You Sound a little Twangy!

Today was the 3rd day of Ki-Swahili and it is going fairly well! The language has a lot of patterns and the same alphabet. Today I was trying to say "ninajifunza chuo kikuuu cha Minnesota" (I study at the U of M), and my professor started laughing and said I have a very twangy accent! I'm the only North Dakotan on the trip, and most of the group thinks it's very apparent in my "O"s and "Ah"s.

It's nice getting into the routine of school and figuring out the area a bit. I have about a 30 minute walk to school each day on paths of red dirt covered with rocks and holes in the ground and garabage everywhere. I walk with about 5 other girls who live in my neighborhood. When the sun is out - it's very very hot! But when the clouds are covering the sun, it gets chilly - very unpredictable weather.

Yesterday, our group of 19 girls and 4 boys went to a lecture on democracy and Kenya's new constitution that was passed about a month ago. The lecture was given my Madeleine Albright, a former US Secretary of State who was pretty funny and witty, and Tom Daschle, a former senator from SD. Someone from the audience asked Madeleine how to help women in Kenya gain rights, and she said that women need to support each other. She said that "there's a special place in hell for women who don't help out other women!" Our professors keep telling us how lucky we are to be in Kenya to experience the changes that will hopefully take place because of the constitution. In the past, there has been a lot of corruption in the government with people in power favoring their own tribes. The corruption is visable to me in the security. Police are not to be trusted because many have other motives or are just posing as the police. We were trained to always ask a police person to take us to the police station to make sure the person is a real police if we ever interact with one.

I found out that I will be in Mombassa, which is on the coast, for my internship in 6 weeks. I'll be working with an organization called SMEP, which is Christian based micro-finance institution that provides small loans for groups of people. I don't know much more than that but will be finding out in the next few weeks!

Other than missing friends/family back home and wanting to go to a Twins basebeall game and a Gophers football game, everything is going very well. The other MSID students are great and we're all in the same boat - learning how to live in Kenya as a white "Mzzungu" - a slang word used by people here to describe a white person who they think has money.

I hope everyone's doing well at home! Can't wait to see you all in December when I'm all tan and you're not since it's winter!!!