On Thursday afternoon one of the cousins, Elisha, showed up from school with one of his friends to stay with us. It was the start of his break and he came up for the wedding on Saturday then would head home to Kisumu for the remainder of the break. He was a brother of Grace, yet another face to fit onto my mental family tree that was quickly looking as if it would become unmanageably big. I think I might actually draw the family tree out to make sure I have things straight, but even that strikes me as a daunting task. Junior had gotten into town too but he was staying with yet another one of the relatives, so I said I would let him know if we were doing anything, but we laid pretty low for the day on Friday, which was more than fine with me because I was pretty wiped out from running with Kemboi so I wasn't really in the mood for any grand adventures. Angela was home from school too, and I really enjoyed hanging out with her. She's shown the intangible ability to make me feel like I've been part of the family forever, rather than like a foreigner that she just met. She had no problem harassing and joking with me, and in turn I felt really comfortable around her, almost like she was one of my cousins back home that I'd grown up seeing every summer and thanksgiving. On Friday she gave me a bad time about not being able to cook, so just to spite her I made some of my world famous ugali for lunch and heated up some chicken in the fridge. All of them have been greatly amused by Roger and Allan's story of when Allan was showing me how to make ugali and I kept asking if we should put other things in, and that's come to be one of their main sources for good natured harassment, especially concerning my cooking skills, which I am always quick to defend by pointing out my ability to make ugali. I insisted to Angela and Elisha that I would make the ugali with all my special secret ingredients and that it would be the best ugali they'd ever had hands down. The thing that makes all this even more humorous, for those of you who aren't familiar with ugali, is that it's just about flavorless and is more a bulk filler food that you eat with meat or vegetables. As far as preparation, you boil some water then add maize flour and stir until it's a pretty thick consistency and that's about it. I was happy to be able to joke with them about it though, it was one of those things that felt like something I would do with my family.
Flo, Allan, Grace, and some of the other cousins came in late Friday night and Flo decided it would be fun to ambush me at one in the morning. I was a little more annoyed with it than I probably should have been, just because I was tired and had to wake up to run with Kemboi in the morning, but it was yet another occasion where I was glad (after the fact) that they felt comfortable treating me as they would one of their cousins rather than as a special guest. Flo and somebody else (there were enough girls there I'm not even sure and in my not-even-half-awake state at one in the morning I didn't really care) crawled into the bunk above me and started chatting, while Allan fired up some music in the living room. Overall I was pretty disgruntled to have my peaceful night of exhausted sleep interrupted, but was tired enough I was able to get back to sleep pretty quick.
Saturday after my run we got ready to go for the wedding that everyone had come to town for. When I came in from my run everyone else looked like they were mostly ready to go, which a couple weeks ago would have had me worried that I was going to be holding everyone up getting ready. But I had sat around waiting for people enough times to be pretty confident that we would be held up and it wouldn't be because of me. Sure enough, I leisurely took my cold shower, ironed my shirt (a note here: I think I've done more ironing since I've been here than the rest of my life combined. When it's time to look nice, people really expect you to look nice), and put on the rest of my one set of nice clothes then proceeded to sit in the living room with most everybody else as we waited for the four horsemen or the second coming, or some mysterious sign it was time to go that I hadn't been let in on but, as usual, no one else seemed to be too worried about it so I wasn't either. Freddy, one of the oldest cousins that lives nearby, came in and, with his usual humor and candor, shook my hand and told me, "Ah, you're looking sharp, but you need to zip your pants." I quickly zipped up my fly as Freddy moved around the room greeting others without giving it a second thought. When the time finally came to leave, I somehow got stuck in the car with all the girl cousins, a troubling recurrence after my time in Kisumu. What I feared occurred, as we headed into town for a couple people to get their hair done and I was left sitting in the waiting room of a salon. That didn't turn out so bad because after the death march Kemboi had taken me on that morning I fell asleep almost instantly, which the girls pointed out later wasn't really all that safe, considering I was in a hair salon waiting room. Chances were pretty decent that one of them would see my hair and beard and would just come hack it off because they couldn't stand it, they reasoned.
