Tired feet and sunburnt noses

That's pretty much the story these days... training at this point has pretty much wound down, and the lot of us are just trying to survive until swearing in. Which shockingly enough is next week! Kind of hard to believe, but I think I'm actually going to make it through! Today we went to this place near Kitui called Nzambani Rock, which is this huge rock that rises up almost out of nowhere. You can climb it and the view from the top is absolutely amazing. I took photos of that, and just hung out and we did our technical training up there for the day, which was a nice change of scene.

The past couple of weeks have been mainly about survival--survival of training. The days are long, and lots of times they can be physically exhausting as well as mentally exhausting (just the strain of learning a new language in 9 weeks is more than I know I bargained for!). I'm really starting to look forward to getting to site and having a little time to relax and recouperate... at least to be able to go to bed at 9 without feeling guilty that I should be doing homework!

And the excitement about site is growing, especially since I got a phone call from one of the people in admin about a half hour ago! When I went on my future site visit, there was a little confusion about my housing. The house that the organization had shown to PC was actually not available, as it is being inhabited by another PCV who seemed a bit distressed when he found out that he would be getting a roommate! (The org thought he was leaving Kenya a year earlier than he actually was, they didn't actually expect us to be living in the same house together!) So a person from PC admin went up there and looked at some houses, and it looks like they've found a place where they feel it is safe, and I will be living on the same compound as the headmistress of a local school. The house won't be finished until about 2 weeks after I move to Meru (but contractor/builder time works the same all over the world, so that's probably going to be more like a month, 6 weeks? We'll see.) It's a self contained one bedroom house, meaning the bath and toilet are inside, which lead me to believe that I'll actaully have running water, which will be nice (they just don't put latrines inside houses, for obvious reasons. It'll be great to be able to get up and go to the bathroom in the middle of the night again! When your bathroom is outside, after a certain time, you can't go outside because of "robbers" and other "bad people" from what we've been told by many of our homestay families. And I think it will probably have electricity too. WHile I'm waiting for the house to be finished, I'll be living at the Girl's school in a guest house on campus. So that could either be really really cool, or it could be a nightmare, as students take to peering through the windows at the mzungu. Again, we'll see!

Well, I've probably spent more than enough time on the internet, keep up the emails, letters and such, I love getting them! ANd I'll try to update asap on a more direct mailing address in Meru.

Take care everyone!