taxi tunes

"I never knew of a morning in Africa when I woke that I was not happy."
- Ernest Hemingway

it should be known that every night when we drive the 6 minutes from the IU house to our hostel the music that is playing in the taxi is downright wonderful. it's typically a love ballad from the mid-90s. last night it was "from this moment" by shania twaine. followed by whitney. i couldn't make this stuff up if i tried. the only thing better than taxi tunes is the karaoke song list.

this morning we went to tumaini (meaning "hope" in swahili) which is an AMPATH funded place for street kids to come on Monday and Wednesdays and play games, eat some food and just be children. a vast majority of the street children here are addicted to huffing glue. you can get half a bottle for less than 10 cents and it gets you high, "makes you brave," and curbs appetite. truthfully, i was dreading going. this is a collection of children that harass you in the street asking for food and money and will follow you for blocks until you get a. pissed and forcefully tell them to leave you alone or b. cave and give them something (read: the latter option is DEFINITELY frowned upon). We learned some slag words (Niaje = what's up?; poa = cool; freshi = fresh) and i perfected the fist pound before meeting up with very poor, sexually active, drug-addicted young teenagers. anyway, they are AWESOME. they giggled at us and talked about us in swahili, but mostly they just played. we played volleyball and soccer and ran around for a few hours. i talked with a street girl who was the toughest chick i have ever met. she was 20, had a 5-year old son, and had already lost a baby. she was turkana from the north (turkana people take out their two bottom center teeth) and came to eldoret to "survive" in the "base." she didn't speak english but i learned that street men and women call themselves survivors and town is referred to as base. they sleep in rolled up carpets at night and men and women sleep separately. they use the nearby river for their washing, bathing, etc. she was shocked by my tattoo and ear piercings, and kept asking if it caused me pain, which i explained it didn't, but maybe it got me some street cred.

in class, we broke into small groups to go over a project and i was talking to another student (also a turkana!) about the bracelet i haphazardly wrapped around my wrist again before i left. the turkana people wear the bracelet too and she offered to re-wrap it for me after class. so we go to the hospital (she works in the lab) and proceed to hide in a backroom for 2 hours (!!) it was the biggest ordeal ever. so sweet she wanted it to be perfect ("it's my first time doing it. i only used to see my grandmother do it.") we had to unwrap the whole thing, straighten it out by pulling it back and forth on the faucet (this obviously required the help of two men), the first time it was too loose, second time is was WAY too tight and my hand turned deep purple and i couldn't feel it and i had a mzungu freak-out moment for sure, the 5th time we GOT IT! then she took me for a mango and a soda at the little kiosk outside of the hospital.

on the walk home i saw one of the younger boys from tumaini. he didn't ask me for money. just gave me a high five and kept walking.