Monday, May 7, 2012

I'm clean! I'm clean! I'm cleeeean!

As many of you may know, this Saturday was Cinco de Mayo (aka my birthday). I celebrated with a beautiful mix of home activities and Kenyan activities. To start the day, I awoke to freshly made chai from my housemate, Andrea. Really most of my birthday went amazingly because of her (shout-out well deserved).  After that, we walked to town to the one of the nicest hotels in Nyeri (though very pretty, don't picture anything too extravagant) where I received my first ever full body massage followed by ordering a hamburger and fries (errr, chips) for lunch. 

After lunch, we shopped around town for ingredients to make a beef stew for dinner for a little get together. We then returned to the Center where I found one of the guys to help me set-up a slip-n-slide for the kids. During this set-up, I was "washed" (a birthday tradition) by about 5 or 6 kids. Washing entails being doused with water for one's birthday. It was probably one of the cutest things in the world as some of the 5 year olds would run up to me with the most mischievous looks on their face you could imagine and throw a margarine tub's worth of water on me.  Already being soaked, I demonstrated the slip-n-slide and a successful activity commenced. 

Later, some of the staff cooked dinner while Andrea and I snuck off to bake the brownies my mom sent. They were A-MAZING! Thanks mom. Back to dinner, a group of us enjoyed dinner together in darkness as the power had gone out due to the rain (nothing new). After enjoying my beef stew, I stepped outside to be "washed" again. This times it was exponentially more cold, but hilarious nonetheless. All in all, it was a Kenyan birthday success.

The following is a video of some of the pictures of the slip-n-slide, dinner, and my late night washing. Enjoy...