A Little Home Sick

Friday, I sent out an e-mail to everyone to send me letters. Emails are great and all and of course I would probably get them faster than letters, but I also have to pay 2 shillings a minute to use the internet. Which isn’t really much money to you guys but it adds up fast for a person who is being paid in shillings.

I guess my home sickness started with all the “Mama’s” (they call anyone who is older and or has children a Mama) in town. I swear they could all be my Grandmother!! And then hub day came. It’s the day when all 48 of us come together and do training instead of just in our smaller groups of 5 or 6. On hub days we get mail. I sent out a couple of letters and didn’t expect to get anything back. But someone called my name for a letter. I was all excited that someone had written me. Then I find out it’s the letter I sent my Mom. It got sent back to me!! A bunch of us had given letters to the medical staff to mail for us in Nairobi and something must have happened because none of them had even been processed. And to top it all off at this point I had sent my brother my new cell phone number and no one had called me!! I would call people myself if it didn’t cost me 200 shillings (that’s about 2 meals) to talk to someone for 8 minutes. I think I’ll just have to suck it up and call my Grandmother though.

I know it’s only been a few weeks here and I’m sure to everyone back home that’s how it’s felt; but for me these few weeks have been months. It hasn’t been a bad experience; don’t get me wrong but there’s just so much to deal with and everything is so completely different. It’s kind of hard to explain I guess. But like my title says I am a little homesick.

We will find out where our sites are in about 2 weeks and then we have a site visit. We go with one of out trainers or supervisors to our site for a few days. Make sure that our living situation will be up to Peace Corps standards and get to see exactly what we’ll be doing. That’s pretty exciting because at this point we still don’t know what our exact jobs will be and some people still won’t know once they get to site since it all depends on the “needs of the community”. I’m excited about finding out what my new job will be; a little nervous too but mostly excited. I mostly just want to know what my living conditions will be like. I think I can prepare myself for anything if I know well enough in advance. The only thing I don’t think I could handle is complete solitude. I mean I like my alone time just as much as the next guy but I couldn’t do it all the time. We had a volunteer come and talk to us about her site and her job doing water catchments in an area of Kenya that gets very little rain throughout the year. Her job seemed really cool and she was very successful in it but she’s out in the middle of no where with nothing around her. She said it would take her something like half a day to travel to a town. I don’t think I could handle that remote of a place… I’ll keep ya posted on where I end up.

Alrightie; I’m off to the “Hub” to study my Swahili. Hope everyone is doing well. I promise to try and put some pictures up soon.