Weekend in Makeni
Andrea Fandrich
October 21, 2011

Kabala has been getting to be a little too much for me lately. Well more specifically, all the men and children that have been harassing me have been getting too much for me lately. I needed to get some time off to be by myself and relax. So Katie and I took a trip to Makeni for the weekend.

It was a fantastic time. I booked us a couple rooms at the catholic convent’s guest house, which was really nice. It was very quiet and clean and the perfect place to catch some relaxing moments.
   
Since we didn’t really have any plans, we just wandered the town, doing some shopping and exploring. We found an internet café,a and it was very refreshing just having internet that worked. We also found an air conditioned gym with modern machines. WHAT?! Too bad I didn’t bring my workout clothes. And too bad I’m not staying in Makeni. The one thing I wish I had the most is a gym. We ended up spending a lot of time at the supermarket by the guest house because it was air conditioned and comforting to just look at all the products we could get. It reminded us of home. Well, because of this African Minerals mining project in Makeni, there are a TON of white people staying there. And of course they all shop at the supermarket. So just by hanging out and looking at packages of Oreos, we managed to do some networking. We met Jim, the manager of Dawnus and he invited us out to meet some more of the expats. It was honestly such a nice time, being able to hang around and talk to people in a culturally familiar situation. (Although we had a little bit of reverse culture shock, and almost found it hard interacting with so many white people.)
   
All in all, we had a pretty random weekend that turned out to be just the break I needed. I came back to Kabala feeling refreshed and energized.  I highly doubt I will be able to take another break like that before we leave, since our schedules seem to be incredibly packed in the coming weeks. That is fine though, I like to keep myself busy and I feel like there is still so much left to do before we leave.