We left the orphanage, and spent the night away for the first time in three months. It felt good, I’m not going to lie.
Of course, we only went to another house owned by the orphanage, but it’s a couple of kilometers away so the kids were out of sight. Not quite out of mind, though, as much of the night was spent doing impressions, and referencing all the nutty things they say on a daily basis.
The premise of the evening was that it was “American Night,” something the Kenyans here found endlessly entertaining, though they seemed to support the notion wholeheartedly. My apartment o’ folks—me, Claire, claire’s bro and friend—the missionaries that live here and the two other random volunteers up here for the week had a sleepover, made popcorn and potato salad and sat around playing stupid card games like Spoon. We went to bed early, got up early, and watched REALLY horrible TV that flipped between offensively bad American music videos (poverty neck hillbillies????), entertainingly horrific Kenyan music videos, and unexplained cooking shows about Italian food. What’s sad is that we watched said horrible TV for a few hours at least and felt pretty enlightened by the entire exchange.
We had to come home at some point, though, and coming back to the land of over-annunciated English was actually quite nice. The kids welcomed us like we’d been gone for a year, and it literally took me 20 minutes to wade through everyone’s hands to get to my door. There was much catching up to do…Tabitha’s head medicine was still there, Hannah had new eyedrops to show me, Rhoda and Janix had to discuss their morning run, Chris M. had to outline his recent fall into depressive teenage angst, and there was Walker Texas Ranger to be watched with the little dictator, and the still-not-speaking-to-us-though-he-will-still-hold-our-hand Jimmy Jimmy James, the machine eater.
It is indeed good to be home.
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