Cincinnati Orientation

After spending the weekend with my Mom visiting my grandmother and some of my Mom's friends in the Cincinnati area, I started orientation yesterday. I arrived at 9:30 in the morning at Randie's house (Randie is the Director of SOTENI) where I met Marla, my traveling partner. We spent the day there learning about culture, history and life in Kenya, SOTENI's projects, safety, etc. We had lunch with Patrick, a native Kenyan involved with SOTENI who is now living in the US and working as a social worker. He gave us some insider tips and perspectives on the educational systems and the attitudes and lifestyles of Kenyan students.

At the end of the day, Marla and I headed to the Wulsin's (Vic Wulsin is the SOTENI founder), where we spent the evening with Vic's parents, Betty and Howard. They were fantastic and we spent most of the evening listening to their stories from visiting Kenya and talking about our plans for the next two months. They had some great stories, which of course I can't remember right now, but they were hilarious.

Today we spent a long time at the SOTENI office getting caught up on the villages we'll visit and programs we'll be working on. We practiced doing an HIV/AIDS presentation, enjoyed some of Cincinnati's finest Skyline chili spaghetti, and spent a loooong time printing documents for Marla's research study (Marla's a student at Tufts who's leading trying to determine the efficacy of SOTENI's AIDS education program). It was a long day but I'm feeling much more prepared for hitting (gently, I hope) the ground in Kenya on Wednesday.

Tomorrow we'll head to the office early with our luggage, we'll pack up the bags of donations, which will include primarily medical supplies on this trip, and we'll finish up any last-minute stuff. Then off to the airport and a bagillion hours later, after passing through the lovely Detroit and then the promiscuous Amsterdam, we'll hopefully arrive in Nairobi.

So that was a very boring update, and I'll try to work on spicing it up in the future (although hopefully the trip itself won't be too spicy...).