The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

So I'm finally starting to adapt to my culture shock here. I'm starting to just come to terms with the TFT and it's becoming easier to deal with because I'm meeting some wonderful people here. The tourism industry has essentially created a huge amount of people who expect money from wazungu (white people) and it's gets really irritating. Yes there are many economically desperate people here and you want to help, but you soon learn you can't help everyone and to add insult to injury there are many people here who use something like "my family is starving" as a way to get you to buy something from them and they're actually lying to you.
But recently I've been meeting people who aren't expecting money from me and just want to be my friend. Sure I might aid them financially somehow later on, but as far as I can tell they just genuinely want to be my friend.
On Friday I went to a funeral for the son of one of our housekeepers, Mama Judith. Her son had died in a car crash. The funeral was at her home and her son was buried in her yard. The funeral was both touching and haunting; a huge amount of people showed up, it must have been most of the village, and some of the mourners let out this mourning screech that I'll never fully forget.
As a turn of events, the very next day I went to a party for the graduation of Mama Changa's youngest son Steven. The party was wonderful, they fed me well and were very welcoming. They also had a local brew of banana beer in a very large cup, close to a bucket, and they had me drink from it often since I was their guest. The drink was pretty good once you got past the layer of yeast on the top.
And then today was a marathon, I didn't run but it was fun to watch. At one point I was walking along the road and two German runners asked me to join, so I just ran with them for a while. I'm defiantly enjoying myself.