Kirindo...

I’m back!!! I’m sure you all have been missing me. J I had quite the weekend – it went by so fast, full of cooking, shopping, getting my hair done… I left with Milicent from the clinic on Friday evening and we walked to Kirindo, the village where she lives. She, of course, knows EVERYONE, so we greeted many people at the center (“Millie, who is your mzungu?”), bought some bananas to stew with potatoes for succotash (beans, maize, mashed bananas and potatoes – at least that’s Millie’s version) and headed to her place, of course greeting everyone on the way. It is rude if you don’t and because I was there, everyone wanted us to come and greet them (shake their hand – here, it is a sign of respect for you to greet people by shaking with your right hand while holding your right arm right below the elbow), so it took extra long, but we finally made it to her home.

Her house is on a plot of land about the size of half a football field. It is set up on a hill, so you can see all the islands and water surrounding Mbita. It’s really beautiful. Their house is a small mud house with a metal roof – it is divided into three rooms. ½ is the living room/eating area and the other ½ is divided into two bedrooms, one of which became mine (and I found out, Milicent’s) for the weekend - yes, we shared a not so large bed and yes, my issues with touching might have totally been challenged, but it was okay. I survived!

Milicent has two children – Felix is 7 and Kaleen is 5 or 6. Felix is her’s biologically, but Kaleen she adopted recently from some distant relatives on her husband’s side. Kaleen’s parents both died and she was left with her grandma, who didn’t want her and, “only fed her guava’s and stole her medication.” Kaleen is HIV positive. So when they came to get her, she was sooooo sick and malnourished and now, in Milicent’s words, “She is happy, happy, happy!” Which really is so true – you can hear her singing and laughing all the time. She and Felix get along really well, which is great. Milicent’s husband, William, was actually her sister’s husband first. Her sister died in childbirth and so Milicent was given to William as basically an inheritance as part of the custom here. Not sure I’d be a fan of that…but William is very good to her and he is well-off, compared to most in that area. They are able to send Felix to a private school and are not wanting for food, have a roof over their head and plenty of clothes. Which, I still realize, is not NEARLY as much as I have – amazing what I am accustomed to!

This weekend definitely held a lot of firsts for me – first time I had fried liver (not sure about that one…), fresh fried fish, first time I showered in Lake Victoria, had my hair plaited, cooked in a small mud hut over an open fire (also not sure how much I loved that one – that smoke burns!) and, of course, the first time I made chapati’s. Which are sooooo good, by the way. (For those who don’t know, chapati’s are basically small, flat, fried bread. Pretty awesome.) So, Friday night, I met the kids, we had fried fish “for the appetizer”, according to Millie (really? I definitely could have only eaten the fish) and then fried livers with spaghetti. I had to get accustomed to eating what was put in front of me – Millie is used to running her house and it’s rude not to eat the food, even if I was full to the brim! Even Saturday night, when we were all exhausted and decided to eat the beef we’d cooked the next day for lunch, Millie says, “but you need to eat, dear. [and yes, we’re the same age, but she always calls me dear – can’t decide if I like it or not yet]” except that she wasn’t eating! So I took the tiniest spoonful of leftover succotash, just so she would leave me alone. J I can be stubborn too! But really, I ate so well and so much. I am going to be recovering all week – I seriously feel like I just had Thanksgiving dinner or something.

So, something I cannot get over is the things that Felix and Kaleen do that I would NEVER have done at their age. Friday night I come into the “kitchen” (the mud hut with the fire) and there is Kaleen, building a better fire than I ever did and lighting the oil lantern. Outside, there is Felix chopping up wood with a big machete – yikes. Or like how, on Sunday night, there is this massive storm coming, the wind blowing like nobody’s business, dust everywhere and the kids need to wash up because they are going to school the next day. They had been totally procrastinating all evening and then of course, they didn’t want to because of the storm, but Millie said “That’s too bad, you still have to do it.” Which meant them lugging a basin of water between them down to the latrine, with lightening all around, and washing down there. They get back, all in one piece, very clean with, “Mama, it was so cold in there!” and of course, Millie having nooooo sympathy. Oy – those are some tough kiddos.

Okay, the rest I will try to tell through pictures. Sorry for the novel!