Still have not managed to escape from Njombe. It rains here all day, every day. Even the girls from London are depressed.

Ok, so we have this houseboy named Faki. Fak, for short.

Faki is 16 years old and does all the cooking and cleaning. I'm not sure why anyone in their right mind would hire a teenage boy to do anything. Case in point: yesterday my host mama bought a chicken for dinner and Faki lost it. He left the gate open and it ran out. When I came home from school he was running around the neighborhood looking for it, but alas, it escaped and we had rice and beans. On the bright side, chickens are only $7 here so... guess what everybody's getting for christmas next year!

I also made the mistake of showing Faki my ipod shuffle. He didn't take it off for the next three days. Apparently he's a huge Beyonce fan because he kept listening to "Irreplaceable" on repeat. There seems to be a pattern here because another volunteer's host-sister keeps taking her shoes.

I actually really like Faki though. He doesn't speak any English except for "Good morning," so I'm forced to practice my kiswahili with him. My host mother thinks it's a good idea for me to help him cook dinner which basically consists of me watching Faki cook ugali while I eat peanuts and say the words "You are cooking ugali" in swahili over and over.

The families in Njombe feed us much more than in Iringa. My host mother told me I eat like a baby and asked if I was scared to get fat like her. I wasn't really sure what to say because of COURSE I'm scared to get fat like her. duh.

The families get very offended if you don't eat their food so I've taken to trying some anoroexic schemes to get rid of all the meat they give me: hiding it under the rice, wrapping it in a napkin and taking it to school the next day to throw out. Another volunteer actually hides half the food her family gives her in her bra so she can dump it in the trash at school.

I think I wrote earlier that I was picking up Kiswahili quickly. That was a lie, I'm sorry. Turns out that even though they don't really have a lot of verb tenses, they have 9 ways to say the word "there."

I also found this weird bug in my bed which I found out is called a Nairobi Fly. Apparently if they bite you your skin starts burning and falls off.