Mudding a house.

I am off today, so this morning I joined the Roberts and their family friends the Champions, and mudded Cecilia’s house. Cecilia works at the guest house, so I know her well. She is from Rwanda, and 10 years ago when the Hutu’s and Tutsi’s were fighting, her husband and her five children took refuge in Kenya. The rest of both of their families were murdered. Like Cecilia, Cecilia’s sisters had each married men from the other tribe, and the husbands killed their wives and children because they were “unclean” before being murdered themselves. So, she speaks Rwandanese (if that’s what it’s called) and French, and then she moved here and learned Swahili, Kipsigii and English. Wow. The church bought her some land, and over the past week we’ve been building a house. Today was my first day helping, and I probably won’t be free to help again until next week- but it was fun! My job was to “mud”. The men put up all the posts and sticks (carefully picked tree branches), and bring the water, and the women use their bare feet to make mud and fill the walls. This will be the first time Cecilia and her kids have had their own house, so it’s very exciting! My hands and feet are VERY dry now though! There will be about three more layers of mudding going up until it’s ready.

More interesting things about Tenwek. I think I might have mentioned that people do not come here until they are very very sick, so much so that it’s “not sick, but ‘how are you not dead?!?’” I’ve also said about how there are 43 different tribal languages practiced in Kenya, so I’m never quite sure how to communicate (not everyone speaks Swahili)! Although everyone around here knows that Tenwek is a respectable hospital, there are a few very remote tribes that do not have a lot of history of sending people to Tenwek. Sadly, John was explaining to me yesterday that sometimes if we hear someone is really sick in one of those remote tribes, we will send out an ambulance to pick the person up. Unfortunately, if the very first people who come here die- no one else from that tribe will come. Let’s say 5 out of 7 die, you can bet that you will not see anyone else. It’s a vicious cycle because only the ones practically DEAD come, and if they DIE here, the people at home think we killed them. It totally makes sense, but it’s very unfortunate.
On Polygamy… Polygamy is still practiced here, but it is less common among the younger generation. If a youth does practice polygamy it’s different than the traditional set-up of wives living next door and the man just traveling from house to house every night. With that set up, the wives and children are not friends and jealous of each other. Instead, it is much more common to have wives in different towns, and instead of a scheduled “today I sleep with you-” planning is done by cell phone.