Day 26: Lakers!

From left to right: Kendi (Pastor's cousin), Dylan, and Pastor

Our lunch at Meru. Total=$4

Today, Pastor Mwiti returned from Nairobi and decided to take Dylan and me to Meru, the largest town around. So we get into a matatu (a Kenyan minivan that averages 20 passengers when it really should only hold 14) and enjoy a sweaty, uncomfortable hour long ride to Meru. It wouldn't have been that bad of a ride, except my contacts started becoming uncomfortable during the ride, leaving me squinting and often using only one eye to see. We crossed the equator which was pretty anticlimactic.

Once we get to Meru, Dylan and I decided to go to an internet cafe, because we haven't had any access to the outside world for a while. So what's the first thing I do when I finally get my hands on a computer? That's right: I check to see if the L.A. Lakers won the NBA championship and sure enough, I get the good news 2 weeks after the fact. I also go through my email and find some words of encouragement from some friends (a lot of people also sent me emails telling me that the Lakers won haha) and I even found out that Audrey Chau and Sarah Chi made it safely to Manila for the Global Urban Trek. While it was really cool to feel slightly connected to America and the outside world, I felt really distant. Everything I read and did on the internet just felt really disconnected. There I was sitting in a slightly ghetto internet cafe with my contacts hurting, reading about how the Lakers won 2 weeks after the NBA Finals ended and how people at home were doing this or that.

During our time in Meru, Pastor, Dylan, and I ate out ($4 for a complete meal for all 3 of us), visited a museum, and paid a visit to Pastor's cousin and her business. It was a pretty long day and we got back to Weru around 9-ish. For me, it was sort of a depressing day. I just felt really out of it the whole time I was in Meru, partially because my eyes were killing me and partly because while Meru is nicer and bigger than Weru, it's no metropolitan area and it didn't even have the homely feel of Weru.

And as always, going on the internet and learning about what's going on at home or with my friends was a strange, almost depressing experience. While it was nice to find out the Lakers won, to read encouraging emails, etc., I realized how far I was from home and that it would be weeks until I saw those whom I loved again. For now, I just had to appreciate being in Kenya, with a good friend in Dylan and sharing lives with a man of God like Pastor Mwiti. They were my family in moments like these.