October already?!?!

Today was my first day of volunteering. I will be working with an organization called Panidpieri, which is actually the name of one of the slums in Kisumu. Their website is www.pandipieri.org. They are a pretty well known organization here and are highly regarded. They have three programs: a street children rehabilitation program, health services program and an education program. I will mostly be working with the street kids, but for the next few weeks I will actually be able to experience all of their projects. Next week I will be helping with a different health project each day. Some of the projects include educating mothers on balanced diets for their babies, home visits for HIV positive patients and terminally ill patients, VCT (Voluntary Counseling and Testing) for HIV, and health education programs for youth involving theater. I am really excited to experience the variety of services Pandipieri offers. This week I am involved in the education program. As a part of the rehabilitation and reintegration of the street children, they have an informal school that children attend during the day that will help them get back on track for school when they are reintegrated. Basically what the organization does it find kids, mostly boys age 8-15, who are living on the streets and they bring them in to the center. During a 3 to 4 month process they try to find out where the child is from, why they left home, and make contact with their family and attempt to reintegrate the child back into their family and community. If this is not possible, they have vocational training for kids and also they send some kids to boarding schools to continue their education depending on heir age. There are about 30 boys and 10 girls at the center who live and go to school there. They have a soccer team which participates in the league in town. So I mostly just observed in the classroom today. Tomorrow, they asked if I would teach the English lesson, the drawing lesson and anything else that I wanted haha. So we'll see how that goes. Like I said it's an informal school so it's much more relaxed than the public primary schools. So that is what I will be doing with my time here. This won't be a full time thing because I would like to help out at KYFA, the youth soccer association I worked with last time I was here.

Otherwise, my accommodations are good. No running water, but bucket showers work well. I even washed the dishes the other day which took me an hour and with running water would have taken maybe 15 minutes. I bought a fridge and a microwave... so I'm not exactly roughing it. I even went running yesterday morning. It was quite amusing because not only am I white, but I'm a girl and I was running, which is pretty unusual here so I got even more looks than usual. I also have cable where I'm staying, which means we have 12 channels instead of 3... but one of them in FOX Sports so I'm able to watch American sports wahooooo. I watched the UNC Women's soccer team play on Friday and I watched NFL football last night... pretty sweet. The food is good. Lots of rice and french fries and good fruit. Needless to say, I have not had chocolate in 2 weeks!

I am asked about Obama probably 6-7 times a day because everyone here thinks he is their brother because his father was a Luo man from this area. Every store sells t-shirts with his face on it and you can buy DVD's of his speeches and photo montages of him set to music.... they are obsessed.

Keep me updated on all American news. I wish I had the patience to keep up to date more from the internet, but not having instant high-speed internet is unbelievably frustrating. More to come soon!!!