THE WORLD AS MY WITNESS

I'm trying to get more pictures of local houses (they're more of huts made with clay dirt and straw) and neighborhoods but I don't want to intrude. It's also a little hard to take pictures on a motorbike. So I guess just more pictures of beaches... Luckily nothing crazy to report here. Life in Kilifi during the election just kept right on going. It didn’t really change much, people still went to the beach, walked around, etc. The only things noticeably different were how the shops were closed, and there was one army truck full of soldiers sitting around bored. The polling centers here were pretty much empty. I think I saw one of the polling workers with his head on his desk? My impression is that the people here are boycotting the vote because their candidate withdrew (see my attempt to explain below). I asked my roommate, whose family is in Nairobi, what it was like in the capitol, and she said it was very tense. No one outside, doors and windows locked. If I unde...

Unrelated thought: I wonder how many ‘first day of work’s I’m going to have until I retire… My roommates and I took a tuk-tuk (a three-wheeled mini motor bus thing, typically good if you’re riding with more than 1 person, if it’s raining or you’re carrying a lot of stuff) to work. Each of them have a tuk-tuk guy and a buta-buta (pronounced boddha-boddha and don't quote me on the spelling; a motorbike, cheaper than tuk-tuk and typically good if you’re riding alone or squeeze another person with you on the motorbike) guy on their phones. If they want to go anywhere, they just call for a ride, and the tuk-tuk/buta-buta will pick them up and take then where ever they want to go. It’s a nice set up since the drivers already know where to go and you build a relationship with them. Like the other day, A called her buta-buta guy to pick her up some water. Like UberEats style. What I see on the way to work on a buta-buta (motorbike) Example of buta-buta next to field of kids pla...

The week before I left, my family had a sunny farewell sendoff barbecue filled with food, laughter and SushiGo! (it’s a card game that you need to play immediately). I couldn’t be more lucky and blessed to have such great family and friends- I am so deeply touched by everyone’s support and prayers. If only the distance wasn’t so big.. but our hearts are bigger. On my way to Kenya, I had a 13 hr flight to Ethiopia. Luckily I had a window seat, and no one sat in the middl. The lady on the aisle seat was reading Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist, which is one of my top favorite books (this was also one of the only three books I brought with me). I was silently freaking out because this book is about fate and destiny, and how if you go after what you truly want, the whole universe conspires with you to make that happen. So maybe this was a basic girl thing of me to be like ohmigosh the universe is sending me this sign!! But I did and it helped cut through the goodbye sadn...

**so let me preface this journey/blog that I don't have good Wi-Fi network / no Wi-Fi at all so excuse any brevity or formatting ugliness** **p.s thanks for reading this and coming along with me** So I've read those stories, as I'm sure most of us have, where a person just ups and quits their 9 to 5 job (though who really works just only 9-5? I wanna know) and goes travel somewhere or does something radically different. My usual reaction is wow good for them for breaking their corporate chains... How fearless to give up a steady paycheck!.. They must have had a nice safety net or something..I cold never do that. Yadda yadda yadda. The point is: I've always thought that story was someone else's narrative, never mine..Until one day it did or at least it became part of mine. Since college started, I knew I wanted to get into international development. Case in point a short bio I wrote around May 2012 for the website of the leadership cohort I was in when I was ...