The music was of course Michael Jackson for the duration, which was awesome. I tried to do the Thriller dance on ice but it is harder to fake it on ice than on a floor (who am I kidding I will never learn that dance) so I gave up.
Then I took the family to one of those meat restaurants where the waiters continually bring you meat. Meat! I forgot how good it was. Its only been what, two weeks, but I also had cold water to drink for the first time in that duration as well, and I feel so replenished now! I even had some ice cream, which to be honest, seemed entirely superfluous after the meat and cold water.
Lydia was the family "house girl," which Wanjiru told me before I came that everyone has, no matter how much/little money the family makes. Then, yesterday, she was gone. Grace's sitter, Esther, was here today and was doing laundry like Lydia usually does, outside in buckets. I asked if I could wash my jeans and this struck Jane and Esther as hysterical. Jane wanted to take a picture of me doing my own laundry, and Esther was laughing at me not knowing how to wash my own clothes.
Anyway I asked if Lydia was home tonight, and there was hardly more explanation than "she went home." Her peculiar and sudden departure is fitting, as she seemed a mysterious figure to me in the first place. She slept behind a curtain that partitions off the living room from ... a bed? I never saw because she never pulled the curtain back, just slipped in between the end of it and the wall at night to go to sleep. And I thought this WAS her home; at least she'd been living here since I've been around.
We had to stop at the supermarket on the way home. Grace follows me around which fills me up with a sort of "that's right, I belong here" attitude. I really don't know more than 20 words in Swahili, but two of them are "koja hapa": come here. So when someone was in the same aisle as me, I would say, noticeably "Grace, koja hapa!" as if to say "look at me, I am likely fluent in Swahili and practically Kenyan." But rather than being impressed, people around me noticeably dropped English words as if to say "look at me, I am likely fluent in English and am practically American."
I hope everyone had a fantastic 4th of July. And a HUGE thank you to my family, who, on a moment's international notice, tried to help me figure out how to use a credit card to get cash, even when it involved calling the credit card company and pretending to be me. Apparently there is just no easy way if you don't have your CC's PIN, which I don't have.
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