When we got out to the wedding most of the relatives were already there, and I was pleased with the number that I could recognize, and even group into family units in some cases. Junior was there, who I hadn't seen for a couple weeks, and I was happy to see him again. I noticed gradually that it was down to almost exclusively the men of the family hanging out in the dirt and grass parking lot, and the wedding was pretty clearly already going on inside. I asked Steve, who I'd just met, when we would go in and he said we could go in if I wanted, but otherwise we'd probably just hang out here. This is a big score for Kenya over America if it's perfectly acceptable to hang out in the parking lot for the whole wedding and then grab the food at the end, and it appeared that that was indeed the case. I decided to head in to the wedding for the sake of the cultural experience, to the understandable befuddlement of many of my counterparts. I went in with Steve, who I'm certain was only going for my benefit because he didn't want to let me go off on my own, and sat near the back. We listened to a couple of pretty rough songs performed by groups of what I assumed to be relatives or close friends of one kind or another, and I got the impression that they were part of an interminable procession of similar performances, so I signaled Steve and we made our escape. It still surprised me that people would travel this far, I think around 8 hours from Nairobi and at least 2 or 3 from Kisumu, and not be required to sit through the wedding, but it didn't make it seem any less genius to me. Outside I met Tony, a young cousin who I think knew me from the school because he immediately started messing around with me with no introduction like we were old friends. He was a pretty fun kid, and I've found that there's nothing as comforting and welcoming while I've been here as being treated like part of the crowd that belongs there. Maybe that's just as true in the States, I'm just not as aware of it there because it's not such a privilege to be treated like I fit in. After everyone came out of the wedding Junior took me over to say hi to Grandy and her aunt. That turned out to be a terrifying situation because once I had said hi to Grandy and her aunt using my best Swahili, Grandy grabbed me by the arm and took me around introducing me to nameless, enthusiastic old people, I think explaining who I was but I think they were all speaking in Luo. I didn't care that much though because if it was anything like the similar situations I'd been in being introduced to endless old people in the US, then they weren't saying anything terribly interesting and I wasn't really needed to talk other than a few cursory Swahili and English greetings, I was just being drug around to be shown to people, so I just smiled and nodded and thought about how if Patrick had made it through our family reunion last summer in one piece then there was hope that I could escape through the flames and come through this "cultural experience" unscathed.
Junior, Elisha, Tony, me, and a couple of the girls (honestly sometimes they just seem to me like a nameless roving pack) headed across the street, just kind of wandering around, then headed back in time for the food. The line was already super long so by the time we got food we were just given plates of rice. As we paused at the end of the line to look for where we were going to sit one of the ladies serving asked me if I wanted more, to which I readily agreed because I was very hungry. I didn't think until later whether she offered because I looked like a hungry teenager or because I was a mzungu. We watched the rest of the wedding festivities casually as we ate and drank glass bottles of bitter lemonade. They didn't appear to be so different from the US, except that there was a time set aside for presenting presents to the couple and everyone came up and individually presented their present. After they cut the cake they begin passing out pieces of cake, but they were pretty darn small pieces and I was still on the hungry side. I thought about grabbing a couple but figured that would be bad protocol and that I would just grin and bear it.
Before we left I had a couple encounters with people from the church urging me to come back the next day for the main service. The first two I met were a couple of young men that were hanging out over by the cousins, and when they said hi to me I kind of assumed they were cousins I just hadn't met yet. We chatted for a little while then they started talking about the prophet that their church was based on, a preacher from America that lived in the early 20th century named William Brennam. The whole thing sounded a little bit weird to me, and my mind jumped to Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons, but they didn't say anything I disagreed with and I took off with the cousins before I had a chance to ask them more questions about what they believed, which I'm not sure I was really ready to do anyway. Right before we left an older man who I guessed was a pastor came over to shake my hand and thank me for coming and encourage me to come back the next day for the service. I thanked him, but told him I would be traveling the next day so I probably wouldn't be able to make it.
It was Grace's birthday and all the cousins were going out to celebrate and go clubbing that night. Roger's house was the gathering point, and the cousins seemed to be a pretty close group, no so unlike our Hamilton cousins but closer in age and older. Most all of the cousins were between Angela, who was in her second year of high school I think, and Atieno or Charles who were a little ways out of college. Overall it seemed to me to be a pretty cool group that was pretty fun to hang out with. I wanted to go since it was Grace's birthday and most of the cousins would be there, but I knew they were going to stay out late and I was wiped out from the running and knew I would be falling asleep at some table by 11:00 and then be waiting around until 4 or 5 before everybody else was ready to go. They gave me a little bit of a bad time about not going especially about it being Grace's birthday, but didn't really bug me about it that much. I just stayed home and watched Thor on my computer with Elisha, then fell asleep quickly at around 11:30, grateful that I wasn't sitting out at some club wishing I could climb into bed.
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