Video 2

Here is part 2 of our loitokitok tour.

Video 1

This is my first attempt at posting a video from my phone. Please let me know how it turns out!

Christmas, Wadudu Wazimu, and Nairobi

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy Hollidays!
I was was wrong when I said we'd kill a goat for Christmas... we killed two. We actually missed out on the actual slaughtering, but we arrived in time to watch the meat being cut and to eat some of the first meat coming off the grill.

No meat was wasted. Personally I ate the liver, ribs, some leg, and even some intestine blood sausage. The liver and intestine sausage was surprisingly good. Later on they made soup from the blood, goat head, and added bark and roots. I was going to try it but we got a great phone-call from my parents. It was so good to hear word from home!

Throughout the day the kids and moma's hung out in the kitchen and inside the house, while the men (mzee) sat outside roasting meat and drinking. Well.. It starts out mostly roasting, but by nightfall it's mostly drinking. They have this local wine called "muratina" that is brewed from honey and a kenyan beer called "tusker". I tried a little of both and sat out with the men for part of the evening. It was a lot of fun. We discussed a little politics, america, kenya, and even religion. Inside we played card games with the kids and even some hackey-sack. Oh! I haven't mentioned hackey sack. I started playing in the airport on the way to Kenya and i haven't stopped. By the time i return home i'll have another badge to put my hippie belt. ;-)

After the party we returned home in a taxi that was meant to seat 7. We fit 13! It was pretty amazing. Oh and a baby... So 14. We got home around midnight and finished off the day with Mandy loosing her lunch/dinner in the bushes. I suppose that's what happens when you get used to a low meat diet and then eat half a goat. Overall a good christmas though!

In other news... Flies decided to land on our laundry and form cacoons around themselves. See picture above. it's hard to see, but it's the size of a large house fly except it's covered in a white cacoon with the edge of its wings poking out. Our family had no idea what they were, but we found almost 7 hidden on the laundry line. eerie... Oh, and Wadudu means bugs and Wazimu means crazy.

We had a secret santa exchange with the volunteers. The picture above is from the secret santa party a few days after christmas. I received a soccer ball! that'll be a hit with my students.

Things are quickly wrapping up in our pre-service training. We leave loitokitok this Sunday for Nairobi to be sworn in officially and then it's off to lake victoria!

Oh... And lance, i have no idea where to get mosquito nets in the u.s. Maybe online. The good nets here are all dipped in a mild insecticide to deter bugs from hanging out. I think it paralyzes them.

Kiswahili and Electrocution

We passed! We needed to get "intermediate low" on our interview test and we did. Mandy actually got "intermediate mid" which is pretty amazing, considering that after the exam she spent a good 1 hour telling me how she did awful and that she wasn't going to pass... Typical Mandy nerves.
Again there were only 2 people out of our whole group to get the int. Mid and the other person has a bunch of language experience. I think Mandy finally admits she has talents with language.

This is actually kind of old news. We got our results last week and followed them up with practical exams on how to light coal stoves, wash clothes, order food, haggle prices, deal with come-ons, etc. I think everyone did well. It was a pretty fun and relaxing week.

This week we practiced riding the local transport and spent 3 days in Makindu about 4 hours away by bus. I call them busses... But they actually called "matatus" (a.k.a. - death on wheels). they're full size vans which are packed as full as possible and driven like an ambulance in an emergency. there's also got to be a law that matatus must be as old as possible and decorated with as much rap and religous stickers available. Once in nairobi we boarded a matatu with a disco ball, wild colors, and a big screen t.v. in the front blaring american and african rap videos. It was typical rap with the bling and the ladies and the what-not, but to kick it all off the inside and outside of the bus covered with jesus slogan stickers. An odd mish-mash to say the least.

In other news... I got electrocuted in the bathroom yesterday. Many hotels in kenya have hot water in their showers, but by hot water i mean there is a water tank on the roof which is piped into your room and the shower head is equipped with an electric water heater. well... yesterday i decided to get my first hot shower in a month so i turned the heater on. At first it was great, but quickely the water got too hot so i decided to reach up and adjust the setting to lower the heat. The shock traveled down my arm and down my leg, probably into the tiled floor. It wasn't serious, but it was a "shocking" experience. ;)

To end off here is a picture of Mandy with her "leso" made into a head scarf. We were eating at a "sikh temple" which is open to all travelers and all religions. They had great indian food and the food (and rooms) are donation only. Delicous. (In case your curious, the british brought many indians to Kenya to help build the railroad.)

