wikendi yangu

On Friday after Swahili class, Whitney and I met Olungah and his wife at his office and were going to go see this guy Toni who is a famous Luo singer (Luo is the tribe that my family belongs to as well as Olungah). We had gone to see Toni a month or so before, but Toni never showed up. It turned out that this time he didn’t show up again and I told Olungah that I didn’t think Toni was a real person, but he insisted that he was. So after we danced a little, we left that place and went to another one called “Deep West Resort Club” which Whitney and I found pretty funny. They were playing Luo music there too so we hung out for a while, then went home.
On Saturday we came to my house and made chocolate chip cookies. They don’t sell chocolate chips in Kenya, but we bought some baking chocolate and crushed that up and it worked pretty well. The cookies turned out to be amazing, despite some difficulties. We didn’t have a measuring cup or spoon and we had to convert all the measurements to mL or grams or Celsius. My oven is also very small so we could only bake 6 cookies at a time and until we got the temperature right, they were taking 15-20 minutes per pan. So it took us about 3-4 hours to bake the cookies, but they turned out amazing and we both felt like we were home for a little while. Between baking and afterwards we watched movies with Chipa, including Memphis Belle which I had never seen, but liked a lot.
On Sunday we met up with Olungah again at school and on the way I had a man reach out of a matatu and grab my chest, which has never happened before, but was quite an interesting (bad) experience. When we got to school Olungah took us to Kibera (the biggest slum in Africa) to a place called Carolina for Kibera which is an NGO founded by a student from UNC Chapel Hill. Whitney is hoping to volunteer there so we talked to a guy about that. Their teen girls’ program was having a photo exhibition of photographs that the girls had taken with disposable cameras they were given. It was really cool to see their photographs, and teaching underprivileged kids how to use cameras is something I really want to do, so it was a pretty awesome coincidence that that event was taking place right when we got there. There was this little boy who ran up to me while I was standing outside and held out his hand for me to shake. I said hi to him in kiSwahili and he smiled and said hi back and then called to his other little friend “mzungu!” and his friend immediately came over with his little hand stretched out to shake mine. It was adorable. Afterwards we went to another part of Kibera where Olungah got his car washed and the windows fixed while we had a beer and talked at a little restaurant nearby.
And that was my weekend (wikendi yangu). Today my mom is going to Israel for two weeks and we are going to be in the same time zone for all that time! I wish her safe travels and fun times in GMT+3 : )