the sign before rain is clouds.

I bought a new bag in Nairobi over the weekend, and on it is a Kenyan proverb written in Kiswahili that translated means "the sign before rain is clouds". I started wearing this bag on Sunady and since then it has been raining. Maybe the key for fixing droughts is to get someone that comes from a very rainy place (like me from Oregon) to walk around in the dry place bearing some profound statement about rain. Seems to be working okay here in Arusha.

Nairobi was a whirlwind of a trip. seven hour bus ride each way Friday and Sunday. So Saturday was packed full of everything we could think of. We fed giraffes (I got headbutted by a giraffe btw), we watched women making beads out of clay and necklaces out of beads, we saw cultural dances, we walked through a replica of Obama's tribes' village, we saw mob run after a man yelling thief and whipping off their belts to beat him, we haggled in an open market, and we ate fabulous Ethiopian food with our fingers.

Sunday morning Victoria and I went to the Swaminarayam temple before sunrise. We drove past dance clubs and saw people just leaving to go home (we thought how convenient, we should have just come here last night it is so nearby :0). We arrived at a temple but the guards were slow to let us in the parking gate. So as we sat in the middle of a sidewalk in the dark and waited I could feel our cab driver tense. He locked the doors, and would interrupt his conversation with the guard to stare down the person who may be walking down the sidewalk at that moment. They do call it Nairobbery for a reason I suppose. Turns out we were at the wrong place anyway, this temple wanted appointments. ha.

We made it to the temple we were looking for. We stumbled up the dark steps but were corrected by the guard who directed us to the womens entrance, the steps on the other side. (I must note though, this is the first time I have seen a temple with segregated entrances where the entrances resembled each other. The women's entrance was as beautiful and spacious as the men's!) We walked in with our head coverings and jeans and long sleeve tshirts looking rather like sloppy travellers, to find women dressed in BEAUTIFUL Indian saris performing a prayer ceremony. We hid in the back but I couldnt take my eyes off of all the colors. What a contrast with the opaque-ish twilight we had entered from. After maybe a minute of the women staring at us, and us staring at them, a girl of maybe 18 or 19 came up to us and asked us to join her sitting at the front of the room. She told me she goes to temple twice each day of the week, sunrise and sunset. And she marvelled that us muzungus were able to sit crosslegged like they did. For the next half hour we had NO idea what was going on but they included us in everything nonetheless. I think we purified ourselves with smoke from incense, and drank holy water, and ate something that tasted like annise? Okay those all sound like dangerous ideas in a country you dont know but I assure you it was fine! Anyway, I was so impressed with how inclusive they were toward us.

Nairobi pictures

So, I am about to grab some hot chocolate and sit on a sofa and watch the rain. sounds like home, huh?