Nairobi!

I arrived in Nairobi and now I have another 4 hours layover time. I’m nearing the end of my journey – this will be my last flight (to Lilongwe!), and then I’ll meet up with the rest of my class and take a bus to Mzuzu. I’m expecting these blog posts to be a lot more spread out soon, so I’m taking advantage of having the time to write while I can. I’m really treating this blog as a journal of sorts, so please don’t feel bad if you intended to read all my posts and now are starting to think “jeez, she’s writing a lot and I don’t really care!” I’ll try to highlight the important/ interesting posts or parts of posts. This one you could probably skip the rest, it’s mostly musings.

I think I slept last night? I’m pretty sure that I was woken up for dinner (at 10 PM…my body is so confused about time and meals and sleep). If I did sleep, it was for about an hour (which means I’m reaching about 40 hours with 1 hour of sleep, and won’t get to sleep for at least 12 hours…I think this is the most sleep-deprived I’ve ever been!). After dinner, I couldn’t get back to sleep, unfortunately. But even that short bit helped because I’m feeling a bit more human (I know I’m talking about sleep a lot…I really like sleep and right now in particular it seems important). I’m SUPER ready to take a shower and change my clothes, though…That will be amazing.

So far, the Kenyan airport is more similar to what I’m familiar with than I expected. I knew that a lot of my preconceived notions were probably a result of the stereotyped view of Africa that I was exposed to for a large portion of my life, but it was still a bit of a surprise to see so many familiar things. I know I’m only in an airport for now, but they have M&Ms and a lot of the same alcohol in their duty-free shops! As you may have guessed by now, M&Ms are also important to me ;)

I’m expecting food to show up a fair bit in the blog because I come from a family of people who love food and I’m no different. So I’ll just take a moment to mention that the dessert that came with my dinner on the plane last night was SO GOOD. It was this tiny layered triple chocolate mousse cake. I was seriously considering scoping out the plane to see if I could find any untouched, but that seemed a little desparate. I was glad to have some chocolate, though; yesterday I was talking with a friend about the saying “absence makes the heart grow fonder” and I’ve decided that extends to other organs…namely, the absence of chocolate in my stomach makes my stomach very fond of chocolate. I’m eating M&Ms as I write this because I still have them around from Detroit and it seemed fitting. Plus, when else am I going to be able to eat M&Ms at 7AM and feel like that’s marginally normal?

On the topic of food, I did a bit of googling and discovered that fish is a staple of Malawian cuisine, particularly near Lake Malawi, like Mzuzu. This is a bit concerning to me since I didn’t really start eating fish until a couple years ago and I’m still pretty picky. Realistically, though, it’s just another way in which I’ll be forced outside my comfort zone. I just need to remember to embrace these opportunities rather than dread them!

I had a lot of trouble wording the next part because it’s a touchy topic and I can’t seem to explain myself clearly. I haven’t known a lot of African-Canadians for most of my life; growing up, basically everyone I was exposed to was white or Asian. Since I didn’t get to know people of that race, I still find myself making generalizations at times, which is interminably frustrating to me. I feel like I should be above that. Now that I think about it, I tend to make generalizations about quite a few groups of people (i.e. people in sororities/ frats) even when I know people in those groups who don’t fit the stereotype I have in my mind. That's something I could probably improve on…I guess this will be my first step! I’m hoping this trip will make me more comfortable with a wide variety of different people so I can approach someone I don’t know as a human rather than entering the dialogue with labels and preconceived notions ascribed to that person.

Well, by writing this, I managed to pass almost an hour of my layover…now to kill some time in a pretty empty airport.

Thinking of you all back in Canada! You’re probably asleep right now and I am jealous.

-Jen