Wie Bitte?
Oh, it’s so cute. She sometimes takes a little pack of mayonnaise, and she’ll squirt it in her mouth all over, and then she’ll take an egg and kind of... Mmmm! She calls it a “mayonegg.” Are you okay?
Search
Find me on...
Posts I like
-
All My Friends Are Dead!
I actually saw this book in a shop last week. So morbid! (&& silly)
-
Play“Shades”
This new Dirty Money / Diddy stuff is way more interesting & effective & actually-fairly-art-y to me than...
-
I Can't Let Go
ATTENTION MUSIC CONSUMERS: It has come to my attention that a new version of Annie’s album DON’T STOP has begun circulating...
-
Check memo
-
Play
Full grown cornfields are everywhere! I suppose they have been for a couple weeks… (Taken with Instagram)
And I will be going to…
Kenya! I don’t think this could have worked out better. For those of you who don’t know (probably most of you) I went to Kenya 2 years ago (I actually left the country literally 2 weeks before the 2007 elections). I loved it. Granted, I spent most of my time in the middle of the bush with a bunch of other white people. However, I thoroughly enjoyed the interactions I did have with Kenyans and found the local culture to be fascinating (the abundance of wildlife and beautiful vegetation helped too).
So what does this mean? It means a lot of things. First and foremost I’m leaving the country for 2 years. But isn’t that scary? Yes. And no. It’s one of those mixed feeling type ordeals. What it means in the immediate future is that I have about 4 weeks to prepare myself for the coming 27 months in Kenya.
My future adventures in Kenya might include, but are not limited to:
- No running water or electricity. But how will I survive? Who knows, but it’ll be fine. If I’m super lucky (which is possible in Kenya) I’ll have both and internet. I’ll have my own Bluth mini mansion in Africa! (AD anyone?). But, if I somehow end up with none of the nice amenities I’m used to, no big deal. I’ll figure it out. (Can you say solar shower?)
- Learning a new language. It would appear that learning Kiswahili is my destiny. Fortunately, I’ve kind of been exposed to it before.
- Learning how to teach. What? Megan… teaching? Who ever though they’d see that day come? Not me. But it’ll be okay. I’ll do my best to educate as many people as I can. Unfortunately my job description implies that I will have to teach not only chemistry, but math, biology, and physics as well. These kids might not learn anything from me.
- A whole new wardrobe. What? No jeans? No shorts? No skirts or dresses above my knees? Uh oh. I might have to brave the mall…
- Last, but certainly not least, diseases. Let’s take a look at the list of potential diseases waiting for me in Kenya (according to Peace Corps): malaria, Rift Valley fever, tick-borne typhus and dengue fever, schistosomiasis (or bilharziasis), intestinal worms, giardiasis, amobiasis, typhoid fever, hep A, B, and E, cholera, HIV/AIDS, rabies, and snake bites. I haven’t even heard of some of those, but the ones I do know sound like an excellent time. Let’s try to avoid those, okay?
Okay, so there we have it. I’m off to Kenya to experience one or all of the things listed above and more. Between now and when I leave I have a lot of prepping to do, which I’ll probably tell you all about. Til then!
P.S. The name stays… for now. Hakuna Matata means ‘no worries’ in Kiswahili and was such long before the Lion King ever happened.
P.P.S. I think I’m going to move this over to WordPress (http://megweill.wordpress.com) for a couple of reasons, namely I have more control over how it looks and I made the stupid mistake of tacking this blog onto my existing one making the whole ordeal confusing. For now I’m going to continue to update both, but we’ll ese what happens when I leave.
The Very Best (feat. Ezra Koenig) - Warm Heart of Africa
i love this song so much. and the video is pretty sweet.
Wookiee The Chew: Winnie The Pooh Retold With Star Wars Characters
this is absolutely adorable.
I’m going to Africa!
soooo I found out yesterday that I am 100% going to Africa, and not even in November… I’m leaving in October! Whoa, almost no time to prepare. And I still don’t know where exactly I’m going. I’ll find that out later this week (hopefully). Anyhow, I went ahead and prematurely created a blog for it (which I’ve prematurely posted in). It can be found here. Follow me!
Interesting reflections from a vegetarian living in Africa:
…When I got to Senegal, I decided to try life on the Planet Carnivore again, to put the pause on my vegetarianism so that I could live - -and eat — like the Senegalese. I wish I could say the journey was dramatic, but it turns out eating meat is a lot like eating anything else. Bite. Chew. Swallow. Repeat. And whatever qualms I had about where my food was coming from were absolved the day I came home from school to find a blasé-looking sheep munching a mound of grass outside my house. Four hours later, he was dinner. The abrupt nearness of the process was oddly comforting.
[…]
…When we were eating, things were much simpler. My appetite could convey what my mouth constantly stumbled over: how grateful I was for the people who had welcomed me, for the kindness with which they had treated me and the magnanimous generosity they were endlessly displaying. And so I ate. And ate. And ate. Grilled fish and red rice. Beef with thick peanut sauce. Lamb and spiced couscous. Until it all started to taste comfortable, even familiar.
[..]
In the U.S. I was vegetarian because I could be, because food was an on-demand commodity in my life and I lived with the knowledge that for the most part I could eat what I wanted when I wanted — and stop eating whatever I decided I didn’t want. But … I remembered that for most people, that particular luxury does not exist.
[…]
[After being] back in the U.S., and I had once again flipped off the meat-eating switch. But being vegetarian felt less ridiculous when it came weighted with the knowledge of exactly what it was: a choice. Vegetarianism wasn’t a matter of absolutely or an absolutely not. It is just the way I preferred to eat, a preference for which I tried to remember to say, not to Allah or anyone else in particular, but just the universe around me, thank you, thank you, thank you.
very very interesting. i highly recommend you click on the link and read the full article.
