You Milk Like a Real Kikuyu!

I spent the weekend visiting Karanja's parents at their farm just at the base of the Aberdare mountains. It was a really cute little house, made of bricks, but with a few wooden sheds around it, then surrounded by vast fields of maize, beautiful colourful flowers, tall trees, and just generally vivid green weeds. Karanja's parents were very old and spoke mainly Kikuyu (their tribal language of which I know one greeting and the phrase for 'come here'), but were very friendly and loved feeding us and praying for our general wellbeing.

Whilst we were there, everyone (minus Amy and I who hid inside) killed a sheep as a sacrifice for Nick, who has had a lot of bad luck recently with bad men mugging him and holding machetes to his throat, as Karanja believed that if a sheep was killed and then a very entertaining ceremony undertaken, then the bad luck would go away. Nick was therefore sat on a little stool, had sheep's blood smeared on his cheeks, drank some sheep's blood, was danced around by a man who must have been clinically insane (he had crazy sticking out hair and enormous wide eyes) who dangled the entire sheep stomach in Nick's face and then proceeded to scatter the grass from the stomach around Nick. The whole ritual was then summed up by Nick downing a glass of sausage-tree-wine, this really strange stuff that comes from trees and is highly alcoholic. We half thought the entire thing was made up to make Nick look like a complete idiot, but on accusing Karanja of this, he protested "he's a witchdoctor! I would not make this up!"

I also milked a cow whilst I was there and was very proud to get lots of milk out of it very quickly, and be told that I milked 'like a real kikuyu' :) We went to a local pub in the evening, which was fun but had disgusting toilets that you could occasionally smell from the pub , and we encountered a man who told us ''I am made in Kenya" and started taking his shirt off in joy at meeting us. Wahey.

The next day we went for a long walk through a beautiful forest which reminded me a lot of one near the farm in Devon (you don't picture Kenya like that but it is sometimes), meeting a chameleon along the way,seeing some monkeys and collecting lots of enormous wildflowers. It was a really nice, relaxed, sunny weekend and we spent lots of time just sitting on the grass and talking, with random members of Karanja's family just milling around and relaxing with us.

On Monday I told my class when I would be leaving, which is the worst thing I've had to do here. They previously had no idea when I'd be going, and although I was glad to chat to them about it because they were able to ask lots of questions and I was able to explain to them why I had to leave, it was SO sad. When I told them the date of my last day, they all just stared at me in disbelief. They all fake-cried when I said I wanted to talk to them about it, but by the end quite a few of them were actually crying. It was horrible.

Tuesday was a happy day. I did a silly activity with them where I drew cartoons of people in the class, saying various stupid things, and got them to write what the people were saying as a practice of speech marks, and they found it hilarious. One of the things I drew was Miriam, the other class teacher, who I'm good friends with, saying "no, I will not dance for you!" and the class replying "dance, teacher!" because they're always asking us to dance, and this led into an enormous dancing session with them all singing in kikuyu, Miriam and I dressed in multi-coloured cloths, and laughing and dancing with them all. It was so much fun. I love them.