It seems like there have been holidays left and right over the past couple of months: Kenyatta Day, Moi Day, Idd, the Indian holiday Duwali (which we’ve been hearing fireworks for, during the last week), Halloween, and the election (which I feel like will basically be a holiday here- with people probably going crazy either way. Halloween was pretty anti-climatic, because everyone was exhausted by Friday night, but the rest of the weekend was very relaxing.

On Saturday, I went to the Maasai Market with my roommate Justine, and then we went to Kibera, the slum where she works. It was perfect weather and it’s actually a really nice place to walk around, because there’s always so much going on and it feels much more like a community than the rest of the city.

Anyways, Justine has been working with a women’s group in Kibera, trying to help them get their accounts together, so I was going to go with her to meet them. (They have a merry-go-round system, where all the women put a little money in each week which goes to one person, as well as a doll-making business— but they’ve been running into some challenges with their book-keeping.) It turned out the women’s group wasn’t meeting that day, but there was a parents’ meeting at the school which we got to sit in on instead, which was also very cool, since we would never normally have any reason to go to something like that.

This school that we were at literally has holes in all the roofs, and struggles to pay a couple of dollars a day for firewood and food for the kids for lunch. There used to be school fees that covered all those expenses but they got rid of them altogether, because some kids who weren’t able to afford to pay anything weren’t going to school at all. So now, it’s this women’s group, and a share from their merry-go-round that is completely supporting the school.

Sunday morning, I went to this amazing modern art gallery called Ramoma, because I need set up an interview with someone there for my NGO paper. It’s in this very Indian neighborhood called Parklands, with tons of Sari shops and Indian food places everywhere. It’s kind of like India in the middle of Kenya and it’s very bizarre to walk around there because there are virtually no Kenyans anywhere. (There's a huge rift between Indians and Kenyans here, because the Indians supposedly own a lot of the businesses in Nairobi, and have a reputation for not treating their Kenyan workers very well.)