My awesome Grandma

On Monday, I got some bad news. My grandma passed away rather unexpectedly. I had just visited her the weekend before I left the country and was pretty shocked and saddened by the news. Things like this are never easy....but being this far away and feeling so helpless and rather disconnected from my support network and my family is a extra tough. She was a fantastic woman with a huge heart, and was always incredibly supportive. The night before I left her house, my boss had emailed me about the terror attacks in Nairobi: she asked if I wanted to postpone my trip or rethink my plans. I sat on my grandma's porch and watched the rain with her and finally got up the courage to ask her opinion (not wanting to hear the sensible "You won't be safe, stay in America.").  She looked at me and said with total honestly, "It's where you want to go, and it's where you're supposed to be next. Don't let crazy people scare you from doing something good." I was very pleasantly surprised and felt so happy to know how excited she was for me and how proud she was that I was taking a risk to do something I thought might make a difference.

Now not only two weeks later, she's gone. I feel really lucky that I got to know her, because not everyone gets to spend this many years with their grandparents around. And in the last year she was just so encouraging - through some rough patches with guys, getting through my PhD, and moving to Africa, she always had a wise and kind word, sent me the most adorable e-mails, and every year sang Happy Birthday to my voicemail. I was lost all day on Monday trying to figure out how to cope from here. I sat in my office crying after I heard, and my Kenyan team looked so scared and kept bringing me tissues and food, but I didn't know how to respond. I left around lunch time and came home to my empty apartment to try to call my family, but at noon-time here its 5am on the East Coast....so I waited around, looked at plane ticket options to go home, and paced.

Eventually, I spoke to my family, cried with my sister, called a couple good friends to vent, and tried to think happy thoughts. By the end of the day, and not knowing what else to do to deal, I wandered around my compound. I had bought some vegetable seeds a few days earlier....my grandma always kept a lot of plants around, so to occupy myself I cut apart some empty plastic Coke bottles and found a shovel. It started to rain, but I walked around the walls of my complex until I found some decent soil, shoveled it into a shopping bag, and sat in my kitchen and planted a little garden on my windowsill.

It's not logistically or financially feasible for me to go home to be with my family for the memorial, but after this week of thinking it all over, I'm just so glad that I got to see her so much in the last couple years and that I knew she was proud of me. She was a really fantastic grandma, and I'll miss her.