Good job, kids

The school year here in Kenya is split up into three 3-month terms, each with a 1-month holiday in between. School closes for the end of the third term some time this week -- depending on the school -- which means that the kids have been busy taking exams.

The school where I have been helping to re-write the curriculum only has baby class (preschool), nursery class (K-4), and pre-unit (K-5), so, in order to continue their education, the pre-unit kids have been busy taking entrance exams for various other schools in the area. Six of them are hoping to start class one (first grade) at the primary school we have been involved with.

Pre-unit studying for entrance exams

They took the exam last week, and all six of them did very well. The curriculum at their pre-prinary school is much more focused on creativity and sensory development than standard Kenyan curriculm, and it is serving these kids very well. (Go figure...three and four year olds need to learn other things in addition to reading, writing, and math...)

As a point of contrast, one of the girls from the school continued on to one of the public primary schools near by and spent two years studying there. This year, she wanted to attend class three at "our" primary school, so she came back to her teachers in the village for study help. This very bright girl actually was less advanced academically now than she was when she graduated from pre-unit two years ago.

Pre-unit taking a practice exam
-- don't you wish that your teacher would let you sit on the floor to take a test?

They helped her study for a few weeks, and she managed to do realatively well on her entrance exam -- testimony to how quickly she picks things up. The education they get plays a huge role in determining these kids' future, so, schools like the ones our friends are running are an incredible blessing to the community -- and a huge ministry opportunity.

Living Life

When we first got here, I kind of assumed that the, “What have you been doing?” question would be easier to answer once we got to this point in the internship. There was a fuzzy sort of idea in my head that, by now, I would have regular ministry and a schedule-ish sort of something to my week.

Ha.

Let’s see. Today I woke up early enough that it was still cool out – which doesn’t last long on days that hit 113 Fahrenheit – and typed up a baby class curriculum for a local school for about an hour, until I decided that, since the power was out, it would be smart to save my battery for other things (like writing blog entries). So, I moved on to formatting the English rough draft of a kid’s storybook that covers Genesis 1:1-2:7, so that I will be closer to ready for really formatting the book on the computer, once I get the Swahili version proof read.

After I got myself stuck trying to decided how to portray God – with my less than stellar art skills, no less – I finished the rest of the pages, and moved on to my, still-in-the-process, attempt at turning a skirt into a sleeveless officer’s jacket, that I will need for a murder mystery party my team is doing next week with a few friends.

(The skirt has already been butchered once in order to be used as an elvish cloak during my birthday party this spring.)

Somewhere in there, I ate two meals, got drafted in as the stamp person for Bible club next term, hung out with my team, listened to Dave Dawson preach a sermon on hospitality, worked on NaNoWriMo, and cleaned up a little around the house.

On Monday, I went to town on an unsuccessful errand run, had Philippians class, went to a prayer meeting, and went back to town – with a little more success.

Tomorrow we have class with some people who are visiting from America, and then they want to take us out to dinner, and, Friday, I plan to be out at the school in the village to work on curriculum. But, nothing is certain until it is history, so, we’ll see.

If I’m ever vague on the details of daily life, it is because we tend to be doing a little bit of everything...

Sorry for the lack of updates, guys. It’s been a busy couple of weeks.

First, Laura, Heath, and I went and spent a little over a week in South Africa, which was more or less like being back in the States, minus any of the people that we know – long story, but, basically, we had to leave the East African Union for a few days so that we could come back in on a new tourist visa that will be good for the rest of our six months here.

Our friend from South Africa arranged for a few people for us to stay with, and those people in turn arranged for other people to pick us up / drop us off / entertain us while we were there. The first several days were a giant game of “pass the American.” It is a game kind of like “hot potato,” except that the potato has to try and introduce itself to each person holding it and go through a certain number of getting to know you questions – including trying to explain how three Americans from Kenya ended up in South Africa – before being passed on to the next player. Rather exhausting for the potato all in all.