A day in pictures

1 - we wake by alarm every day underneath our mosquito net.
2 - after much grumbling i get dressed and head to the bathroom, which in our case is a hole in the ground. it's actually okay for me. The latrine is vented seperately outside so the actual room has little odor.
3 - after using the "facilities", i head next door (literally) for my morning bucket bath. The house girl (she's awesome) usually has already been up for an hour and has boiled a bunch of water that we dilute to temp.
4 - this is the morning view outside the shower room. You can see our hand washing station and some of the main house.
5 - after cleaning up i head in the house to eat breakfast. Most days that is bread with plum jam and chai/tea. Somedays flat pancakes or eggs.
6 - after breakfast we head up to town for training. it's about a 2km walk up hill, but the scenery is beautiful. Pictured here is brian (from my language group), Mandy, and mt. Kilamanjaro in the background.
7 - we usually get lunch in town as a group and it generally looks like this... Rice, beans, beef, and cabbage. Usually it's good, but it depends who's cooking. This particular meal made me sick... Wrong resteraunt.
8 - usually once a week we head to the "outward bound" facilities towards the mountain for activies. it's a great facility surrounded by forrest and with plenty of cabins.
10 - many times we walk through small farms called "shambas" to get home. it's fun very scenic hike, but one i would only take during the day.
11 - there is no picture 11, because i can't capture the starry night we get. I swear i've never seen this many stars.

Hope you enjoyed the pics, i'll give more pertinent updates later.

Day's Pictures

A few pictures from the day. Me and my headlamp up close and personal. Mt. Kilamanjaro on our way home and a termite flower. The termites come out like locusts when it rains and at night the cuddle to stay warm. They also remove their wings and run away in pairs, sometimes leaving these crazy wing flowers to find in the morning.

Models and Moto

Moto
So... I tried my hand at baking again today. Today i tried to make cookies. I thought of a great idea to simulate an oven. I took a big stew pot and put spoons in the bottom. Then i put a metal plate on top of through spoons and a lid over the pot.

The idea was to put an air gap between the heat and the food. This worked great on the first batch of cookies, but i ran into a big problem the 2nd time. In kiswahili, "moto" means fire. Well... Moto is hot and i was using an aluminum pot. The melting point of aluminum is around 600 C. See the photo below...

Model school
Next week is "model school", where we get to practice teaching a few lessons to real students. We made lesson plans last week and now it's game time. we'll let you know how it goes.

here's also a pic of my brother mike

Saxophone and kiswahili

A few exciting things happened today. First, we had our second language exam today! We do our tests 1 on 1 with native speakers and they gauge our kiswahili language level. The levels are novice low, mid, high, then intermediate low, mid, high, etc.
I felt pretty good this time around. I understood everything, answered rapidly and creatively in what i thought was a good accent, but in the end i got ranked as a novice high. We need to get the next level (intermediate low) to "pass" kiswahili and swear in. I was a bit disapointed i didn't get it, but only 2 people out of the whole group got it. One woman who i heard has experience in africa and another who is... Drum role please... My wifums, the one, the only Mandy.

She rocked on the exam. I hope to join her soon... hopefully.

The other exciting thing is that i finally brought out my saxophone. I got a cheap loner from a friend in midland (thanks larry), but it works okay.
I played a bit for the house girl, Mandy, and the dogs. The dogs are either very big fans of saxophone or they want to kill me when i play. One dog just started howling whenever i played. Regardless i didn't play too long.

Okay, here is a pic of us on our bed. Mandy studying kiswahili (no surprise) and me chillaxing and updating my blog.

If you guys want to hear about something specific or see specific pictures let me know on the comments!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today is turkey day! I'm so pumped. We're all getting together to celebrate, cook turkey, play games, and even do a crude re-enactment of the first thanksgiving for our Kenyan Teachers. I decided to attempt to make brownies for the occasion, but it's going to prove to be a challenge without either cocoa or vanilla. I experimented yesterday using Cadbury Hot Chocolate mix and it turned out pretty good! Now I just have to repeat on a large scale for about 30 people. J

We're also going to play ultimate Frisbee, soccer, and volleyball… in Jeans. We are excited to wear jeans.

