All alone

Well, I'm back. I apologise profusely for the long absence. We've been all over the place and I've been trying to deal with choosing classes for coming back. Also, a lot has happened and the idea of writing it all was, quite frankly, intimidating.
So I'm not going to try to write it all. It's in my journal, or most of it. I will instead summarize what has happened since I last wrote:
-I went to six Swahili weddings in Mombasa (the food was good)
-A crow fell in the window of my host family's house and the servant cooked it, so we ate crow for dinner.
-My host sister got engaged to a man who is not her boyfriend and whom she does not love. But she seems okay with it...I wouldn't be. He's a mechanical engineer and has a really nice car.
-We took a ferry and bus into Tanzania on my birthday, then stayed in Tanga for the night and had an amazing lunch at our director's friend's house, then went caving and, later that night, dancing.
-I got Kilimanjaro for my birthday, just as Franz something or other of Germany got from Queen Victoria for his birthday years and years ago (that's why the Kenya border looks like it has a bite out of it--if she hadn't been so generous, Kilimanjaro would still belong to Kenya). The difference, however, was that the Kilimanjaro my classmates bought for me was a brand of beer and not a mountain.
-We then took another bus to Dar Es Salaam and then a fast ferry to Zanzibar, where we stayed for ten days.
-We were repulsed by how overrun Zanzibar was with tourists...but there's no wonder, since it's a gorgeous place.
-We got a ton of practice haggling in kiswahili with the shopkeepers there, who were more willing to accept a much lower price when they discovered we spoke the language and knew what prices things were actually supposed to be.
-I had lobster for the first time. It was delicious. Also I had barracuda and octopus and calamari.
-I drank a lot of sugarcane juice.
-We returned from Zanzibar and were given 46,000 KSH and cast out of SIT to go and write a paper for a month.

And that is where I am now. It's not really being cast out, since they know exactly where we're staying and when we're traveling and we have to call in several times in the next month to let them know we're okay. But we are on our own, researching, writing and trying to figure out what to do with the rest of our day, until December 8th.
I'm in Lamu collecting stories about majini (singular=jini). Jinis come from some of the same traditions as Alladin's genie in a bottle but they're more into possessing people and taking out their malice on humans, and they very rarely sound anything like Robin Williams. They are Muslim folklore, but in East Africa the Middle Eastern traditions of jinis combine with African spiritual practices. They are often exorcised with verses from the Qur'an, but they aren't all Muslim, just as not all humans are Muslim. And in Lamu, since it is such an ancient town and society in general, there are jinis everywhere. Everyone has a cousin or a sibling who's been possessed, and many jinis apparently live both behind the house I'm living in and in the woods behind the power generator.
I have to go, actually, because this afternoon I'm meeting a mzee (a term of respect for an old man) to talk to him about the jinis he's seen. And I may or may not hang out by the power generator some night after midnight and try to find some jinis (assuming I can find someone who's not terrified to search for them who will go with me). Also, I'm going to talk to some of the waganga (witch doctors) who perform exorcisms. All in all, I have no idea where this project is going to go but I'm pretty excited about it.