Pants and Pizza!!

My team is going to Nairobi (the capital city of Kenya) tomorrow to get our visitor visas renewed (the stamps in our passports that mean it's okay for us to be in the country -- kind of important :D) tomorrow, and we're really excited about it.

For the girls, Nairobi means that we get to wear pants...err...trousers...(pants are your underwear!) for the first time three months! And, for our whole team, it means a chance to eat Western style foods, like pizza, cheese, and maybe even milkshakes!

We may be crazy people who decided to go off to Africa to tell people about Jesus and learn new languages and new cultures, but we're still American college students (technically, I'm still an American teenager! lol.), and we like junk food... sshh....don't tell our moms. :P

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Video #6

He is Risen!

Happy day after Easter!

We have the day off of class today, so I thought I'd take a moment to try and get some of my Easter thoughts into words.

The first thing that popped into my head yesterday morning (well...probably second thing: the first being something along the lines of, "Ugh, why is it morning already?") was the thought that, "This is why I'm here."

Literally, the things that we remember on Easter and Good Friday are directly responsible for the fact that I woke up this morning in a house in Northeastern, Kenya, in a bedroom where five other girls are also sleeping.

For some reason, it struck me as an incredibly powerful thing that events that took place thousands of years ago are still effecting every detail of my life today. The fact that those women found an empty tomb the morning after the Sabbath set off a chain of events that somehow culminated in me being right here right now and you being exactly where you are at exactly this moment. (Won't it be awesome to get to heaven and see the ripple effects of the things that we did with our link in that chain?)

The other thought was about as basic -- if not more -- but it was a good reminder all the same.

Jesus didn't come to America.

He didn't come to a place that was trying to be politically correct. He didn't come to a place where people were supposed to be equal. He didn't come a place that promised freedom.

Although, I would be one of the first ones to tell you that there are things that are seriously MESSED UP in the States, huge injustices -- and small injustices -- that should not be tolerated but are, attitudes that don't fit with who we say we are as a church, etc, Jesus didn't come to a 20th century America.

He came as a lower middle class son of an occupied people, to a country torn by social, religious, and ethnic tensions, to a time where life was far closer to what I'm experiencing here than what goes on in America.

Here, a woman's voice is worth half of that of a man and her life is worth 1/70 that of a man's, yet He spoke with the woman at the well.
Here, mob justice is more likely to get a hold of you than the authorities, if you get caught doing something wrong, yet He stopped the mob from stoning the woman caught in adultery.
Here the government is known to be corrupt, yet He brought tax collectors into his inner circle.
Here prejudices against other tribes are common and accepted, yet, this carpenter from a backwater city challenged the stereotypes that people held so dear.

So many of the things that Jesus said and did that make sense in an American context were radical acts in His context. Yet, He willing lived in some of the worst that the world has had to offer, and that, to me, makes Easter all the more exciting.

He came. He LIVED. He Died. and, He rose again!

Happy belated Easter!

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Candlelight

I don't seem to be super skilled at matching my life to the power schedule...thus the lack of timely blog updates. :P

It turns out that the "new" generator that they were installing when we first got here was really a new casing for the same old generator. (Welcome to Kenya) Therefore, for every 24 hours that we have power, we have 12 hours without power. It's actually not too bad, except for the fact that I only seem to be motivated to update during those twelve hours OFF.

We're gaining a lot of experience when it comes to doing things by candlelight, simply because it's way easier to stick a candle to the table or into the neck of a pop bottle and leave it there than it is to try and balance flashlights and arrange them so that everyone can see but no one is being blinded.

It looks really cool to see candlelight flickering over everyone as they read or study or wash dishes or whatever in the dark (although we've decided that there is a serious reason that people were eager to invent electric lights -- it's not real easy to read when your light is flickering and dancing in the wind and casting crazy shadows everywhere. :P).

Some nights we read out loud to pass the time (Ashley is reading The Bronze Bow to us right now), some nights -- or long powerless afternoons -- we just sit around and talk, some nights everyone retreats to their own little corner with a book (We just got a BUNCH of new ones in a couple care packages.), and, as of last night, sometimes we play poker.

(Obviously we're not Southern Baptist...lol. We started collecting pop bottle caps a few weeks ago to use as chips. :D)

Life

Hmmm.... cool things that have happened lately....

~ We got to watch one of the guys that the old team led to Christ get baptized in the water tank in our supervisors compound! He's a teenage guy from a Muslim background, so, getting baptized was a huge deal for him, and a huge blessing for us to be able to watch.

~ All of the kids are out of school for the month of April (They get one month off between every term), so we won't be going out to any of the schools much this next month. :(

~ We had camel heart for lunch the other day...not bad at all

~ The number of mongoose (does that word have a plural??) in our compound lately has been ridiculous. We walked in a few days ago to find at least thirty of them running through our trash pit.

~ We have a new night guard. (Apparently, in Kenya, you don't hire friends to work for you, because the line between friend and employee gets really blurry really fast -- oops.) Our old night guard, David, is still a friend, and we're probably going to go work on his house sometime soon, before the rains start.

~ The old team leaves in two weeks! :( It will be very strange to drop down to eight wazungu students where there have been sixteen...

That's all I can think of right now...I'll let you know if I remember anything else.

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