We did have fun though. We managed to eat kudu, crocodile, ostrich, and wild buck; talk for an hour to a “youth group” that consisted of 12 to 26 year olds – yes, we are 20, 21 and 22 respectively, and we are here to tell you what to do with your life…not so much – visit a cave where they are excavating Littlefoot, one of the oldest human skeletons ever found; barbeque with the youth group; go see a couple of movies; and go strawberry picking with the seniors from the church.

A few hours after we got back, we went back to airport and picked up my parents. I’ll let them tell you all of their stories – I might even make them come and write a blog entry or two… – but, let’s just say that they got the full experience of powerless nights and afternoons and got to see our abundant collection of mosquitoes and flies…not quiet Africa’s big five, but wildlife nonetheless. :P

Now, it’s time to get back into normal life and hopefully back into the habit of actually updating my blog. Lol.

Introductions: Part Three

Hey, welcome back to the house. Grab some water, because I'm sure that you're thirsty after your walk. The guys are over to use the internet, (We had a wireless router installed in our house, and the entire team helps to pay for the monthly credit.) so you can meet them now.

Warren is our resident expert when it comes to "random" knowledge -- generally, the sorts of information that people, who are into science fiction and fantasy / like to write such things, manage to pick up as they go through life, plus anything I could ever think to ask about music and/or trees -- and is the one on the team most likely to launch into a long explanation of something that he finds fascinating.


Like Ashley and I, he likes to write fiction and is currently working on a fantasy novel. He's enough of a nerd to know who the Yuuzahn Vong are, but he also loves to work with his hands (his fingers don't tan/burn, ever, which is completely random!), and you can generally find him wherever Jason is, working on some sort of a project -- often out at the school. His dream is to come back to Africa, potentially Uganda, and work, so, although he has struggled to balance life outside of internship with life on internship, he is more or less in his element here, especially when he can be involved in discipleship or community development projects.

Heath (far left in the picture) is by far the quieter of the two boys, the youngest in a family where all of the older siblings are female, in comparison to Warren's status as an only child.

He is calmer and more deliberate than most of the rest of us (definitely, the one on the team most completely different than me :P), but he enjoys spending team time -- or guy time -- with the x-box or playing games like Cranium or Settlers of Catan. His family means a lot to him, and a becomes the most animated when he is talking to them on Skype. He wants to work in South Africa, which is a very, very, different sort of place than North Eastern Province, or even Kenya, but he has grown a lot through coming on internship here, and we're glad to have him (the one guy to six girls ratio that would have happened without him...definitely would not have been fun for the guy that had to escort us all to the market...lol.).

Jason and Bekah are our internship directors.

Jason initially reminded me a lot of Chris Grandberry (They must have similar accents or something), but he is really very much like my second sister Kayla, strong willed, almost always confident, says what he's thinking, and always wanting to meet physical needs -- plus a good dose of sarcasm and impatience with ridiculousness in the form of bureaucracy.


He has carted us all over the place in his vehicle -- yes it is possible to fit eleven adults and two children in one vehicle. And, he has taught us all sorts of valuable skills, like slaughtering chickens, lighting a jiko, and, of course, how to use your teeth to pluck a chicken's butt feathers when the pliers are not available.

Bekah is nearly as much of a blog stalker as my mother, and she loves asking questions. Questions are her way of getting information about the world and about people she interacts with. Jason often accuses her -- jokingly -- of being, "too nice" and trusting everything that people say, but she is pretty good as using questions to get to the bottom of things and come out with a picture of the way things really are -- of course, sometimes she uses Jason as resource of getting those answers! :D


She just got a small car and is learning how to drive shift / drive in Kenya, as well as learning to like the two new dogs that just came to live with them. Like Jason, she enjoys being busy, building relationships, and meeting physical needs, and I'm sure we keep them both more than busy as they try to keep track of eight interns.

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Welcome to Town

Town center is about an easy ten fifteen minute walk from our house, but keep your eyes open, because you'll probably start to notice different things -- things that I can't tell you to look for, because they don't seem different to me anymore, as soon as we walk out of our compound. Actually, I guess that even the fact that we live in a compound with several other houses is different, huh?

