fun facts and a poem

Thursday morning I had class and then met Josephine who is leading the Mt. Kenya trip to talk about details. I spent the rest of the day in the hospital with Whitney because she wasn’t feeling well and I decided to get my chest thing checked out. Both of us came out with negative results, so that was good. Since my day was so uneventful I decided to include some fun facts and a poem.

Fun Fact: mzunguko means “round” in kiSwahili. Our professor told us the word “mzungu” came from mzunguko because Europeans went around the world to explore.

Fun Fact: even though homosexuality is illegal in Kenya and a huge taboo, men hold hands with men and women with women all the time walking down the street in public.

Joy sent me this poem one of the first days I was here. Her niece Emily wrote it and I have it taped up on the wall next to my bed. I like it a lot.


It isn't a question of finding gratitude--
the trouble is always finding space
between bus fares and falling soufflés
and naming previously undiscovered species of fish--

To make room for gratitude
we may have to sacrifice a moment
of sipping apple juice or riding bicycles,
we may have to pause
in the middle of a chapter, the middle
of a sentence, even mid-word,

to hear the yellow leaves
crackle under our feet
to take a tiny hand
in our own warm hands
to look with reverence at a face
that didn't have to smile but smiled anyway.

Gratitude will not fill our stomachs
or shelter our heads,
it will never
reveal the mysterious location of our car keys
or help us up from the concrete
that scraped us down to the blood,

but it may compel us to see the route home
at a walking pace
and to look up
from the sidewalk where we lay
to the vast, blue wonder we call sky.