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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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!

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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!

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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. :)

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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

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