Saturday April 3, 2010

What’s up! Holy freakin cow these days are starting to mush together and I can’t even tell them apart any more haha. Yesterday morning it rained and I promise you I thought that someone was going to die... I have never seen anything like that, it was almost scary. It was like ridiculous raining, like a hurricane was blowing through or something. I was talking to Anthony about it and he said that was not even bad compared to some of the storms they get here around May, he said that it rains for days and you can’t even go outside of your house because it is just gnarly and you will slip everywhere. So if it rains like that while I am in Dzivani it will straight up just make me stranded out there for days if I need help haha. We then went up to Miguneni after it cleared up which is the village that is on the way to Dzivani but only like ten minutes up the road. The Miguneni primary school is ranked number one in all of the southern part of Kenya for the highest scores, which is freakin impressive since the conditions are so ridiculous and it is one of the smaller primary schools around. The way the grading works here is everyone is ranked in a position in their class, so if you are number one then it means you are basically a 4.0 student and then number two would be close behind and so on. Secondary school starts after 8th grade and if they don’t have the grades to make it, their schooling basically stops there because it starts costing money at that point. So the higher up in your class you are, the more likely you are to keep moving on to school and maybe get a scholarship from Koins. So Miguneni has the highest scores out of anybody and they are also the most rapidly growing school that Koins works with, so they need more classrooms. Koins has already put one building up there and it was a three roomer I think, but they out grew that in two years. So they were using both the new building and their old which was a bunch of mud huts squished together with basically half the room mudded and the other half just open like they just said nahhhh to finishing building it haha. They also have a huge shortage of desks so the kids that are in the mud hut building have no desks. One of the Miguneni teachers is on the Koins board and he is dope, his name is Buffalo and he is the biggest Kenyan i have ever seen, so fat. He said he used to teach in the mud building and said he had about seventy students in a twelve by twenty foot space with no desks and they have to write their Swahili lessons and math problems in the floor with sticks... Good psych! I can’t even imagine how gross and sweaty and nappy that room had to smell cause everyone here smells like the sourest, grossest BO you have ever smelt, I am just used to it now, haha. But since they are so crammed and since they are working the hardest, we are putting another school building up there for them to have. It is going to be a two-room attachment onto one of the existing buildings they have already and we had the ground breaking of it yesterday. It was a lot less exciting then the Dzivani one they had for me, but its all good, the students and the people are stoked about it. The ladies here are the hardest freakin people you have ever seen, it makes me wanna just cry watching them while all the men just sit on their thumbs all day, literally all day. Today we had the opening ceremony for the Vikolani school which basically just means that we are finished with it and we hand it over to the village. It was a huge celebration just like how pretty much anything we do here is. They had dancers and all these parliament members came to see it and their bodyguards from the Kenyan army with big M-16s and all that good stuff. It was so bloody hot too, I was sweating thru my clothes again, but I am so use to it I just stopped caring any more. I have officially outlawed wearing boxers anymore, just straight swimsuits and tanks from here on out. But after the Vikolani ceremony, all the Koins crew left to go home. It was sad to see them go. When they left everyone was just pawning all their unwanted gear off to me so I was pretty much the Kenyan D.I. all afternoon. Once they left, I honestly had nothing to do! I kept asking all the Kenyan board members what work we need to do and they just shrug and say “Ah today Mr. Dallin we relax” and I was like, “OK today is Saturday and we need to work, tomorrow we relax.” They all just sit on camp chairs on the KCC porch and watch all the ladies do the work, it ticks me off so bad. So I cruised over to the work shop to see if they needed help on making desks. After I took a nap and I think Buffalo came in and told me that tomorrow I have to go with him in the truck or something all morning which I have no idea why because his English sucks so I have pretty much been speaking pidgin English with him for a week. But who knows, it could be fun and then I get to have my sacrament meeting tomorrow by myself which should be pretty tight, I am stoked for that. I am so jealous of St. George tho! I bet you guys are just killin’ it down thurrrrrr. I wanna rip something on my mountain bike so bad! I haven’t done anything physical for a week and I feel like the biggest waste of life... I can honestly feel my stomach just shrink more and more each day, and all my swim suits are getting more and more loose... haha there is no way I can be ready for that tri in august... I wish I had all gear here so I could train, but I honestly think I would die trying to do a half ironman when i will be coming from sea level for five months with nothing but my running shoes and no way to swim or ride... but I dunno maybe I can pull it off. Well that’s pretty much all I can really tell you cats about for now... we are going to work on the Austin School on Monday bright and early.. The trenches are already dug for the footings all three feet deep around the whole perimeter. They don’t mess around here, so I got this camera from this girl so I can start taking pics of the progress of it and send them home. Well kids, keep killin it, kickin back and feelin good... this life is too short and will pass you by too quick if you don’t learn to laugh and love... in the words of Neil Young, “keep on rockin in the free world” and love all of you.