I’ve been getting complaints that I’m not updating the blog enough. Apologies, but honestly not too much happens living in the middle of nowhere. Or perhaps I’m just getting used to the crazy things that go on around here to the point that they fail to seem noteworthy. I’m also enjoying not getting on the internet very often, and when I do gather up my things to go online it takes so long to load that I quickly get discouraged. But, with all that said, I’ll do my best to post more often and I’ve decided to rack my brain for interesting/comical/gross things that have happened that I’ve failed to write about thus far. Let’s start with the latter.
First let me explain a little bit more about Nani and Chris. They help everyone in the entire area. They are honestly two of the most amazing, generous people in the world and put a huge portion of what they make back into the land, people, and culture. They’ve lived here together for about 15 years (Chris has lived in the area his whole life) and truly love the land. Unfortunately much of the area has been taken over by onion farmers (which often leads to the pungent smell of onions wafting all the way to my house when a huge gust comes through) and the natural landscape has been demolished. Fortunately the land that Nani and Chris bought has poor soil so there aren’t onion farmers right next to us. This is also the reason that the village was willing to sell them the land, and luckily it is the most beautiful property within miles as it has a huge lookout rock (excitingly similar in appearance to Pride Rock) and a beautiful winding spring.
Side note: Acquiring land here in an interesting process. When you want to buy land here, you first have to go to the village and get their blessing to do so. Otherwise when you go to the local board they will fight against you. Once you pass that, you have to go through another board or two and it’s a long bureaucratic process. But essentially if the people in the village don’t like you, you’ll NEVER be able to get the land no matter how much money you have. Luckily for Nani and Chris, they have a wonderful relationship with the people in the village, and both parties with go to endless lengths for each other.
Back to their never-ending generosity… They also pay for a bunch of kids to go to school, Nani secretly has about all the women on the pill, they pay for pretty much any medicine that anyone needs, they have a foundation for a local high school that they’ve put thousands of dollars into, and they loan their car out to basically anyone who needs it (or have one of their workers drive people where they need to go). As I said, Nani and Chris are amazing and so genuinely selfless.
But let me get to the gross story. About a month ago one of the women from the village (possibly also employed here, but it’s hard to know since they seem to give jobs to nearly half the village in order to help them out) went into labor. Since they take people to the hospital anytime day or night without question, the woman and her husband took Chris’ giant Land Rover. However, she didn’t quite make it to the hospital and gave birth in the backseat. Thankfully the baby and mother are healthy, but let’s just say that canvas seat coverings don’t clean up as well as leather ones.
The next week we headed to Arusha with a full car so Nani and I piled into the backseat with the boys. About an hour into the trip Nani got a strange look on her face and we realized that there was a huge, mysterious stain underneath us, stretching across the whole backseat of the Land Rover. It didn’t take us too long to put two and two together. We tried to politely explain it to the boys (without going into too much detail about childbirth), somewhat laughed it off, and sucked it up for the rest of the weekend. Lovely.
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