I'd tell you that there isn't a lot to see here, because, in reality, it's just another small town -- think Benton City, but with an actual population. But, because this isn't the sort of small town that either of us grew up in (unless you were really born in Somalia and you just never told me about it), there is a lot that you are going to want to take in.


The smells are a strange mix of just about everything, the slightly spicy smell of cooking food, the sweet scent of fresh fruit warming in the ever present heat, the sour smell of rotting trash, tepid puddles, and...uhhh...how do you say this nicely... animal excrement, the hot dust that Eastern Washingtonians know all too well, and a little rubber and car emissions just to add some excitement to the mix.


Yes, people really are staring at you, and no, they generally aren't doing it to be offensive. You just happen to be the most exciting thing walking down the street at the moment.

REMEMBER: Driving here occurs on the left side of the road, so be sure to look both ways before you cross, or you might end up a little thinner than when you landed in Kenya....


A normal shop, like the bookstore we just passed, has everything on display behind a wooden or glass counter and you just tell the shop keeper what is that you would like -- great way to practice Swahili, unless they decide to take mercy on you and carry out the transaction in English, at which point you'll be hard pressed to get much more Swahili out of them.


You've pictures of the market before, so, after we pick up the last of our things at the supermarket (one of the only shops in town where you wander through aisles picking out your own things, and the best place in the district to get western style things), we'll head in there and pick up some vegetables and rice and we'll be on our way back to the house.

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Introductions: Part Two

Laura is probably the one on the team most like me (Yes, Dad, she's a tight wad who hates shopping too :-P). We blame it on the fact that our mothers could be long lost twins... except that her mom grills her with a million questions to get all of the information she wants, and my mom just stalks all of my teammates online. Lol.

She is fairly positive that she wants to work in a Muslim context in North Africa for a good solid chunk of her life, so being able to come here on internship was a really cool opportunity for her. She is the one who makes all of our video blog entries, and she's about to start teaching computer classes to the teachers at Life Frontier School, so we make good use of her technical prowess, and her photography skills. She can draw a crowd with her camera quicker than the rest of us could even think to notice that there are that many kids in the area, and they love making goofy faces and posing for her. Probably one of the biggest areas where we differ, is that she is infinitely more patient and deliberate than I am, and she's been putting that to good use building relationships with a few of the older girls at Life and discipling them in their walks towards the Lord.

Rebecca is our resident artist and the one who designed all of the rooms that we painted at the school. We tease her about being "old" -- all of 26 years -- and about the fact that she's from a farm in Nebraska, but I don't think that any of us could imagine internship without her here.

Her and Ashley have this amazing skill of turning every conversation back to "...at the nursing home..." or "...at the assisted living..." that I really enjoy, because it gives me a chance to learn medical stuff besides that first aid and wilderness medicine that I've studied before. Yep. I'm a nerd like that. (Ashley told me last night that she brought a few medical handbooks back from the States, knowing that I would get excited and want to read them. Lol. )

Like the rest of us, she is also nice and stubborn, but she has put that stubborn to very good use in learning Swahili. Our neighbors love her for it, and they are always giving her new words and testing her ever expanding vocabulary. She keeps us on our toes by turning everything back to the need for prayer, and by asking Bible questions that force us to pull out the mental concordances and try to find the words for things that we may not have tried to verbalize in years. "What does so and so mean when they say....?" "What does in mean in such and such a book when in says ...?" etc.

Me and my smurf nose, I hope you don't need an introduction to, so, I think that you have officially met all of the girls. The boys will likely be over tonight, since we have the internet router at our house, but, for now, let's go to town and let you see what you can see.

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Day Three: Introductions -- Part One

Good morning. I hope you slept well and didn’t get too tangled in your mosquito net trying to get out of bed this morning.

Normal days around here move at a pretty relaxed pace, so I’ll let you take some time to get to know everyone.

Ashley is our resident southerner. She’d describe herself to you as a “homeschooled, Southern Baptist, Calvinist.” We joke that I was homeschooled, Esther was homeschooled for a few years, but Ashley, Ashley was HOMESCHOOLED. She’s okay with that, though. :P She may look like a sweet little, Southern Baptist, homeschooler, but she can be tough as steel and just about as stubborn (which is a good thing in a team of strong willed, passionate people).

