A little chaos

Today was a very long, challenging day. I'm firing half of my students and have had to restructure the focus of my PAR project to be concerned explicitly with shelter.  I don't know if I mentioned this before, but there is a phrase that goes "Africa wins again." It basically explains every time that something inherently simple becomes an elaborate, complicated, untimely mess. I've had rather incredible success in the last 3 weeks, and as it stands, Africa hasn't beat me yet, but its certainly starting to fight harder. How exhausting...

Aside from that, I went and chilled out for 30 mintues today at a Coffee House in the Ethiopian section of one of the refugee camps.  Coffee House is a slightly misleading term, think more of a tent, some rusted sheet metal walls, some sticky benches and a dirt floor. It was the second time I've had ethiopian coffee since I came to Kenya, and man, its really intense. Its so concentrated that Espresso is quite diluted in comparison. This time it also had a large amount of sugar, it was like drinking a shot of coffee tar syrup.

Not much else to report on. I have some meetings this week and projects to work on. A Sudanese guy that I practice speaking Arabic with named Ibrahim has invited me to his home for lunch on sunday. I'm quite excited, and the best part is that I know my way around one of the camps well enough that I can get there myself.

On another note, I visited a different camp yesterday and was sitting with some young women, drinking really sugary kool-aid with my friend Said. One of the girls jokingly asked if I will take her with me when I return to the States. Intending to maintain the level of humor, I said she will have to marry me first... apparently I need to be a little more careful when it comes to mentioning marriage to women around here. They are certainly ready and willing...it took a lot of talking to diffuse that situation.  It doesn't help that all the men have multiple wives around here.  Lesson learned indeed!