Saturday 7 January 2012

Host Family!

While here in Kenya, I lived with a host family.   When the organization I was working for asked me what kind of family I wanted to live with, I told them a pretty well-off family.  I was glad when I was placed with my family.  Many of the other interns I was with thought they were super tough and chose to live in a tin shack more "traditional" housing arrangement and completely regretted it within a week of being in Kenya.  One of the interns begrudgingly came to love her cockroach infested room.  Her room had a window facing a garbage dump (Mombasa obviously does not have zoning laws) and since windows here do not have screens the roaches flew in from there to use her room as a nesting and resting area after spending a hard day flying around the garbage dump scrounging for food.  On several occasions when I met up with her, she had a very exhausted look about her face.  After asking if she was ok, her response would be, "The sound of the roaches flying around kept me up all night!"  After about a month, the cockroaches even had about 50 babies, which she became slightly attached to - her response after my organization volunteered to fumigate her house was "NOOOOOO!!!  They just had BABIES!!!!".  


My awesome host dad, Kenn, posing with his 2 month year old daughter, Talia.  He is from Kisumu and went to college in India and the UK.  He is self-employed in construction and involved in various other projects.  We bonded over the many football matches we went together.


My beautiful host mother, Maureen, posing with her daughter.  She is also an educated professional.  She used to be a pharmacist, but now she works as a pharmaceutical sales rep.  She kept a very organized, well decorated, and clean house.  


Kenn's mother.  She is 76 years-old and lives 5 minutes from Barack Obama's grandmother's house in the outskirts of Kisumu.  I had many interesting conversations with her.  Our typical conversations were something like, "How do you plow your fields in Chicago?" she would ask.  Which I would respond by saying, "We don't plow our fields in Chicago.  We go to supermarkets to get our food."  Followed by a puzzling look on her face and long periods of awkward silence.  


This is our house help, Felicia.  She is a friend of the family's that came to help after Maureen became pregnant.  She just graduated high school and she is working for the family to save money to go to college.  She became like an older sister to me.  Her favorite movie is the recorded live-action play version of "Tyler Perry's Big Happy Family" (it was recently made into a movie starring Isaiah Mustafa, the Old Spice Guy).  Here is the link on Imdb.com:  play version - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1647476/; movie version - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1787759/).  As you can see by the ratings, its an awful awful movie.  We watched this movie as we ate just about every night for a month straight (and sadly, since I was so slow at eating my food with my hands, it took me the entire movie to eat my meal).  Felicia liked to say the actors' lines and sing the songs along with the movie.  She knew the entire movie line by line and after about 2 weeks of watching it every night, I bitterly did too.  My host father watched 2 minutes of the movie once before he had to leave because he couldn't stand it anymore.


 Family photo...everybody says I have my mothers eyes.   


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