Other updates: Mandy is still "rocking" the language scene. So much so that she's getting transferred to a faster paced language group next week. This means that in the mornings Mandy will need to walk to a different house to have morning Kiswahili lessons instead of staying at our house for lessons. I'm still staying at the house with my friend Bryan and our trainer Emily. Our group was pretty awesome, so we're sad to lose Mandy. For me the language is starting to slow down. We've learned most of the high frequency words like "to want, like, need, good, bad" etc so that our improvement isn't as dramatic as before.

I promise… pictures will come. J

Update in Pictures

Habari Zenu Y'all!?
Here are a few pictures from our thanksgiving day extravaganza. FYI - the brownies from hot chocolate worked out even better than expected. Hot chocolate has 2-1 sugar-cocoa and brownies only need 4-1 so the rest was pie.. Or brownies.. Or history.

Picture 1 - the beautiful outward bound facilities

Picture 2 - me and charlie in authentic pilgrim garb ( i also had a musket)

Picture 3 - beau jones

Picture 4 - the native americans

Picture 5 - Mandy, stacu, and Kristiann

Picture 5 - Bryan from my language group

Picture 6 - walking home

Picture 7 - our room is on the right, the left is the kitchen with the house girl harima in the door

Hope you all had a great thanksgiving!

Test

i'm attempting to post a blog from my phone.

Language and Final Posting

Good news today. This morning I finally figured out how to use my cell phone to get internet on my laptop. It involved a USB cable and much fiddling, but it's pretty awesome. The thought of updating the blog from a phone seemed pretty rough.

We got some more good news today. We found out our permanent sites today! Mandy and I will be spending 24 months on the eastern edge of Lake Victoria teaching at an all-girls school. We'll have our own house and nearby access to electricity! It's quite exciting. The school requested that I teach Math and Physics and Mandy to teach Chemistry and Physics, both at a freshman/sophomore level. We're very happy they're not asking us to teach biology. We would not have been the best choice for that.

There is supposed to be a market only 3 km away and several larger cities within a days travel by bus. Over-all we're quite happy. There's even a chance that they'll install electricity at our house during out stay. We're not getting our hopes up though. J

I suppose I should actually tell you about what we're doing for the next month and a half. Well… currently we're living in a mid-sized town near the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro called Oloitokitok. We're here with all the new teaching volunteers getting training in Kiswahili Language, Kenyan Culture, and Teaching. They keep us very busy during the week with 2-4 hrs of language in the morning, 2 hrs of culture, and a few hours of education training every day. The language is intense, but we're learning very fast. Mandy is especially doing well. Our language group is only three people and we get tons of practice and one-on-one attention. It seems like Mandy's brain is like a steel trap for language. I'm doing okay, but my brain sometime acts like a sieve for memorizing things.

We're hoping to reach "proficiency" in Kiswahili within the next few weeks so that we can leave it behind and speak Luo. Our permanent site speaks Luo and we can't wait to get started learning about it. Oh – I should clarify. Learning basic Kiswahili is required as a PCV, but once you reach a minimum level, they'll allow you to start learning a local language. Most Kenya's speak English, Kiswahili, and their local language. I'm sure we could get by on English and Kiswahili, but In order to "fit in" more at our site I want to learn the local language (Luo).

Here as a few pictures from my phone. I'll post more in the next few weeks of our host family and the scenery.

The above picture is our bedroom during training. The beautiful lady is Mandy taking a nap under a mosquito net. The bucket and jugs are for water preparation (we treat our water). And yes, we have lighting J

This is me.

Okay that's all for today. If you want to contact us, email is the fastest. We can also talk on the weekends if we plan it out. Oh, and if you want to send us a Christmas present (hint hint, wink wink) the address is below.

Jon & Mandy Van Regenmorter

Peace Corps Kenya

P.O. Box 698-00621, Nairobi Kenya

Safe and Sound in Kenya

Real quick update -- we're safe and sound in Kenya. Travel went well and we're beginning our training.

I'll write more later!

Heavy Lifting and Vanishing Phones

Staging Begins Tomorrow

It’s Sunday night at 8pm. Tomorrow morning at 2am we have to wake up and drive to Grand Rapids to catch our flight to Philadelphia. We’ll probably only get a few hours or sleep, but I have grand hopes of sleeping on the plane. We’ll see how that goes…

Okay, I should back up and update on our last preparation and mishaps. On Friday we ran several last minute errands before picking up the U-Haul in Bay City and meeting our friends for lunch. After lunch our friends proved their weight in gold by helping us move a 2 bedroom apartment down 2 flights of stairs into the U-haul. (Thank You!) It ended up taking longer than I hoped and rained the whole time. Apparently we own a lot more stuff than I thought we did. We filled the 14’ truck to the brim and had to end up tossing some stuff.

