A number of things occurred to me this morning as I was scraping away the last bit of toothpaste out of the tube. One, my dad’s practices on how to get every penny’s worth out of the tube were finally being put to use. Two, I’ll have to crack open this new Kenyan toothpaste tomorrow, and I’m a bit nervous for the unknown. But the most significant thought I had was, “Damn. I’ve been here a while.”

Quite a while- just over five months to be exact. A lot can happen within five months- a whole semester of school, nearly two trimesters of pregnancy, and depleting an entire king size bottle of toothpaste. The part of my head that I shaved before I left is now three inches long, my six month supply of toiletries from the US is almost exhausted, and the cheap watch from Target I’ve been wearing since I stepped off the plane looks like it’s been through a hurricane. The only strange thing about the five months that have recently passed is that I am in Kenya. In Africa.

A few PCV friends and I were reveling on a Sunday afternoon about how we feel like this, Kenya, is our life, and has always been our life. Everything that happened previously to Kenya was a past life, a false reality, a life that didn’t actually happen. We are already so enveloped in Kenyan life that when I think back on Lincoln, Nebraska, it does not seem real. And when you add on the other small detail that we will be here for another year and a half, twenty one months, America really doesn’t seem like an attainable future.

People have asked me if I ever feel homesick. To me, homesick is a multi-faceted word. Thanks to me somehow rigging unlimited 3G internet, I am very well connected to email and facebook. I talk to at least one member of my family every day on Google chat or Skype, and I am able to keep up with my friends’ lives too, so it’s not necessarily like I’m “people-sick”.

But I would say that I sometimes get “America-sick,” and that doesn’t just mean I miss Oreos and pizza and fast food drive thrus. I miss walking down the street and not sticking out like a sore thumb. I miss not living on a budget of shillings. I miss the freedom of driving anywhere and not being paranoid of being out by myself at night. I miss buying things at fixed prices in the store because you know you’re not being overcharged. Those are the things that I miss, but those are also easy things to just deal with.

So many aspects of life here that I’ve had to adjust to now seem as if they are second nature. I prefer to order traditional Kenyan food at lunch, I am used to mopping the floor the old fashioned way, and I am well accustomed to the heat of midday and know that if I step outside between 11 and 3, I will need to shower again. I’ve learned to sleep through choirs of school children, chickens, and motorcycles zooming by. Sitting on complete strangers in matatus and watching people pick their noses and pee on the side of the road doesn’t even phase me anymore. I’m even used to drinking warm beer. Yeah.

So I suppose this new toothpaste bottle is ushering a new phase in my life. After all, who knows where we’ll all be when we finish our next bottle?