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.