Velcome to ze Nederlandz....

It's about 7am and I arrived in Amsterdam a couple hours ago.  Yesterday I had to kill about 12 hours of layover time in Nairobi before my flight left to arrive here.  And now I only have 5 hours to go before the final flight that will bring me home.  Yay!!!!!!!!!!!!  I am so excited to come home.  I know I haven't been gone for that long, but I miss my life.  I miss all the little things that add up to make it my quirky silly little life: Mike making me laugh, making yummy crazy dinners that always seem to include avocado or guacamole, my dogs, going for runs in the morning, and having my crazy fam over for dinners.

I'm too tired to come up with anything interesting to say although lots of little funny things happened in the past few days.  Maybe once I actually sleep for more than 3 hours, I can form intelligent thoughts again.

There is one funny thing I thought about as I was trying to fall asleep on Wednesday night (my last night in the village).  I remembered the very first night I arrived in the village.  News of a death in the family had also joined along for the ride and people were crying and mourning just as I arrived.  At first, I wasn't sure what to think.  I wondered, "Oh boy, did I take someone's room and now their unhappy about it?  Is someone upset that I'm here?"  I kept pacing back and forth in the dark room trying not to get anxious. And then it clicked..."Ahhh, even better...someone has just passed away and they are receiving the news..." I knew that mourning sound from my mother's Ethiopian culture of mourning when someone dies.  And then I met this young lady who was about my age named Gylian.  She was still a stranger to me at the time, but I could tell her job was to make sure I wasn't alone all the time and I had someone to talk to (if I only knew then how important it would be to have her around to get my work done!)  And then when she asked if she could sleep in the same bed that first night, I thought "you've got to be kidding, right?"  But by the end of the month, it was as though she was my sister or something and we would stay up in bed at night giggling about the funny things that happened that day.  I also learned that she literally acts drunk when she eats chocolate! It was hilarious...

The other thing I remembered about the first night was how nervous I was and I expressed it to myself as frustration (cause I like to act as though I'm tough!).  Everything felt so out of my control.  The village was still so foreign to me and the sounds were, too.  I arrived at night and I had to pee really bad.  I asked Gylian where the bathroom (pit latrine that is) was and she said, "We wait until the morning, yeah?".  I just agreed at the time because it was late and I didn't know her well enough to want to argue that point.  I ended up trying to hold it the entire night and finally around 1am, I ran outside in the dark and peed in some bushes!  I thought, "Wow, great first impression this is gonna make!"  And then I saw beady eyes staring at me while I was peeing.  Of course being a bit dramatic and thinking the worst, I thought it might be a hyena or something, but later I found out it was one of the dogs, Simba.

And when I got back into bed and under the bednet (which was also foreign to me) I kept hearing the sounds of the straw roof snapping when the breeze came in, and what I didn't know at the time was that a cat, Juliette, stayed up on the roof at night scratching at the straw.  I was so freaked out.  I didn't know if there were snakes, spiders, wildlife and if they were dangerous.  Because what I know about my travels to foreign places is that you can never access a situation fully by a local's account.  They are used to whatever is there and don't always see it as something worth noting to a foreigner. For example there are acacia bushes with huge white thorns everywhere in the village and the locals just walk right through them as though it's no big deal.  Don't follow! Trust me...not knowing the thorns were riddled all over the ground, I stepped on my fair share and they are soooo painful. No one mentioned it to me until after I screamed like a little girl. I'm sure they thought, "geeze, this one makes lots of funny noises!"

Back to my first night and the scary sounds of squeezing and snapping...I remembered jumping up every 5 or 10 minutes and putting my headlamp on to see what it was.  I'm still convinced a little person was running around on the floor every night. But it's amazing how if you just stay with something, you adjust to it.

Well, those are my slight incoherent ramblings for the moment.  Now I only have 4 hours to go before I'm on my way back to Boston.  I'm always happy to come back to Massachusetts!