Long Time No Post!

It’s been awhile! Whenever I wanted to make a blog post over the past few days, the wifi has not been working. And whenever the wifi has been working, I just wanted to watch emotional X Factor UK videos and cry about it #myhobbies. So this will just be a mess of random thoughts, mostly about orientation and classes!

• Orientation was INCREDIBLE! It feels like it was forever ago! It was a smorgasbord of sight-seeing, learning and eating.
  

  Insert cheesy rendition of “On Top of the World” by Imagine Dragons

  Oh and the eating. We went out to such nice restaurants and on two separate occasions I had the opportunity to eat with my internship partner at Seeds of Peace Africa and my professors. I almost screwed up talking to my internship partner, because the conversation at our table (there were three others) got shifted to queer issues and of course I was like “BOOM! THIS IS MY JAM YO!” So I talked and talked and talked about queer issues/history/etc. She was so nice and was just nodding her head, but the man to my right, who represented an organization I wasn’t interning for, didn’t seem to happy with the conversation. He started saying things like how gay people can’t reproduce blah blah blah. But it did teach me that I do need to pick my battles. I also learned some survival Swahili, including “mzungu” which basically means “white people.” My go-to response for when I’m called a “mzungu” by a stranger is, “Wapi Mzungu?!” as I look wildly around, which loosely translates to “Where is the white person?!”

• Speaking of Swahili, my Swahili class is going great! I’ll create a separate post with some of the things I’ve learned in that class so far. My other classes are going great too! I’m taking Epidemiology, Community Health, a class on Kenyan Culture, and Environmental Health. Our professors are normally teaching much more educated students, but it is just AU students being taught by these highly educated and established professors. One of our professors had to switch his class to another day because he needed to meet with the first lady of Kenya. Casual. I’ve only run into minor issues with the classes so far. One was in our epidemiology class where some translation issues led to a whole lot of confusion. And another was in another class where the professor made a racist remark involving Chinese people and dogs and nobody knew how to react. After talking to Frances, our professor for our culture class and a member of the AU Abroad team in Kenya, I learned that I don’t have to feel uncomfortable about speaking up in those situations. Being at the University of Nairobi is really great, and they have this cheap and delicious cafe place right outside of our classroom.

I think that’s it for this post, but I’ll be making a bunch more in a sec! STAY TUNED.

The song of the post is “SOS” by Rihanna