day in the life

So it’s about ten o’clock on a Thursday night and I’m about ready to crawl into bed. All I did today was go to class, but seriously life here’s exhausting. Just to get to USIU, we have a 20 minute trek to the center of Westlands, where we are supposed to bargain for fair Matatu prices with our vast knowledge of Swahili- all at the crack of dawn. From there we have to forage for seats on a USIU bus, which takes anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours to get to school, depending on the “jams”. (Although we thought the jams were pretty ridiculous at first, we’ve quickly learned that the longer they are, the longer our morning nap can be.)

Classes at USIU are pretty much a joke. In Fundamentals of Photography, our professor announced today that the board wanted to switch the course to a class on digital photography- mid-semester. (Keep in mind, this is after he insisted that every student go out and buy a manual SLR camera, and regardless of the fact that they have yet to make their photo lab digital). And I won’t even go into International Organizations, except to say that I’m going to be super good at regurgitating definitions of regimes by the time that class is over. Thank God for Swahili, which is actually interesting and entertaining and useful. Who knew classes could actually be enjoyable?

We don’t get home from Swahili till like 9- which for some reason seems like an incredibly long day. But we actually got our act together and cooked some fabulous spinach sauce and rice for dinner. Although we’ve basically been living off of cereal and peanut butter and jelly for breakfast and lunch everyday since we’ve been here (I’m talking five loaves of bread and two jars peanut butter a week for the five of us), we do actually cook real food for dinner. In fact, the first week we were back in Nairobi, some of our Kenyan friends came over and helped us cook chipati (this friend tortilla like-thing), ugali (this spongy stuff made out of maize), fish, lentils, beef stew and I don’t even know what else. And it was actually surprisingly good, considering the fact that we made it.

Sooo- I was thinking I was going to have so much free time this semester, but I think between commuting, classes, my internship, eating, and sleeping whenever possible, our schedule’s actually pretty full already. Not that it isn’t a good time too. On Tuesday night we went to this club K1 for jazz night, which was super fun and a good break from everything. Not gunna lie- by the end of my first day at my internship Wednesday, running on four hours of sleep, I was pretty exhausted. But I guess you’re only 20 and in Kenya once, right?