More on Meru

Greetings! I hope all of you are doing well!

I’ve just returned from my rural homestay in Meru which is an agrarian community near Mt. Kenya. I stayed there for about a week.

I really enjoyed my stay in Meru even though most of the time they spoke Kimeru (which I can’t understand) and the fact that I was full 24/7. They follow the food pyramid… and by that I mean they mound their food into mini-mountains on their plates and eat it ALL. They made fun of how little I eat in comparison and told them I would eat like they do if they allowed me to work on their farm! I did get to weed for a couple of hours on their farm one day (with a big ol’ panga which is this knife thing which they use for everything) and spread fertilizer on their coffee plants on another, but other than that, I didn’t get to do too much manual labor because I was a guest and they thought I was more fragile than I am. It was a week of trying to break down stereotypes. Who knows how successful I was!

So to give you some idea as to what it was like, my family had a two-acre shamba (farm) which grew foods like bananas, papayas, pineapples, mangoes (my favorite!), maize, beans, kale, tomatoes, tomato fruits (a different thing), macadamia nuts, cassava, and coffee as their cash crop. (Adam, I was thinking of you when I got to visit their coffee factory!). They also had 4 sheep, 2 goats, a dog, and a loveable cow that was going to have a calf sometime this month.

These people were really into religion (4 hour church service! and prayers even before tea sometimes), politics (right now they’re all riled up about the Ocampo 6), farming, and family. I met so many family members and friends and they would quiz you on their names in front of everyone.  Yikes! Needless to say, I paid very good attention during introductions! Everyone was very pleasant and very excited to meet me. I made it through the week with only two marriage proposals which is small in comparison to other girls from the semester,  so I feel good about that (Don’t worry Mom, I did not accept them!).

For those of you who are excited about the animals, the only animals I saw were livestock, birds (one was a really bright purple!) and we saw some baboons as we were riding in the bus back to Nairobi.