Schools and Street food

Okay........whatever I said about buying land in Kenya being easy-that was an untruth.  First you have to agree on a price.  Keep in mind this is a country of bargaining, so that can be a lengthy conversation on a good day.  Then you have to talk to the chief so he knows a land sale is about to go down, and to get his blessing, even though he has no legal claim to the land (can you imagine how well that would go over in Americaland?!).  Then you have to contact all the seller's brothers, uncles and cousins to make sure they don't want it and won't try to claim it after its been sold.  Then you go to the land office and actually purchase the plot.  When you go to the land office you have to make sure you get a real agent who works there, not a broker posing as an agent who will take your money and give you a fake deed.  Whew.   Thank goodness I have this great team with me or I'd be banging my head against the wall  :)

This week we have been breaking every rule those crazy travel clinics give you when you go in to get all your shots.....yup, we've been eating street food.  There's a new little shop that makes fresh mango juice, and I just couldn't pass it up.  We've gone there more days than we haven't, and no one has gotten sick, so the odds seem to be quite in our favor.

Kaitlin and Cat, having a nutritious meal of street food......everything their overzealous travel nurse told them not to do :)

Fresh mango juice-our daily guilty pleasure :)

Dave and I spent the good part of a day in Kisumu with Joshua touring a polytechnic school and learning more about courses, degrees, and what he likes.  Considering the fact that he changed his mind throughout the course of the day, I still think he is undecided.  He loves computers though, that much we know for sure, so it gives us a little bit to go on.  He sounds like he is most interested in computer programming, which I know literally nothing about, and he has no experience in it to know if it's really what he wants.  Thank goodness Dave knows what he's talking about.  We decided to put him in a computer basics class over the summer to see what he thinks of it all.

University stuff here is so crazy.  Since he is our oldest, we are learning about the search for schools and the process the government has put in place to do it.   The minister of education in Kenya is apparently as corrupt and inept as all the rest of the government and totally screwed up the  higher educational system.  First of all, they issued an application form that all students have to fill out and pay for (of course it's about money) that goes through the government before it goes to the schools.  You choose your top 3 schools and top choices of study, but you can be placed in ANY school in ANY course of study.  A student friend of mine had wanted a major in  international relations and got French instead.  On top of that, he changed the grading system this year to be considerable more rigorous, but did not adjust the qualifications for admission.  A larger high schools could have around a hundred students with a A average last year, and there are many throughout the country.  Due to the new scale, there were only 144 students who make A grades this year in the whole country!  But the programs are still using the old grading system for qualifications for admission, so there is a huge group of students who don't qualify for any of the programs they should have enrolled in.  What a mess.  But it's what we have to work with, so we're doing our best.

Dave and Joshua nerding it up-they talked techy for hours :)

Jessie