After dinner with our friends we drove through the storm to Holland and slept the night at my Parents house. In the morning we backed the truck up and started moving everything into my brother’s old bedroom. Surprisingly, unpacking the truck and moving it into the bedroom seemed to go pretty quickly. (Thanks Family!) We ended the day by riding to Battle Creek with R.J. and Kim. It was a very production few days.

Now for the mishap… a few hours ago I just checked my backpack for something and noticed that one of the nice cell phones was missing. We tore everything apart but had no luck. In fact, in the process I also noticed we are missing ALL the extra cell phone batteries, the USB sticks, and a phone/computer cable! It was extremely frustration and disappointing. I had a whole strategy on how we would have phones/internet in Kenya without electricity and now there is a big old dent in that plan. We still have one cell phone with a solar charger, but we’ll now have to be careful.

Here’s a few random pictures from out Family Travels

That’s Me, Mandy, Jenna (Niece), and my Uncle Tom’s pit-bull. Actually a very cute dog.

Look at that cute mug… he’s so cute.. oh yea and there’s Jessie too J -- Mandy’s sister.

There’s the other neice Ally and my beautiful wife Mandy. My hair is actually much shorter now.

Testing Out Microsoft Live

Just doing a test to see if I can blog while offline.

FAQ

Ok. I just sent out an email to my entire contact list directing them to this blog, so I figured I should put some more details about our trip here for the curious among us.

Here are the Frequently Asked Questions we've gotten so far.

1.) Where in Kenya will you be going?

• Short Answer: We don't know yet.
• Long Answer: For the first 3 months we'll be receieving training in Loitokitok, Kenya which is near the base of Mt. Kilimanjaro. At the end of training they'll pick a specific location for us based on the current needs and our skillset.

2.) What do you do during training?

• Training will focus on language (Kiswahili), cultural, and education training all to make us more affective teachers at our final post. We'll live with a "host family" during this time to help immerse us in the language/culture.
• The town has electricity, water, and cell phone coverage so I'll be updating the blog and adding picture fairly regularly.

3.) Will you have electricity & water?

• Our final post will most likely be without running and electricity. Some PCV's (Peace Corp Volunteers) do get modern amenities, but I believe the majority don't.
• We're preparing for this by packing solar chargers for cell phone, batteries, solar showers, etc.

4.) How can we contact you in Kenya?

• Email is the best method. Around half of Kenya has cell phone coverage at 900 Mhz. We just bought a quad-band PDA phone that will work in Kenya. We also bought a solar charger that will work with the phone so there is a good chance that we'll be able to check email and "text" people using local SIM cards almost daily.

5.) Is Kenya safe?

• As I understand it, Kenya is one of the more peaceful countries in the region. Peace Corps is also very thorough in picking safe locations for volunteers and ensuring their continued safety.

6.) Can we come and visit you?

• Please do! We can have visitors after 6 months (after April, 2010). We'll also accumulate vacation days and may even have weeks off when the school kids are on vacation. We're planning on traveling around the area on our free time and we'd be happy to have you with us!

7.) What will you be doing?

• Our primary job is to teach Math & Science. We don't have all the details yet, but typically we'll have fellow teachers (Kenyan) and a principal for guidance.
• The main goal is to prepare the students for the national exam. See link for details.
• We're also encouraged to have side projects within the community.

Until next time.

Jon & Mandy

Leaving Dow

I've got to say, it isn't what I expected... leaving Dow that is. I'm not sure what I expected. A mixed response, more silence, maybe a few weird looks. I knew our friends would be positive, but I never expected the random emails, phone calls, and people dropping in to tell me how excited they are for us. It's almost like this is the first good news they've head in a year and we're benefiting from their pent up good nature. I honestly haven't heard a single negative thing.

So yes, tommorow is our last day. I've got a lot of stuff to do. Mandy has been slowly emptying her office over the last week whereas I have not moved a single paper. I'm determined to do usefull work until my last day and then throw everything in the trash/car like a mad-man and drive away.

In case you haven't had a chance to talk to us, we are leaving Dow on Oct. 2nd, flying to Chicago on Nov 2nd, and after a few shots flying to Kenya on Nov 4th. Between now and then will be a lot of moving and traveling to visit family & friends. If you'd like to be on that like list of friends/family we visit shoot me an email or call my cell and we'll try and get there.