Are You Sure This is School?

Part of our language studies involve "language lab." Basically, that means that we get sent out for a couple hours each afternoon to talk with specific people who have agreed to help us with our Swahili.

By far though, the best language lab is out in a village down the road with the kids in the pre-primary school there. The kid in the picture above is named Omar -- or something very close to that -- and he is an absolute sweetheart. Many of the little boys, especially those that come from Somali or Malakote families, are used to being the center of their worlds. You can't blame them for it, it's the only thing that they've ever known, but it's hard to realize that they are growing up with such of a warped concept of the roles that men and women are supposed to play in the world, and that they are being taught to just take whatever they want whenever they want it.

I'm pretty sure that Omar is Malakote (I'm still not very good at differentiating who is from what tribe, but most of the village is Malakote, so it's a pretty decent guess...), but, from the little bit that I've seen, his attitude is totally different from the other boys. He's much more careful with the girls and doesn't push them around and grab things from them as much as is normal; he's very protective of us, and he seems to be constantly trying to get the other boys to behave.

It's really cute to watch, 'cause he's not more than six or seven years old, but he's a total big brother to the other kids. It would be REALLY cool to see him grow up with a knowledge of Christ.

Honestly, all of those kids have caught my heart (...not that that's hard when it comes to me and kids...), but it's heartbreaking to know that they are growing up in a culture where it is assumed that being Malakote means being Muslim. (The Malakotes are one of the six different "unreached" people groups within the province.)

Pray for continued ministry opportunities out in this village, both for the guys to be doing physical labor and for us to be building relationships with the people out there, especially the kids.

More pictures of the kids are coming soon!

<><

Pics

Well, once again, I am stealing Laura's pictures, because she does a really good job with them.

All of these were taken at a primary school that two of our friends started out in a Malakote village about ten minutes walk from our house. We went on Friday afternoon to just hang out with the kids and practice our Swahili. It was a lot of fun.

Younger kids don't care as much as adults do when they realize that you can't understand them very well...

Plucking a Chicken!

Getting chicken for dinner here is not nearly as easy it is in the States.

Yesterday, we sent a couple of the guys to the market to get us two chickens. They butchered them there and them brought them back to the boys' house where we were eating lunch.

After you get the headless chickens -- and, yes, they totally jump around right after you cut the head off unless you stand on the wings to hold them still -- you have to boil a big pot of water. You kind of swirl the chickens around in the boiling water to get the feathers all loose, then you run your hands all over them really fast to get the big feathers off.

Some of the little tiny ones stick, which is really obnoxious, :P cause you have to pick the feathers out individually...their skin kind of feels like those slippery water toys that you play with.

After you get all the feathers off, you have to pull out all the guts and cut off the feet and the neck, and, only then, does it start to resemble the chicken that you can buy at the grocery store...

...It tasted really good though!

<><

Video Blog #5

Dreaming and Scheming

My team has been running into an interesting problem lately.

Our tithes are too big.

I know that sounds really funky, but, because our budgets include ministry costs and other random things that put our income higher than the average person in this part of Kenya, giving our entire tithes to the churches we are attending would overwhelm their budgets. They could easily find ways to use the money, but, when we leave next spring, they would be in a world of hurt trying to make up for the funding that suddenly disappeared.

We still want our tithes to be going towards local ministry needs, though, so, after we give appropriately to the churches we're attending, we have started pooling our tithes into an additional ministry fund that we can use to do bigger projects in the area.

There are a billion and ten different , really exciting, opportunities that we could take advantage of in any given month, so we're asking that you join us in praying for wisdom and discernment in picking out the things that will be most Christ glorifying and the most culturally appropriate.

On a slightly lighter note...

Billy and Warren have been building a tree fort in one of the big trees in front of their house (lots of fun to try and explain to the other folks who live in the same compound...lol), and, since it's kind of hard to climb a tree in a skirt...they had pity on us and out up a tire swing....which is also lots of fun to try and explain....

Kenyan's don't really do play sets, so even most adults have never been on a swing, let alone a swing that goes that high.

We love it, but watching our language teacher get on the thing is hilarious. She is a little (a lot) terrified of it. :)

<><

A Few Lesson's We've Learned...

...in the past couple of days.

1. a) You have to get online in order to update your internet credit, therefore...if you wait until it is completely gone and you no longer have internet access...you can't update your credit.
b) If you are a not so intelligent wazungu (white person) and you do happen to wait until your credit is completely gone, the nice people at the store have the magic ability to to do it for you from the store in town.

2) It's perfectly fine to wear shorts within an enclosed compound (like our site supervisors), but, if you are going to leave the compound to go buy a coke...putting a skirt back on over your shorts is very much a requirement. (One of the girls on the old team caught us just in time before me and another girl went out...oops! Bad idea in a culture where even guys' knees are considered scandalous...)

3) Chicken hearts are actually really tasty

<><

Birthdays and the Bush

A bunch of different things have happened since the last time I wrote, so we'll go for the quick overview method (and then hope that I get better at updating).

We've done two birthday parties for friends (both on birthdays that we made up), one who is a missionary just outside of town, and the other for a friend from one of the Muslim tribes in the area. Both of them were born out in the bush (one into the Masai tribe and the other into the Somali tribe) so they don't have any record of the date they were born.

Birthdays aren't really a huge thing in Kenya -- mainly because so many people don't even know the day -- unless a bunch of crazy white people insist on them, but our friends had fun celebrating anyhow.

They may not really do birthdays, but Kenyans are pretty much okay with any excuse to get people together for a party. Lol.

We went to a game reserve just outside of town to take pictures of giraffes -- twiga in Kiswahili, pronounced like the English word "twig" -- and have an American style picnic that our site supervisors had prepared for us (it was definitely NOT ugali and sukuma wiki. :D ).

It was kind of odd to be standing there beside these huge giraffes and realize that we weren't in a zoo. There were no fences. It was just bush. It was just where the giraffes lived.

I don't think I've ever seen a giraffe run before, but they look really funny. Their knees bend funky ways like a camel's, so they have a very awkward, swaying gait when they run. I don't really know how to describe it, but I'm sure that there are pictures up on YouTube or somewhere.

We visited a village that is about 28 km out in the bush where, even ten years ago, there was no school, almost no one spoke Kiswahili (the national language), and the kids were told that even allowing a Christian to touch you could make it so that you weren't a Muslim any more (effectively sending you to hell) and that white people ate babies.

Things have changed a lot. There is a primary school (1st through 8th grade) in a village where, in the past, the most educated person had only gone through class five (fifth grade). Everyone speaks at least a little Kiswahili, and the kids are learning both English and Kiswahili in school. There have been Christian missionaries in the village for the last ten years (running the school and medical clinic and trying to plant a church), and the adults are almost as comfortable with white people as anyone in town.

Although...the only game we could get the kids to play with us was "run away, screaming and giggling, while the muzungu girls chase you across the village"...and they were facinated by the paleness of our skin...lol.

I think that me and Ashley met half the village by the time we were done chasing the kids down paths and around huts and past groups of very amused adults. :)