hey everybody! i'm back in nairobi visiting my kenya family. everyone's doing well. our house help got fired though because she was leaving the two year old in the house alone during the day and not giing him his lunch. crazy. i leave wednesday and i have a night in london and then i get to sf on thursday. i think. aaaaasee you all soon!

sorry. couldn't get the picturees up. this computer won't even recognize my usb. oh well. i'll try in nairobi and if that doesn't work, i'll post them from the states.

hi guys! sorry its been so long. i'm in arusha now. we had a week on the coast snorkeling and taking classes. it was wonderful and beautiful. i had lots of fun and saw some really cool stuff. now we're camping on the property of the family who owns the safari company which is about 60 km outside arusha. this is my last internet access before we leave. so no more me for four weeks. i'm desperately trying to peice my life together at the last minute. i'm trying to regiter for classes and take care of flight plans all over the world. its hectic. tomorrow we have class and the next day we leave civilization. i'm finally gona get to use my binoculars and my ten time zoom. there's been a misfortunate event with my pictures from the first half of the trip bcause i lent them to my friend so she could put them on her blog and she accidentally deleted them off my mem card. i think there's still a copy of them on the computer she was using though and i'm going to get the girl who owns that computer to upload them as soon as she gets back to a place where she can get onto the internet with her computer. i'mg oing to try to get the other ones up though. we'll see. this isn't a very fast connection. you'll get them all eventually though. don't worry.

anyway, so we went to zanzibar and that was awesome. first we stayed with the muslim families in this tiny town in northern pemba called tumbe for three days. it was a crazy experience. they didn't speak hardly any english. my host family mom didn't speak a word and she would blab at me in swahili and i could hardly understand her because she was missing a lot of teeth and talking really fast. it was hilarious. but we got by. i ate some really yummy fish there. best i've ever had probably. no idea what it was though. zanzibar and pemba are huge exporters of spices, especially cloves, so i got some and hopefully i can smuggle them back to the US. then we met back in zanzibar town and hung out there and finished up our history and islam courses and then we had a week off. i've told you this part. most of the girls went to this little town called nungwi and a few days later just about everybody else showed up too. it was really touristy but beautiful. i made a friend named sele who is really awesome. we met him because he manages a hotel and restaurant and he offers this free cooking class. you pay for the food but its pretty cheap and you hel him make it. the food was amazing. we made curries and spiced rice. and he is the funniest guy. we just talked to him for hours. i have lots of stories from nungwi. but no time to tell them right now.

then we met up with the safari people and they threw us on a couple of dhows and brought us back to the mainland for the coastel biology thingy. they're really nice people. we got to stay right on the beach in these little bandas with no electricity and all that fun stuff. they feed us good food and the staff humor us when we try our swahili on them which is nice.

ok. now i'm going to try and put up some pictures.

hi i only have a minute but i wanted to tell you that i'm sorry i haven't been writing in so long. i'm in zanzibar and so much has happened and i'm having so much fun. but we're finishing up both history courses within the next week so i'm very busy and i'm traveling constantly at the same time. in fact i have to go to the slave market right about now to meet my professor. i am taking lots of pictures and they're awesome. in a week when we finish our classes we have a free week to travel and i'll probably stay here in zanzibar and i'l have lots of time so then i'll put up all my pictures and write more about what's happening. i can't begin to describe all the stuff i'm seeing. gotta go bye.

hi guys.
we're leaving in a few days. so sad. today we had our swahili final. one of two. this was written and the other one is oral but it's at the end of the program. hopefully i did ok. we gave all the teachers and the guard and the maintenance guy presents and took pictures. they're all so nice. i'm going to miss them. Mama's teaching me how to make chapati tonight. i'm thinking of coming back here next summer to do research for my thesis and my family told me i could stay with them if i did. i told them i'd write them into my grant if i get it so they could get compensated. i'm going to miss them. they've been so sweet to me. my mom gave me a kikuyu name. it's wangui. i had really yummy food just now for lunch. i'm bracing myself for not having really good food anymore. i'm told that other than nairobi it's hard to get really good food in kenya. although i had some pretty delicious spiced rice in isiolo. we made friends with the owner of this bar that we go to a lot to study near my house. his name is habel. he's teaching me darts. he might come visit us in the states. he also owns an ajoining butchery and the other night he had the butcher make us this big chunk of grilled goat that was sooo good. ok i gotta go. bye!

pictures! just a few for now i have to go.

cat at the school.
my friend anya. sorry she's sideways.

