Buckets

Perhaps it has rained buckets since my last post for some of you. We haven't seen much rain, but buckets are plentiful and multifunctional. The one day it rained (of many--el nino is expected), it was heavy for a couple hours as we ate our pizza this past Saturday. It was just a bit of pizza after we had cooked ourselves silly in the afternoon with Kiswahili practice galore. Our progress has been off and on, with six hour-and-a-half lessons spread out over the past two weeks, with various opportunities to talk scattered throughout.
Thursday past we talked with a wonderful professor from the university of Nairobi about early humans in the Rift Valley. He gave us a useful overview of general ethnic distributions with their corresponding expansions. I was surprised at the number of non-Bantu-speaking tribes there are. Nilotic was a language group I had quite forgotten, and some of the Kushitic-speaking residents of northeast Kenya are likely to have been here as long as there have been people there. From the second archaeological site we went to (in Nakuru--where we saw flamingos pinking up most of a lake and zebras, gazelles, and baboons on the side of the road), we went to a magnificent bowl. It was the crater of an active volcano, with a few vents steaming. You need to see it, but I forgot my camera--image searches on Menengai should find you pictures almost as good as ones I could've taken (or check out my friend Whitney's blog, whitneyinthemotherland.weebly.com. The clouds were thick in some places, with Lion-King-esque beams escaping from thunderheads as the sun sank low to its late afternoon angle. From our perch on the rim, the bowl streched out to our left, and on our right was (at a bit higher than the center of the crater) developed land. These people living near the volcano were not quite as risky as the scrubby plants that popped up all over the crater's black floor. Our professor, who had been to the inside to make geological observations (paleo-anthropologists seem to be well-versed in many disciplines), told us that warthogs and snakes live there, too--animals who rarely drink water.
Our clothes were still wet--jeans still dripping--after a night hanging on the line. The buckets we used for washing and rinsing last night greeted me after I woke this morning and stepped into the tiled entryway that had seen us attempt to clean our clothes. We checked for buckets this morning at Phyllis's house--we will need them as we travel Thursday. When we want a hot shower, hot water must go in the bucket with a sponge. Here, luxury is an electric hot water plate attached to your showerhead. That was how I showered at my host family--it was just a day without water, and I needed my shower. I will be well acquainted with buckets by the end of this year.
We roll out Thursday for placements. We're taking a day longer than expected as we work to ensure our schools we don't come with a bonus gift of H1N1.
Peace of Christ be with you.