Rain (lindsay)

Today it rained almost all day. Usually, a rain storm happens once or twice in a day, but today it was pouring almost all day. We road our bike up to Kwale in the rain, and we walked through Kwale in the rain.

I have a slight allergy to rain, and sometimes I break into hives when rain drops hit my skin. It's strange, but also kind of neat like a science experiment. I took two Benadryl and that made my hives disappear, but now I'm pretty groggy. Forgive me if there are typos or if this post isn't quite as coherent as usual.

Our rainy walk in the mud lead us to the Literacy Center. We were going to meet with Gideon M'betsa (the manager of the office), but he had just left prior to our arrival. He had a family emergency and had to leave. We did manage to buy a tri-lingual dictionary (Chidigo, Kiswahili, and English), so the trip was productive in that sense.

We then went to meet the women from the women's group (the Tuesday group that made the soap last week) at the Pamoja Center. We were given our soap in it's finished state: cured and packaged. We were supposed to meet the women's group to see them perform some traditional Digo dancing and singing, but there was a mix-up with the timing and most of them left before we arrived. Appointments and scheduling are handled so differently here than in the U.S. You learn to roll with it. Flexibility and resilience are pretty crucial skills.

Today's dancing and singing was rescheduled for tomorrow morning instead. It will be a different group of women (people who do this professionally for a living). I'm excited to see this part of the culture and film it.

Tomorrow we will also be visiting the chief again, and he will go with us to meet a medicine man. We will talk with the medicine man about his role in the community and what he does. I am very curious about this because it is a huge part of Digo culture. Rather than fight, people go to their medicine men for advice and assistance. By assistance, I mean that it is common for people to pay their respective medicine men to put curses on the people with whom they are fighting. 

Collin and I were discussing the correlation between power themes and belief in the supernatural. I saw some laundry hanging on a fence to dry today, but it was pouring rain all day. I thought: Wow. To not even be able to control when your clothes will be dry and clean--how powerless you would feel when it rains for days at a time some months.

Likewise, with sickness--when we are mildly ill, it is probable that the medicine we need will be available at our physician's office. It is not usually this way for people in the Digo community. Access to money and medicine is much more limited. How powerless I would have felt if I couldn't have gotten an antibiotic this past week to cure my strep throat.

In a lot of ways, the average person in the Digo community doesn't have control over these types of things. When you can't control your life on a basic level such as having food, health, and dry clothes, it is no wonder that people turn to the supernatural realm for help. Where else do you turn when your resources run out, and you have no other human recourse for help?

Anyway, after our rainy excursion around Kwale, we landed back at Terry's house for a while. We hung out with the infants for a while, and then drove home when the rain lessened. The bike worked well today, so that was great news.

Now we are back at our cottage, and our internet is working as is our electricity. This is also good news. My health has fully returned (thanks for your prayers, emails, and encouragements), and I am excited to make the most of our last week here in Kwale.