Kuuliza si ujinga

I've been at my site for almost a week now. A quick description of my village:

Sometimes I feel like I'm in Montana. Other times I feel like I've just stepped out of a Peace Corps brochure. There are grassy, rolling plains with grazing cattle being herded by small boys. There are mountains in the distance. There are mud huts decorated with white chalk and roofed with thatch, farmers who will deliver you fresh milk in plastic water bottles, donkeys peering in your window. If you request chicken for lunch, a farmer will bring you a live chicken to kill. If you have leftovers from dinner, you store them in a cabinet overnight and boil them before eating them in the morning. Cooking is done with charcoal or kerosene, clothes are washed by hand, water is fetched at one of the faucets outside and carried to houses each morning.

But I haven't stepped back in time five hundred years-the village is modernizing rapidly. Many people have cellphones, which they charge for 300 shillings at a local store. I drank tea in a mud house that had solar-powered light bulbs. Most of the people in the village are Christian, in fact very religious Christians, and there's a Lutheran church and a Catholic mission in the village. There's a computer at the mission as well. No working computers at my school yet, but my headmaster has one that he's trying to run off of solar power. And we do have science labs with equipment and a small library.