Corruption: Feed the Beast or Fight Back?

It's been awhile since I've updated regularly, I know.  I had family in town visiting and no computer access at home, but I swear I'll be better this month!  Here's another post based on suggestions left by you, my loyal readers.  If anyone else out there on the interwebs want to know more about Kenya, Captain Awesome, or my random musings on different topics leave a comment and I'll do what I can to appease the masses. 

When I saw the suggestion to write about something negative that has happened, how I handled it, and how it's affected my perspective of Nairobi, Kenya, or East Africa on my Request Line post I wasn't sure what I would write about since I had already kind of put myself out there more than I'm used to on my post about the armed robbery that occurred at a house where I was staying. But, alas, Kenyan police handed me the perfect thing to write about this past week.

Day of the African Child

June 16th is the International Day of the African Child.  It began in 1976 in Soweto, South Africa with thousands of black school children taking to the streets to march in protest of the inferior quality of their education and to demand to be taught in their own language.  Hundreds of children were shot down by security forces and in the following two weeks of protests more than 100 were killed and a thousand injured.  To honor the memory of those fallen and to draw attention to the plight of 30 million street children across the continent every June 16th since 1991 has been recognized as Day of the African Child.  The theme for June 16, 2011 is to spread awareness of the dangers street children face, promote the protection of them, and determine effective strategies for child care and protection.

Dating Dos and Don'ts: Why I Don't Date

I was asked recently why I don't date with regular frequency here.  My auto response is that even though I meet a lot of people here I am picky about who I attracted to and the quality of person with whom I want to spend my free time.  However I realized recently this is not the sole reason for my careful choosing of potential dates.

Girls Night In: PJs and Cocktails

Thanks to those of you who posted comments on here or facebook and gave me some inspiration for future blog posts.  Keep 'em comin!  In response to one of the suggestions I received (you are a social butterfly but why not blog about a night in?) here is the first post in my By Request series.

Ameringlish*

After an incident at my office last week, I am now willing to concede that Americans really do speak another language from the UK and former British colonies.  (No gloating, Graham.)  It took me a good ten minutes on Friday to convey to my Kenyan colleagues that I was in need of a band aid.  Not a cloth bandage, but just a simple sticky wrap to put over the blister forming on my toe.  Finally after showing them the offending toe and acting out what I would like to do to it they determined I was looking for an elastoplast.  Elasto-what? According to Wikipedia (the source of most useless knowledge floating in my head) this is a brand name for a sticking plaster or adhesive bandage.  Both generic terms I would never have thought to use to explain the item I needed.  Perhaps I should work on expanding my vocabulary. 

*The name of this post is stolen from the title of my bestie's blog about life as an expat in the UK.  Check it out here.

Request Line is Open

As it was recently pointed out to me by friends at home and abroad, I have been a slacker about keeping this blog up to date.  This has been for a variety of reasons, but I do admit I have neglected to update this blog as regularly as I would like.  Therefore I'm going to (attempt) to write a weekly post based on all of y'alls requests.  I started this blog before I moved 9000 miles away from home to a new country and culture to let my friends and family see what I see while living abroad so I want to know what you are interested in hearing about.  What do you want to know about Nairobi, Kenya, East Africa, or my life in general?  Post a comment and I'll see what I can do. 

Glamping

For those of you in the know, glamping is short for glamorous camping, which is exactly how I spent my weekend.  A friend invited a small group of us to hang out at the ILRI farm.  The estate is located in Kapiti outside of Machakos, about an hour or so outside of Nairobi towards Mombasa.

Dating Dos and Don'ts: Speed Dating 101

A couple of my good friends collaborated on a speed dating event that was hosted at Divino last week.  I tagged along to help out with registration and sanity maintenance.  As guys are by far the flakier gender, many who RSVPed to the event didn't show and we were scrambling to call friends to come partake.  (Clearly it's a terrible hardship to ask single guys to hang out with 15-20 good looking, eligible women on the prowl for which the ratio is skewed in their favor.)

As I wasn't expecting to meet the love of my life there (no disrespect to the guy selection, I'm just extremely picky AND had the opportunity to scope out the options as they registered AND was already friends with 1/3 of the guys in attendance) I was ready to have some fun with these speed conversations.  A few of my friends who came out in support (and the potential for awesome stories) and I came up with some surefire conversation starters in case of duds.  I mean who doesn't bring up unicorns, LARPing, Renaissance fairs, and zombies on a first date?  Hmmm, maybe this is why I don't date that often.... (For those of you non-geeks out there, LARPing is live action role playing and is most commonly affiliated with the Dungeons and Dragons crowd.  And for the record, I have never LARPed.  Which is more than some of those in attendance at this event could claim, you know who you are.)

Dating Dos and Don'ts: Take 2

So I recently read a blog from a woman who said that if a guy who is chatting up a woman has a significant other then they should take the responsibility to tell the chatee within 30 minutes.  As someone who has spent entire evenings having nice conversation with gentlemen who proceed to flirt shamelessly but don't have any follow through I agree this is just the courteous thing to do.  This is not to say that I wouldn't continue having an interesting conversation with said gentleman and am not even saying that it's not ok to be a flirt (as I'm usually attracted to guys who are more outgoing and flirtatious), but I do agree that it's in everyone's best interest to casually mention a girlfriend in the conversation.  It doesn't have to be an awkward, "So, you know, I have a girlfriend" type thing.  It could just be "Oh, yeah I really liked XYZ, I saw/did that/went there with my girlfriend."  I'm certain that the girlfriend at home would greatly appreciate her existence being made known.  As someone who experienced this occurrence rather recently, let's call him Nne Macho, it would have been nice to know that despite his flirtation and nonstop attentions he actually had a girlfriend.  I would have been happy to conversate with this friend of a friend despite this fact, but would appreciate knowing that it had no potential to go anywhere.

The day the rose colored glasses came off

As this blog is intended to be about my life abroad, the good and the bad, I have decided to post about something that happened to me recently.  As everyone who decides to move abroad knows, security is often a issue and of heightened concern.  Nairobi, among many other cities around the world, has a very high crime rate.  Most of this is petty crime (pickpocketing and cell phone theft) but there is also a level of violent crime as well (armed robberies and carjackings).  I was fully aware of this when I decided to live here and am very conscious of day to day security concerns and I take my personal safety very seriously.  (As some of you know, I left a position that required me to move to Juba, Southern Sudan because of a lack of security measures implemented by the organization I was working for, so I am not one to jump into a high risk situations without precautions in place.)