Wednesday, 6/24/2009 Noon.

I am staying with a family of 5. The parents are Innocent and Jane, and the children are Gideon - 15, Enoch - 8 and Grace - 3. Grace was the only one up last night when I arrived at 11pm. I have trouble understanding her mix of Swahili, English, Spanish and gibberish. But she’s very cute.


I played cards with the 3 other volunteers and Innocent for an hour, and the whole time wondered what the coughing was coming from behind a curtain in the living room. I found out later it was Enoch, who has malaria. It seems not to be a huge deal; apparently the night after he was diagnosed he was out playing soccer with his friends.

The other volunteers love playing a game called squidge, which I determined is actually just a race to see who can finish solitaire first. I played 2 rounds and was terrible.

Laying down in bed was the most glorious feeling after 25 hours of sitting up in uncomfortable positions. I heard mosquitos buzzing around my head and couldn’t determine whether they were in my mosquito net or outside of it. I suffered a few psychosomatic bites during the night and woke up scratching furiously throughout. The volunteer sharing my room seems super badass as she slept without a mosquito net.

No extraordinarily odd dreams last night to report. I was shopping for a hat, helping to put on a latin-themed production of the king and I, meeting a drug dealing cop at 1000 E 10th Street apartment 1G (I haven’t smoked since leaving so American Spirits were the illicit goods), and speed-dialing Ashish on his birthday to see if he wanted to go to a soduku party and a concert afterwards.