At the same time, she has probably grown and changed the most out of all of us since being here. She still likes old movies – her idea of a good movie is one that has never been produced in color – and can talk your ear off about the Civil War if you let her get started in on that one, not that she’s passionate about the subject or anything. But, she now responds to the Somali version of her name (“Asha! Asha! How are you?”), plays constantly with the babies she didn’t know what to do with at the beginning of internship, works in our neighbor’s duka, and all of the people whom she has built relationships with since being here love her.

Esther is also from the South, but she’s from Texas, so, not only is she still proud of the Confederate flag, but she is also proud to be from the only state that can legally A) fly its flag higher than the US flag when they are displayed together and B) secede from the US and become its own country whenever it wants.

She’s our resident adventure queen, always looking towards the future and trying to convince the rest of us to do something “adventurous.” If Esther looks up suddenly and says, “I have an idea!” beware, something you would never think of is about to come out of her mouth (ie. Wanting to put on a bui bui, get in a taxi, and try to drive towards Somalia just to see how far “we” can get). She’s in love with this continent and always thrilled to be doing something “different,” so she’ll enjoy having you around, and will love to milk you for as much wisdom as she can get out of you.

She’s struggled throughout internship with the fact that so much of what we do here is just living life and building relationships in this context, that desire to be doing and seeing new things is just so strong in her that sitting out here where “things” don’t really happen rubs her the wrong way. God has used that to change her though, and she is much more content and willing to be wherever He wants her than she was at the beginning of this adventure – and she definitely has the cleanest Swahili out of all of us!

Melissa is the “baby” out of the team. I’m actually the youngest, but she gets teased about it all the time, for some reason. :P She’s also my fellow Washingtonian, although she comes from the other side of the state. We have fun trying to explain to people here that the weather in her place is more like Nairobi while the weather in my place is more like here, even though we live in the same state.

You’ll probably hear her singing throughout the day, and she has a laugh that carries outside of our house loud and clear. The kids out at Life (and anywhere else she goes) love her and her crazy faces and cool finger tricks. She loves trying out new Swahili phrases (including ones that she finds written in matatus!), and she has grown up a ton since getting here, and there is a wealth of wisdom hiding under all of that goofiness – kind of like another Melissa I know.

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Day Two: Part Two

Sorry. I haven't really forgotten about you. We're almost at the end of that paint project that you came to help with, and it's more or less taken over my life for the last month or so.


Thanks for coming out today, though. Having the extra set of hands to help paint was really nice. Bekah is very much a questions person, so I'm sure that she knows all sorts of things about you after half a day of working together. If it weren't for the fact that she has a one year old and a two year old at home who can only be entertained by someone not-mom for so many hours at a time, she would have stayed all day to help us. In this case, the crazy interns aren't the only ones who like having a big project to work on.

I think that her and Jason are almost more determined to get this thing finished before the teachers come back next Tuesday than even any of us are -- which is saying something, because there is a lot of stubborn and determined on our team. Lol.

Annelise (the daughter of some South African missionaries who have been here working with the school for quite a few years) also came out and helped us. She's a good worker -- when she isn't totally bored from spending all day staring at the same dark blue paint -- and she likes coming out to paint. When you're nine years old, any excuse to play around with thick gooey substances is a good way to spend a day. Lol. (We even managed to get most of the paint off of her face / the rest of her before sending her back to her parents... :D)


You weren't quite as lucky in the matatu department on the way back to the house, so, welcome to the land where seats wobble, sliding doors don't quite close all the way, and it isn't anything abnormal to get a glimpse of the road through tiny holes in the floor. :)

They may look a little sketch on the inside -- something about the neon orange dashboard combined with the pale pink interior and the old school velvet paisely seat covers is just a little...special -- but the drivers know what they're doing. If you ever took the time to glance out the window as we went, you probably noticed that they have an amazing ability to dodge goats, donkeys, pedestrians, potholes, etc without slowing down significantly. :P Think of it as a twenty shilling kiddy roller coaster.


