Photos of My New Home

Here are some pictures of my new home (thanks, Dad for the camera!). I hope you all enjoy the visual tour of Lusi.

Maize fields near my house.

Kids hanging out near the dirt road by my house.

A View of Lake Victoria from the main road at Owimbi (about 15 minutes walk from my house).

OVCs (orphans and vulnerable children) playing at the Saturday Psycho-Social Support day.

Sign board at my work, outside the office.

My office at Rafiki wa Maendeleo.

The Finance and Admin office at work... you can see the new, fancy choo on the left in the back (see the end of this post for the related story).

My house. It's the perfect size for me :)

My bedroom.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been stepping into my new role at Rafiki wa Maendeleo. I am now supervising 4 departments: Agro-Forestry, Economic Empowerment, Advocacy and Health. There are only 1 to 2 people in each department, but I have been feeling pretty overwhelmed by the transition. Since I am now responsible for signing all their travel plans, money requests, weekly activity plans, activity reports, timecards… etc. I barely have time for my own work it seems. The first week was the hardest since I had to start implementing weekly departmental meetings and getting used to the constant requests for a word here or a signature there. I actually got in a bit of trouble from Finance the first week because I kept changing my signature on the documents… it’s REALLY hard to keep it the same! But as I go along things are getting easier. I am learning from the other managers at the organization and I think I’ll figure out something that works for me. Somehow I need to find a balance between a nice boss and all the yelling and reprimanding that is necessary. The worst part of the past weeks was trying to convince the youth organization submitting reports to us that it wasn’t actually my fault that their forms were incomplete. Yes, I am much stricter than the person who was looking them over in the past, but that doesn’t mean that these things weren’t required all along.

The hardest thing for me about being a supervisor now is that I am 1) younger than most of the people in my departments, 2) I am American, not Kenyan, 3) I am new to the organization and 4) I am a volunteer. It’s not that I don’t think I’m capable of performing well in the position, but it is hard to convince the people around me that I am a good fit for the position. In the end, this will be a fantastic attribute on my resume, so I’m pushing through the rough patch. I know I can do it, and there is always a bit of a rough patch when transitioning into any new job so I feel it’s just par for the course. I am going to be able to learn so much through working with the community and learning how to manage people. The director is planning some leadership and management training for the 3 supervisors coming up soon and I’m excited to get a few more useful tools under my belt for working with people. This will definitely be an exciting year!

The other thing I have to get used to in my new place is the insects and animals. Cows are everywhere (ALL of them have long horns – males and females alike) and they always seem to be staring in a menacing way. Leave alone the fact that a 5 year old can heard a group of 20 down the road without incident… I’m still afraid of them. Snakes. There are so many snakes. I have only actually seen one, but it was a 6ft long black mamba (very poisonous) and it was crawling through the yard when Solomon killed it. Then, the other morning at work my colleague was spit on in the eye by a spitting cobra (also poisonous and can cause blindness). He is ok now, but in the past he was also bitten and these things happened in the shamba (farm area) of our work compound. Yikes. There are huge spiders in my house, ants everywhere (including safari ants – my dreaded nemeses), so many flies, and flying praying mantises. My house is positively overrun by chameleons. They poo on EVERYTHING, but I’m counting my blessings because as far as I know, they aren’t associated with anything dangerous (like rats and the plague). I did have a huge rat living in my house, but I haven’t seen him around for about a month – awesome. Finally, I had a run-in with a swarm of wasps (flesh-eating cannibal wasps – you’re welcome, Dad). At my office there are two different choos (toilets) that you can use. There are some fancy new ones, and some older plastic ones. I’ve been using the older ones because the new ones are built with three different holes inside and I couldn’t figure out where I was supposed to do which business and got overwhelmed. However, since they are more environmentally friendly (they create usable fertilizer out of both things) I figured I should use them. Well… I did. And what happened? I walked in, used it properly without too much confusion and walked out proud… right into a nest of wasps which swarmed around me and gave me about 5 bites between my left arm and leg. Frick! Luckily, we grow aloe plants at work and that took the sting away within a few minutes. Good thing I didn’t embarrass myself by running out of the choo screaming with my arms flailing about. Oh wait, yeah, I did.