A mix of emotions (and pictures)

My host family on Easter!! Well, most of them anyway. This is outside our house in the compound.
The beautiful beach at Lamu island (from the post a few weeks ago).

The sun setting at Lamu island (Mom and Dad, I was walking through the sand barefoot on my cell phone with you guys when I took this picture... remember??)

The beach on the northern coast of Mombasa on Easter day.

My bedroom! And blue mosquito net, that's less than perfect, and the sheet that never comes out from under me thanks to the heat. Unfortunately this picture doesn't quite do it justice... you can't see the cockroaches and 5-inch long milipedes. Really though, I'm gonna miss this room. Especially when I go back to sharing with 4 people, including two kids, in Nairobi...

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Aside from the fact that I want to break this computer right now because I've spent about an hour trying to upload pictures to the blog and it's still not working (gotta love technology in Kenya), this week has been a crazy mix of emotions. Here's yesterday morning for example. I wake up at 6:30 a.m., an hour before my alarm, and can't go back to sleep because I'm thinking about all the things I need to do and people I need to see and gifts I need to buy and errands I need to run and papers I need to write before I move back to Nairobi on Saturday. I eventually just get up decide to get an early matatu into town to get a start on it all. Then in the matatu I start thinking about how I don't want to leave my family and my village and Mombasa and even that dirty, sweaty matatu because I love my life here right now, and once I leave it will never be like this again. But then when I get off the matatu, I realize there's a brand new giant hole in the sole of one of my flip flops (which I've worn exactly every single day since arriving on the coast), so I'm going to have to add that to the list, which is continually getting longer. At lunch break I grab a matatu to the market near north coast to try to get a new pair of sandals, which was a huge wrong turn on my emotional rollercoaster. I don't know if I've written about this before, but these are the things I won't miss about Kenya:

1. Getting marriage proposals and "I love you baby"s from complete strangers at least every other day.

2. Having to hide my phone in matatus so that when the guy next to me asks for my contacts I can say I don't have a phone.

3. Hearing "hey mzungu (white person)" or "jambo mzungu" from about every other person on the street in Mombasa.

4. Having to know exactly how much everything costs or should cost beforehand so that when they tell me something's 400 shillings, and it's really supposed to be 50 shillings, I know they're giving me a mzungu price.

5. The old man who has kids my parents age who waits for me on the street outside of my internship and tries to give me presents and take my picture and take me home with him.

Now, this is just what I won't miss about a normal day. Going to the market, alone, as a blonde white girl is not good when your patience and emotional energy is already running low. When guys are literally grabbing your arms, pulling you to look at their items, shouting "mzungu" and "hey baby" at you from all directions, you better be ready to hold your ground. After about 20 minutes of that, I quickly realized this was not my day for bargaining. I gave in, took a matatu back near work, and bought a pair of sandals for twice the price at a shoe superstore.

But that's not the end of the story...

For the past week I've been dreading going back to Nairobi. The city in general is more dangerous, more fast-pace, more stressful, more dirty, more over-populated, and on top of that I have about 25 pages of papers to write and research for when I get back. Plus two exams.

But then I met up with two of my friends from the program for lunch, and before we know it we're talking about going to our old hang out in Nairobi when we get back, and sleeping in Carolyn's host family's soft beds (with real mattresses, not foam!), and having running water, and faster Internet, and seeing my friend Rachel again who's been across the country, and starting our traveling journey... and suddenly I'm excited to go back to Nairobi! But I don't want to leave here! But I can't stand the "mzungu, I love you mzungu" here! But I don't wanna leave life with my host family! But I have 25 pages to write and two exams to study for and no computer! Ahhhhh!

Kinda get the picture?

Anyways, Mama's taking me to the bus station Saturday morning at 10 a.m. and shipping me of to Nairobi whether I like it or not, so there's no need putting too much thought into deciding how I feel about it. The good news is, because my other two friends on the coast have been experiencing similar bipolar episodes lately, we've unanimously decided that our 28-day journey next month will include at least a couple days back here in Mombasa. So this isn't goodbye for good, Mombasa. Just goodbye for now.