this one to American life, one I didn't really expect to find. It was also nice to be able to get in some weights, because that was something I had just counted on not being able to do all summer, so maybe I will be able to get in there more regularly. It was 100 schillings (just over a dollar) to use the gym for a day, and 1500 schillings for a month (about $17). Anyway, I took it easy again on Thursday, it was good to stay off my feet. My training while I've been over here hasn't been very good, and I suspect the amount I've been up and walking around has been a factor. Hopefully I'll be able to adjust to that. I got the chance to play with the kids in the evening again, which was great. They're so enthusiastic they can be suffocating at times, and I kind of wish I could hang out more with people my own age, but their enthusiasm and energy are great to see and they are always excited to have me out there. I spent a decent amount of the afternoon on Thursday on the Internet updating my blog, checking email, and getting pictures up on facebook (I don't know if I've mentioned it here but if you want to see pictures and we're not facebook friends, just friend request me and if you're less sketchy looking than Ann Rodriguez I'll probably accept your request). I was surprised how much just being on the Internet and making contact with people at home was a comforting thing. I guess I've been seeing and experiencing so much that I hadn't thought that much about how much I missed home and it kind of hit me. I'm definitely more homesick than I was beginning of college, because then I was in a new place but I still fit in and could be one of the group, where here everything is new and I never fit in. Something as trivial as what kind of clothes someone wears or what kind of music they listen to seems like pretty small potatoes compared to whether they speak English most of the time and can't immediately tell that I don't belong. It's an interesting sociological situation for me because I like to think of myself as someone who's pretty independent from needing to conform to the group or be around people where I fit in, but I'm finding that is absolutely not the case. Right now more than anything I just want to fit in and be normal, and I think when I return my idea of what it means to fit in will be a lot different. Adding to this, I hadn't been able to connect with my parents on Skype yet, and I was surprised with how much I was looking forward to that piece of normality in my life. Another comfort from home that I was surprised how much I appreciated was watching "Grown Ups", a pretty standard silly, slapstick, Adam Sandler and Chris Rock movie with Glen, Patrick's cousin who was hanging out here before going to school on Friday (more on that later). I didn't even really care about the movie itself, but just seeing Americans and hearing people talking like Americans was refreshing. On Friday morning we took Glen to the boarding school just outside downtown Nairobi where he goes. I was interested to see the school because I had heard a lot of boarding school stories from Patrick so I was intrigued to get a mental picture of what they were like. I couldn't figure out why Glen was just coming back to school though because I knew this was the middle of the term for everyone else. Upon questioning him and Flo about it, I uncovered that the reason Glen was coming back to school was because someone had lit the school on fire and caused pretty significant damage so that everyone was sent home while the school was repaired. This cracked me up, but talking with Flo about it more, apparently it's not such an uncommon occurrence. She said there was one point when she was in high school when schools all over Kenya were burning and it turned into a pretty widespread problem. These revolutionaries could be an inspiration to malcontents in American schools everywhere. When I was in school we would joke about burning the school down, but kids here actually followed through with it, and with alarming regularity. I was impressed. There was a form Flo had to sign as the person dropping Glen off that was kind of your typical school waiver, except at the top it said something along the lines of, "due to the student unrest on June 17 and subsequent closure of the school…" you have to sign somewhere to say you'll pay all the damages if your child is the one who tries to pull off the next stunt. I loved that even more. That made it sound like the students had risen up against injustice and revolted, and the rebellion had only now been quelled and order restored. Mrs. Babcock would have been proud. You don't get much more democratic than that, is this a great country or what? Power to the people! At the gate of the school there all the kids had to line up and be "inspected" by teachers on their way in, in a process that appeared to me to be a cross between an airport security checkpoint and what I picture an army equipment check to be like. If any of a student's uniform was unsatisfactory, they would be sent back to town to buy something that fit the school guidelines. Backpacks and clothing were thoroughly searched through both to ensure that students had their books, and also to ensure they weren't bringing in the necessary materials to light the school on fire again. I think they picked the most crotchety, anal group of teachers at the school to perform the checks, or at least I hope so, because if all the teachers were as out-to-get the students as those ones I'd light the school on fire too. These were clearly people who were trying to