Weekend

This Saturday was the first time I've felt sick since I've been here. I woke up in the morning feeling very ill and felt nauseous all day. I ended up napping a lot and working on my homework. I had 8 chapters of Swahili homework to work on so this at least gave me a chance to do that. It thankfully only ended up being a 24 hour illness and I felt nearly 100% on Sunday.

Sunday, I met up with one of the other girls in the program at Prestige Plaza (a large shopping center) to catch a bus downtown. We took a short bus ride into downtown Nairobi to attend mass at Holy Family Basillica. The man on the bus who collects the fare of course tried ripping me off again. He first told me that the fare was 60 KSH (the actual fare is 30 KSH). When I basically called him crazy, he said that it was 40 KSH. When I still refused he finally accepted my 30 KSH. We arrived at the Basillica at 10:45am and the Mass wasn't supposed to begin until 11:30am. The Swahili Mass at 10:30am went long so our Mass didn't start until 11:45am. The church is very large and several hundred people attended Mass. This was much different than the small Protestant service I attended the week before with my host family that was in an event tent with 35 people. They sang a lot more songs than I was used to and the people swayed, clapped and danced a lot as well. Me and the other girl from the program stuck out as 2 of 4 white people in the whole church. Communion was very random and arbitrary - basically, whenever people felt like it was their time to go, they would walk up to the front of church and receive Communion. There were definitely a lot of things that were the exact same as my church at home. I guess it is a universal Catholic thing to only give the sign of peace to the people immediately surrounding you. Church lasted about an hour and a half (3 offertory and 3 Communion songs certainly adds a lot).

After church, we went to Steers near the church which had fast food. I got an overpriced cheeseburger. When we were finished eating, the friend I was with reached for her bag and it was gone! Somehow someone managed to take her bag from between both of our legs under the table. It unfortunately had her Ipod, an expensive rain jacket, her cell phone and some money in it. Thankfully she didn't lose her passport or her ATM card. We reported it to the security guard at the restaurant but he couldn't really do much.

Monday morning before class we all compared out interesting weekend stories. One guy while getting his haircut at a salon had 2 armed men burst in and rob the salon. They grabbed the items from one of his pockets then left. Thankfully, they grabbed the wrong pocket and only took sugarcane from him. His cellphone, wallet and other items were in a different pocket! He said that he feels that the only reason the salon was robbed was because of his presence as a white person. We as white people in Kenya attract a lot of negative attention. Our skin color is viewed as wealthy no matter our actual financial situation. Just by being somewhere, we can attract crime.