Now that we're back at the Witt's house, we're going to eat dinner and just hang around for the evening. Tomorrow morning we'll go to town and you'll get your first real glimpse of town proper.

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Day Two: Part One

Welcome to town. We're in the middle of a project, so we're going to put you to work this morning. The other girls are waiting for us back at our house, so I hope you're up for a little bit of a morning walk. Jason and Bekah's, where you stayed the night, isn't far from our house, so we'll be there in just a few minutes.

I know that you want to look at everything around you, but I might suggest that you keep at least half an eye on the ground. Some things, like punda (donkey) or goat poop are just nasty to step in. Other things, like methange thorns, can be painful if you don't pull them out of your shoe right away.


We'll stop at the duka by out house to pick up some bread to take out to the school with us for lunch. Hope you like peanut butter sandwiches. Normally, we have a friend who cooks lunches for us Kenyan style, but, because so many of us are out and about working on this project and other things, it has been easier this month just to handle lunches on our own. Believe me, we'll be more than happy to get back to pilau when the month is over.

On the way town, don't let your focus on the ground keep you from seeing everything around you. Don't worry too much about staring. Odds are good that there are plenty of people staring at you -- not only are you new to town, but you are also another new white person. Hope you're good with being the newest form of entertainment in town. Lol. (Just try not to make eye contact with the opposite gender. :P)

Public transport around here is called a "matatu," and we've been getting an influx of new ones lately, so the odds that we'll get a nice one for our ride out to the school are pretty good. Of course, the conductors of the nice ones are very concerned that the paint on us will rub off onto their seats...Lol. Kenyans have an amazing ability to stay clean while doing dirty jobs that Americans obviously do not share.

Haha. You survived your first matatu ride, including the jungle gym of trying to get in and out over 14 - 20 people. :P Hope you enjoyed it, because that's how we're getting home as well.

Rebecca has designed Bible story pictures to go on the walls of the preschool / kindergarten classes here at one of the schools, that we've been working on for the last two weeks or so. Today you get to help paint bushes, sand, clouds, and mountains, in the first two rooms to fill in some of the scenery around Elijah (1st room) and Joseph (2nd room).


Grab a brush and get ready for your first experience with super sticky / runny (Yep. At the same time, it's kind of like painting with gak sometimes. :P) Kenyan style oil based gloss paint.

We Interupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programing....

Field Trip: Day One -- Part Two

Now that you've had a few hours for the "Oh, wow. I'm really in Africa." culture shock to start settling in... we're going to culture shock you again.

It's time to hop back in the taxi and drive to Eastleigh, where we'll pick up the bus to North Eastern Province. You'll know when we start getting close, because things will start to look more like the middle east than anything you probably ever imagined this part of Africa to be. The streets down here are swarming with people. Long flowing veils cover all but the hands, feet, and faces of most women, and even many of the men are covered neck to ankles in the long white or cream colored conzuls.

When we get out of the car and head into the bus stage, you'll notice that the language sounds different, almost harsh and angry compared to the softer sounds of Swahili. It is Somali, the mother tounge of almost everyone here, and you'll be running into it a lot until you get back to Nairobi.

Luckily for us, most people speak Swahili as well. Somali is NOT easy to learn. Lol.

Just to confuse your jet lagged self even farther, once we get out of Eastleigh, the first several hours of the trip are through downcountry Kenya.

Coffee and pinapple plantations are everywhere, so soak up the scenary. This is your chance to experience a little of the Africa that you've seen in movies, lush, green, mud houses that stand out in redish brown contrast to the plants around them and well organized villages.

As we go, the landscape will get drier and more desolate, and the villages will shift to clusters of low, round huts, thatched or covered with pieces of bright cloth or plastic, easily moved when the herds need new grazing, almost always tucked away within sight of a large water hole.

Herds of camels are still visible at dusk, even though most other wildlife is starting to disapear back into the bush.

By the time we get in at 7:00 or 8:00 pm, night will have fallen, so you'll get your first glimpse of my current home in the morning.