squash any concept of Lockean governments-should-fear-their-people ideals that may have been planted in the collection of impressionable young minds under their charge. There was some to-and-fro we had to go through because the teacher that inspected Glen didn't like the socks he had brought, but after a decent amount of walking around and talking with people, we didn't have to go back to town, so I chalk that one up to Glen's calm demeanor and smooth talking, though his smooth talking was in Swahili so I can't actually say for sure. Flo and I were going to go the National Museum, but between the amount of time we spent up at Glen's school, running a couple of other errands, and apparently everything shutting down early on Fridays, we decided to forgo the trip and just got lunch and then headed to meet up with Mama Patrick at her school. There was something of a crisis brewing because Lois, the oldest of Patrick's sisters (I think) had gotten her blackberry stolen while in a matatu, and they were now in the process of reporting the theft so the police could track the phone. I will say any measures should be taken to get out of the way of any of the Otieno women when they get agitated and on the warpath, because I would probably actually rather face a charging rhino, because at least that would make quick work of me and it would be over. If I can manage to stay in the good graces of all of them for the duration of the trip, that will be a milestone success, and very essential to my personal well-being. I say this because I had seen Mama Patrick and Flo go on mini-rampages (I still don't know that I've seen the full fury of either one, but I've seen enough to have a more than healthy fear of both of them), but it alarmed me to see Lois out for blood because until now she had seemed the most mild mannered and laid back one of the bunch. Anyway, we headed to the police station to report the theft and on our way out ran into a man who lived in the estate who Mama Patrick said hi to. Once he was told that I was the boy who always ran laps around the neighborhood in the morning he recognized, but said I looked much different now. Him and I got to talking about America, and he was a pleasant but very opinionated guy, at least on this subject. He rolled through some of the ties between American and Kenya, and when I mentioned I was going to school in Seattle he told me some about what Bill Gates had done here through his foundation. The really interesting part of the conversation to me was when he started explaining to me his thoughts on Kenyans going to America. He said America was absolutely the number one place Kenyans would go if they left the country for education or more opportunities, but he said that was in jeopardy because of a US tendency to condescendingly treat them as people who needed to be taught how to be successful and make a good living. He said Obama has helped the state of this, because he is so well liked and respectful of other peoples, but that the US could potentially see a decline in Kenyans coming there if this attitude persisted. My first reaction was to be defensive about how the US treats people that come there, but I realized I'm not here to defend the US. There's already too many Americans ready to defend the US whether we're right or wrong and not enough ready to learn about other cultures and what people around the world think about the US, so I want to make sure I'm one of the people who is taking care to learn, not to defend. Because whether his opinions are true or not (and from talking with him he's a guy who's traveled quite a bit so I'd trust his thoughts on the subject a lot more than my own) that is still what the perception of the US is, at least in his mind and I think in the minds of a lot of people here. And as far as whether we are condescending toward other people, as far as I'm concerned it doesn't matter one bit whether we think we're condescending, it matters if they think we're condescending, so in that respect his opinion is overwhelmingly more valid than mine or any other Americans. Ah, but that's more than enough of that rant. After that I headed with Mama Patrick back to the bus depot to catch a bus home. One thing I'm not sure I've mentioned is that if you want to get on a more reputable source of transportation than the matatus from downtown to the suburbs, then you have to wait in a line in town that at times stretches several hundred yards across a large square that serves as the bus depot for commuter transit to the suburbs. Mama Patrick always takes these buses home rather than the matatus, and the buses roll through often enough that you usually don't have to wait more than 20 minutes or half an hour to get on a bus. Still, the whole situation makes me feel like I'm in the Soviet Union waiting for bread or something. Another interesting aspect I don't think I've mentioned is the British influence here. When you're waiting for the bus, you stand in the queue, not the line, and when Junior and I are getting off a matatu he says we're going to "alight" here, not get off here. Patrick's dad will talk about any given person as a "chap", and as far as I can tell the gun control is similar to what I've heard it is like in Britain. That is, no one has guns, but the police carry full-on assault rifles and sub-machine guns. They kind of scare me too, because none of the guns the police carry appear to be standard issue, I've seen a whole assortment of firearms being carried by police officers and army personnel.
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