30 November 2010

The Youth Group

By the end of our time in Kalacha we were meeting up the church youth 4 evenings a week.  Mondays and Wednesdays were 'Manyatta Singing'.  That basically means that the youth and the church elders get together at various people's houses and have some worship and a bible study together.  It's cooler than it sounds.  Mostly because you're sitting outside and it's pitch dark and there's just a really good atmosphere.  There's just the added complication of finding it, one of the boys in the youth group would come and collect us and then walk us home again so we didn't get lost in town in the dark.  Then on Friday and Saturday evenings the youth met in the church to sing together very informally and practice their songs for Sunday morning.  Then add to that the meeting after church on Sunday to discuss what's going to happen during the week, and the fact that the youth clean the church on a Saturday afternoon.  That's a lot of time taken up.

Youth meetings were always interesting, they were led almost entirely in Gabra.  We didn't understand a word of what was going on!  And yet despite that we somehow managed to enjoy every minute of it.  (wow, cheese Emma, cheese).
Back:  Guyo Jillo, Fathe, Bebi
Clockwise around the circle:  Tura, Guyo Berilli, Galgallo, Guyo Ali, Duub
P.S.  Were you counting Guyos?  Yes, there was 3 of them.

27 November 2010

Goodbye Kalacha

We left Kalacha on Friday :(

Right now we are staying at RVA in Kijabe for the AIM conference.  Which means I have decent internet again!!! YAY!!!  Be prepared for blogs in the past tense for a while, I have stuff to tell you that never got told.

Becca has already written about a lot of the things we did in the last week so I'm going to direct you there http://www.beccaisinafrica.blogspot.com/


Cold, wet and happy

Anyone who knows me at all will know that that's a really weird thing for me to say.  But when its 50 degrees outside (yes 50 - http://desertharvest.blogspot.com/2010/11/how-hot-is-it.html).  Being cold and wet is so much more enjoyable.  The combi has its own swimming pool and on several occasions Becca and I took the Andersen children swimming during the afternoon.  The thing we loved to do the most though was to wait until it was like 8 or 9 pm and pitch dark, and then go swimming.  For one thing you don't want to be able to see all the dead bugs that you're swimming with, and for another, this way we got to go to bed damp.  [insert some smart physics explanation as to why evaporation makes you cooler].

Ja-el tries to take Uriah down

Acacia learnt to swim (with arm bands but without holding on)

Silas learnt to jump in
 One of the things the kids enjoyed most was that we let them loose with a pack of bath-tub-crayons.  There's no walls to draw on in the pool, so they drew on each other instead.

14 November 2010

Life on a farm

Ok, so it's not literally a farm, but sometimes I think it might as well be.

There's the chickens, who just generally get under your feet and constantly need shooing out of the house.

Rooster - isn't he pretty!
And when we arrived there was 3 broody chickens, so now there's like 14 chicks.

That's only the first 5, I fail at taking pictures
And then there's the goats and sheep, who in theory go about as a herd with a herdsman, but there always seems to be 1 or 2 just wandering around, and they eat everything!

I didn't even go outside to take this picture,
they paraded right past our window
Goats - eating a bush
 And there's the 2 baby goats and the lamb that are still too little to go out with the herd, so they have the run of the combi.

Ja-el and Miwani (the friendly goat)

Coco (the goat that's scared of the world)
Ja-el and the lamb (at less than 48hours old)
And then there's the dogs.  The Andersens own 2 dogs, Kinga - a little Jack Russell/Daschund mix who hunts lizards and scorpions and things - and Max - a 'village' dog who keeps other dogs and hyenas and things off the combi.  And then the day guard, Isacko, owns a dog called Gucci (yeah, like the clothes designer) who has just recently had puppies - as yet unnamed.

Kinga
Max - the doormat
Gucci and the puppies



10 November 2010

Prayer Retreat - The Goat

As the Andersens leave Kenya to go on home-assignment soon they are looking for homes for all their animals whilst they're away.  This includes a herd of goats.  The Samburu man who was cooking all the food (which was amazing by the way) really likes Gabra goats as they are both hardier and prettier than Samburu goats.  So Eddie and Rachel decided to take him 'the gift of a goat' as thanks for all his hard work.

So on the morning we left for prayer retreat, this happened:

Step 1 - catch your goat
Duub and the goat (named John)
 Step 2 - tie his legs together so he can't squirm too much
Poor goat didn't know what'd hit him
 Step 3 - put the goat in a sack so he really can't squirm
Yep, that's a goat, in a sack
 Step 4 - put the sack in the back of the car under the children's feet

 Step 5 - drive 4 hours across the desert.  Laugh everytime you go over a bump and the goat complains, loudly.  And laugh even harder when he lifts up his head and the child nearest (Acacia) screams at him and bursts into tears (and the goat shouts back at her).

08 November 2010

Prayer Retreat - pictures

The "Dining Room"
 
"3 year old in a meeting"

Alicia discovered, to her cost, what happens when
 you start to read stories to one child


Alicia and Claire from Korr and Dan (the pilot with the awesome motto)

05 November 2010

Prayer Retreat


Last Thursday morning we set off on the 4 hour drive to Kurungu for Prayer Retreat.  Kurungu sits in a valley between 2 mountains (don't ask me which 2) and is as different from Kalacha as you can get whilst still being in Northern Kenya.  There's the simple fact that when you look outside there's mountains instead of desert, and it's green and stuff actually grows there.  The temperature in Kurungu during the day isn't that different from the temperature in Kalacha, but at night, it gets cold!  Well, it probably drops down to the mid-twenties, but I was cold.  It was very easy to spot which people had come up from the Nairobi office for the retreat and who lives in the North, the Nairobi people were comfortable in the evenings and mornings and boiled in the daytime, the Northerners had no problems with overheating, but complained of waking up cold.

Another massive difference between Kalacha and Kurungu was the bugs.  Kalacha has moths and locusts in great numbers, a few spiders, a few ants, and that's about it.  Kurungu, on the other hand, had lots of bugs that thought I was very nice to eat, thank you very much.  I haven't been so badly bitten to pieces in years.

Our time in Kurungu mostly consisted of eating, sleeping, and praying.  We were basically eating 5 meals a day (although 2 of them were called 'chai time - with snacks').  There was an AIM pilot at prayer retreat who claims that his motto for life is "Sleep til you're hungry, and eat til you're tired", we quite effectively lived that out.

The 'prayer' part of the retreat consisted of us all getting together 3 times a day and spending an hour or so hearing from each set of missionaries about their work and praying together for them and their ministry.  It was fascinating to hear about the different things that are going on, sometimes so similar to what we are doing, and sometimes so different.  There is nothing like spending 3 whole days surrounded by people who speak your language after spending a month bouncing between 3 different languages.  We have been known to use 3 language in the space of about 5 seconds.

We met some wonderful people at Kurungu that I am looking forward to meeting again at conference in 3 weeks.  2 of the girls are living and teaching in Korr (about 3 hours away from Kalacha) and Becca and I spent large portions of our time with them.  There isn't very many young people around here and even fewer who speak good enough English to have a real conversation with.

01 November 2010

Dirt - part 2


Dirty foot                                 Clean foot

For those of you who made rude comments about the lack of dirt.