loooong weekend

Friday there was no class for the holiday. I went into town to have a drumming lesson, which was mostly good. When I got back to my house, Whitney and Dolly and Monique (my cousins) were over. Monique is the youngest of Whitney’s sisters and just got home from boarding school. She is 14, I think. I asked her how school was and she said “traumatizing”. Chipa, Whitney, Dolly and I played this game called “Ludo” which is sort of like Sorry, but the board is shaped differently and you can block people from passing if you have two of your people on the same spot. It was fun. We also played uno (which we called moja) so that Dolly could understand why you had to say uno when you had one card. Moja means “one” in Kiswahili : )
After they left I watched the news and there was a story about this man in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia who holds the world record for laughing for one hour and 45 minutes. He goes to orphanages in the city and uses his laughing “talents” to make kids laugh. There was this whole clip of this guy laughing hysterically and all these little kids giggling, it was really cute. It reminded me of Mary Poppins.

Saturday was pretty low key. I went into the city and found a bookstore and bought a book called “The White Masaai” about a European woman who went to Kenya on vacation with her boyfriend and fell in love with a Masaai man, married him, and lived in his hut with his mother and other family. I am excited to read it. Whitney and I tried our Dormans, a coffee shop and it was nice. For the rest of the day we just hung out, played board games with Chipa, and watched “Pursuit of Happiness.” We did have a man ride by on a bike though and yell to us “Wazungu! Can I rape you?” That was pretty shocking…

Lucky that Saturday was low key because I woke up at 5:45 on Sunday to go to church for Easter. The service was at 7 and Whitney met Monica and I there. It was at Monica’s church, which is Anglican. That service was relatively short, and then at 9 we were off to a Catholic church in Donholm where Monica’s friends’ children were getting baptized and first communion-ed. They had four kids-two girls about 10 and 5, and then twin boys who were about a year and a half old. The boys, Jasper and Jeremy, were pretty cute. Jasper was pretty flirty and played with us, while Jeremy didn’t want to let go of his dad’s neck. The parents assigned Whitney and I as official photographers for the service, which besides being the only white people there, made us stand out a lot more as we were obnoxiously trying to make our way through crowds to photograph the four kids. The service was Catholic, and was 3.5 hours long! There was really good music though, and a lot of it, with percussion and beautiful voices. The church was packed to the brim and people were singing and dancing, and it made the 3.5 hours seem not as long. During the service, there was this adorable little girl who kept walking up to me and just standing there and smiling. She was about a year old and just had two little bottom teeth, and she would just stand there grinning at me. It was adorable.
After the service, we were driven to the family’s house where there were at least 30 kids, and a lot of really good food. So we stuffed ourselves and played with kids and talked to a really funny woman who teased Whitney for not eating enough and said that she eats “this much” because she is African, gesturing towards the mountain of food on her plate. She said she tries to gain weight, but she can’t, she even tried eating chips (French fries) for lunch and supper every day for a month, and stuffing the sides of her pants with tissues to try and “get a figure”. She cracked us up.
So Easter was a long day, but a good one. We met a lot of new people and spent time with a lot of cute kids, and saw new parts of the city. I am really glad to have experienced it in a different part of the world.