making trades

Happy Birthday Tia Julie!! I hope those little cousins of mine are being nice to you.

Tuesday we met at Masaai Market for the first half of Swahili class. As soon as I got there, I had an entourage of 3 men who said they wanted to show me their shop and that they would wait for my other friend to come and deliver her to me. They did in fact do that, and they also wanted to give me some very bad deals, so eventually I got rid of them when I told them I wouldn’t pay what they wanted. I did end up getting some cool stuff. I was buying a painting from one lady and she wanted more money than I had left so she asked what else I had in my bag. I told her I only had a pen and some hand sanitizer (besides my water and notebook, which I needed), so she ended up selling me the painting for 150 shillings, half a bottle of hand sanitizer, and a pen. What a bargain. I also got (for free) a cool sunburn on my back with a white line from where my bag strap was. Just picture a “no” symbol, but instead of a red slash with a white background, I have a white slash with a red background. Cool : )
The second half of class we sat in a park and learned Swahili and talked about our purchases and showed each other what we got. After class we were going to make our bus reservations for Mombasa on Thursday but the news has been showing clips of people wading through water waist-deep in Mombasa because of flooding there, so we decided to put it off for another weekend and bake chocolate chip cookies at my house this weekend instead.
We have our first test, which they call a CAT here- something that starts with “c” achievement test?- on Thursday in Anthropology of Infectious Diseases, which should be interesting.
OH! My sister had her baby on Friday! It is a boy and his name is something that sounds like Shay or Oshay, I am not sure. I will have to find out more about that. So now I am the proud Aunt of two little boys : )