hey folks. back from our trip to the country. it was pretty amazing. beautiful countryside. we went to embu and my friend sara and i stumbled on a little ngo there so we went inb and talked to the people and got a lot of really interesting info on the challenges to ngo's in the area and what kind of stuff is getting done. we stayed there in a really wacky hotel that looked like the town in edwaqrd scissor hands. then we went to a school that is being built somewhere outside of mehru. they gave us a tour of the campus, and what they're building and we met with some of the students. we played games with them like soccer and frisbee and volleyball and that was fun but then i stopped playing volleyball and got mobbed by a crowd of girls who were nice at first and then they all started grabbing my butt. i'm still not sure why. but it was pretty terrifying. they like to pet my head because my hair is short and they say "smart. very smart." that means you look good in rough terms. then the lower school got out and a whole crowd of little kids came outside and hung out with us. we're like celebrities in these areas because most people have never seen a white person before or maybe they have once. so they crowded around the bus and talked to us and waved at us and held our hands. then when we had to leave they ran after the bus. then we went to ehru to our hotel and the next day we went to a museum, not that interesting, saw a crocodile. i kdon't know how to spell that. mehru wasn't that interesting. from there we went to a town called Isiolo which is virtually at the end of civilization. past that point it's not safe to travel at night without police escorts and aparently there isn't much of a road anymore. isiolo is predominantly muslim and a lot of people on the street were speaking in arabic. in towns outside of nairobi where there are efforts made to keep street kids off the street, there are these kids who have run away from home and they are hungry so they sniff glue to make the hunger go away. so you can imagine when a whole bus full of white people rolls into town all these kids come out and crowd around the bus and put their faces to the window and beg for money. and other people come up with bracelets and carved animals and try to sell them to us.
from mehru we went to a town called nanyuki which is close to mt. kenya. we had a really pretty view of it from the hotel and we all got up in the morning to watch the sun rise behind it. don't worry i have pictures of all this stuff and i'm going to get them up this week sometime. in nanyuki we went to a grave yard where there are people burried from the conflicts that happened here during WWII as well as the mau mau emergency. so much more to tell but i have to leave now so i'll pick it back up in a couple days.

tomorrow we travel to Embu and other places. we get back to nairobi on friday and then we have one more week here before we tqke our swahili exam and leave for mombasa.
i hope my swahili gets good because we're going to be the first lewis and clark group to do homestay in pemba which is near zanzibar. it'll only be three days but it should be interesting because the adults don't speak english like they do here and also because they are muslim. we're going to have to go get approprite clothes. i'm excited for that.
classes are interesting nd we don't have much homework outside swahili so i have nothing at all to complain about. tomorrow i get to take a real shower because we'll be staying in a hotel. i'm pretty excited.
i've been taking trips on sundays to see my family's families. that's realy cool. last weekend we went to a slum on the outside of nairobi called nairobi where my mom's brothers and sisters live. that is a few of them. she has twelve. yesterday we went to see family out in the country which was really neat. i hadn't seen any of the rural parts of kenya. it wasn't that far out but it was very pretty and different than here. i can't explain what it was like to be in their home. what i can say though is that i met my mom's uncle and he asked me where i was from and i said americ and looked at me and said "but you're not fat." my mom's brother asked me if i wanted to be his second wife. i said no thank you.
that's all i have to report right now. i'm saving up my shillings to buy phone so when i do i'll give you the number so that if you wanna pay international rates you can call me.
i'm glad to hear that the texas clan is all safe. i got really freaked out when i saw the pictures of floods on tv and heard blah blah blah houston texas blah blah galveston and couldn't understand what they were saying. ok gotta go. i'll post again either from the road or when i get back.

hello guys! i'm back! sorry i fell off the face of the plnet for a minute. couldn't get to internet. the power goes out every couple hours here which always seems to be when i get out of class.
i'm having a wonderful time. i'm living with my home stay family now and they're awesome. i have a mom and a dad named agnes and john and a little sister who's 9 named tetra and a little brother who's 2 named ryan and a house help named gentrix. i take showers out of a bucket. i love it here. no one is in a hurry. everything just happens when it happens. swahili is coming along very fast but well. we went to the market today to practice bargaining. i hven't been able to take hardly any pictures yet because most places i would want to take a picture of i wouldn't dare take out my camera and flash it around. next time i go to internet i will try to bring my usb cord so i can put something up though. in a few weeks we go to mombasa. i'm really excited but i will be sad to leave my family. they are so sweat to me. they make me eat so much food.
when we walk down the street children see us and say wazungu hawayou? wazungu means white people. today we went to a museum and three of us got trapped in a huge crowd of children who were just staring at us and following us around. we got really uncomfortable and practically ran out of the room all red in the face.
anyway i'm having tons of fun. i love it here. don't be surprised if you never see me again. just kidding. ok i'll write again soon.

I'm in Nairobi now. We're staying at a place called methodist guest house and in a couple days we will meet our homestay families. it's pretty nice here. big pool, three meals a day. they're really nice to us. there are guards standing by the dorr to the rooms all the time. we had our first swahili class today. we do three hours of it everyday. and i'm about to go to history after this. flying here took about three days. i went into nairobi yesterday with some other kids and its sooo different than any other city i've ever been to. there are casinos all over. people drive on theleft side of the road but all the cars are uilt with the steering wheel on different sides. people stand on the sidewalk and offer you safaris when ou walk by. i had my first tusker. that's the main beer here. it was nothing too special but good. not much alse to report. its really hot when the sun comes out but as soon as it goes behind a cloud it's way colder and you have to put on a sweatshirt. no pictures worth posting yet but i'll put some up as soon as i get some good ones.

hi guys. i leave in a couple hours but i just received word that one of the girls who's going on my trip set up a flickr account so we can all put photos up. so if you're not getting enough here, you can click on this link and see more from other people. ok bye!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenyatanzania2008/

hello. So I'm going to Africa and I set up this blog so that when i'm there I can put up little updates (or pictures if I can get my hands on a camera) instead of trying to tell everyone about my trip individually. So if you want I guess you can subscribe to the blog and it'll let you know when I put stuff up i think. But otherwise you can just check it when you're bored. I leave the 31st so if I stop calling you back around then that's why. K bye!