Before you get any news I want to clear up some boring but useful things. Recently I had an extremely confusing conversation with someone from FHI talking in acronyms so I though it might be best to give you a mini dictionary of all the abbreviations I use quite a bit.
MCK: Methodist Church Kenya
MCH: Meru Children’s Home
CCM: Catholic Church Missions (the feeding project is based at CCM Meru Township primary school)
FHI: Food for the Hungry International

Ok now is a bit for my Mum’s benefit. I’m enjoying myself and am very happy here – I don’t miss any of you! So now everyone who knows my parents can stop asking them and my mother can stop jumping behind bushes whenever she sees any of you.

I need to correct myself as last time I tried, and failed, to write two sentences at once. Schools close 2nd December (ish) however Class 8 and Kaaga Girls (secondary school) are already off.

I’m getting a backlog of all the greetings people at this end are telling me to send so please consider yourselves about 100 times by everyone.

Righto! To business. Thus far I’ve been to two carol services, one at Kaaga Girls and the other at Meru Teacher’s College. Apparently length is directly proportional to holiness and these two were very holy. As in over 3 hours holy. A carol service here is much the same as home (apart from the length!). There’s lots of singing, bits of drama, preaching, prayers and lots of dancing. Obviously all the songs aren’t the same, there’s a mix of Swahili and English, (sometimes even in the same song!) and people don’t mind dancing in the aisles, something you don’t see very often in Britain methinks. Listening to people sing ‘Jingle Bells’ when you’re sweating is rather odd. The most random thing about them both was the people who talked to me afterwards. At KG the woman in front turned round and asked for my mobile number. Just that. She wasn’t bothered about my name or anything, only the mobile number. At MTC it was a drunk second year who wanted to be my pen pal and was convinced he’d lived in the US for 2 years.

In between carol services I’ve been cooking sooo much that I really am fed up with cabbage now. If it wasn’t for the fact that I’m supposed to attack it with a very large knife that would be exactly what I want to do. One of the cooks is ill and the other has only just come back from leave so everyone has been busy busy busy in order that we can eat. I had a scary moment the other day when I walked into the kitchen store to find some cabbage. Instead I found a goat’s head staring at me from the shelf. Starting backwards I almost put my own head in its rib cage which was hanging from the ceiling. Nice.

Actually, it’s not just cooks who are scarce – all the staff seem to keep disappearing. A while ago they visited Isiolo then on Monday the place was deserted because they all went to vote. Apparently it takes all day to vote, I’m not sure why. Oranges (No) won so there’s no new constitution and people round here are quite disappointed. Kaaga Methodist was a counting center so church on Sunday was a bit intimidating with security people wandering around with big guns. However, it was pretty peaceful on Monday, I don’t think there was much violence anywhere.

I think that’ll be it for this week as I need to get off the computer.

Siobhan