Problem with Pictures will try later.

Blog #10

Hello from Kenya! It’s Liz again. Just a brief note about the Marshmallow Challenge… Yesterday after work we met with the 8^th graders in a classroom. Our tools were 18 pieces of uncooked spaghetti, one (stale) marshmallow, and a foot of masking tape. We were split into teams – half Masai, half Groton – and then we had five minutes to build a free-standing structure to hold up the marshmallow as high as possible. If we broke the spaghetti, we got no replacements – the stakes were clearly high. The group with the highest marshmallow wins.

          Some group took the scientific approach – isosceles triangles, cradles for the marshmallow, bases with intensely taped sides, etc. My group went with the “impale the marshmallow and tape it on top of a teepee of spaghetti” approach – and we won! We got to work together with the local 8^th graders, which was really interesting and fun. As our time here is slowly running out, it’s nice to just spend time with kids and work together on something as simple as a marshmallow challenge.

          I miss you guys, see you in 6 days! Enjoy your week alone.

                   Love, Elizabeth

SOPA!!! Marianna here. . .hi mom (and Dad and Michael too since you guys are probably feeling bad that I left you out all my previous blogs. . .woops!). Talia, Rachel, and I just got back this morning from our homestay, which we had been on since Sunday evening. I don’t really want to be speaking for the group, as an experience like staying at a boma with the Masaai Tribe has completely different impacts on different people, but I am pretty sure that everyone had a pretty good time! We arrived at a chief’s boma at around 6:45 in the evening, shared some chai tea (sooo yummy) with our translators and our hosts. Then we had a few hours dancing and singing with all the little children in the boma. It was a lot of fun, but kind of difficult at times when we couldn’t come up with any good songs to sing! The children clapped and snapped a lot of Masaai spirituals, while we searched our arsenal of Disney and sing-a-long songs from our younger years to entertain them. Then after a lovely dinner of rice and cabbage and potato stew, we lay down in an enkaji, a hut, under a mosquito net and fell asleep to the sound of children singing and goats just being silly and baa-ing all over the place.

          The next day we took a morning stroll to some neighboring bomas, but we noticed that many nearby bomas had been abandoned, and were overgrown with weeds and trees. The huts’ roofs had fallen in, and there were no traces of the big, boisterous family that had previously inhabited the houses. It makes perfect sense why they had gone; they can only stay in this place for the dry season, and will move back out into the plains for the wet season. It’s a yearly migration many families make, but something about it made me sad. To build a life from some sticks and some mud, only to leave it behind a few months later is part of what it means to be Masaai, but to me, a New York City kid, it means always moving, never stopping. Maybe it’s because I’ve never liked being in transition (which is obviously why I LOVE being a teenager. . .NOT). Who knows!!! Anyway, after this, we and the kids drew pictures on some construction paper that Rachel had brought, and then retired for the hot hours of the day to our little hut for some reading, relaxing, and card games. Another little walk into the African wilderness brought us to “the swamp,” the watering and grazing location for the bazillion goats that live nearby. It was really lovely to sit on a log watching the herds go by, thinking about the ice cream that awaits back in the US (that’s a hint to all those parents reading this now. Stock up.) It was so surreal to be chilling there talking about Pinkberry and Starbucks! How much more lacking in “sense of place” can you be? However, there were moments when we would just be quiet, taking in the scenery, being reminded that we were in the middle of Kenya. Later, there was more singing, dancing, and sleeping, and now here I am, writing this blog at the dining table before we go back to our afternoon session of work.

          I cannot believe that there is less than a week left before we go home. There still seems to be SO much to do, so many more people to talk to and be friends with, and so little time. I miss everyone at home, but there’s that feeling that something will be left unfinished after we go. Hopefully, we’ll make enough of these last few days so that that weirdness goes away.

                                                                                                          Xoxo

                                                                                                          Marianna

P.S. Mom, no word on the Nosim the goat. Which is. . .like I said. . .just kwerd.