April holidays continue...

Greetings from Kenya and a late happy Easter! Here we continue on with our April holidays as we are breaking the school for the month of April like everyone else... while still thankful for my holiday to Uganda when I was told we were on break, I remain and will remain confused as to why I was told to go when I was... At the same time, I have enjoyed life on holiday here...

For me this has meant spending a lot of time with the toddlers, especially as we have had some nanny turnover and are currently down a few... The toddlers are at a great age for playing, games, singing silly Western nursery songs to the nannies great amusement, and my latest favorite thing... dance parties! Those babies know how to dance and I have been learning a lot of new moves although recently the older boys have been borrowing our radio to my dismay...

 Last Wednesday I even got to go into Nairobi as a proxy nanny with Madam. Two of the little babies needed to go in for injections, so I got to visit the rather impressive Jomo Kenyatta Hospital, and be utterly embarrassed when her three three year olds decided to make a great escape and I proceeded to chase them, or follow them as I was holding one of the babies, all around the hospital compound to try and get them back to our waiting room... While I love the babies and toddlers, I don't know if I could really be a nanny... It is hard work!

These past weeks have also held some lovely opportunities for cross-cultural exchange and for sharing life together outside of the routine. I got to help with my mzungu friend in the kitchen on two different occasions; the first sorting rocks out of the next days beans(no small feat when those beans feed two hundred people... we did a good job, but often you do find rocks in your food...), and then another day washing up the lunch dishes and amusing everyone by my attempts to mop the kitchen floor like a Kenyan(at that particular moment in addition to the kitchen boys, several of the nannies were in getting hot water, so the amusement was widespread...). Helping in the kitchen was fun too just for the sake of laughter, as the kitchen boys liked to teach, and test, our knowledge of Kiswahili and tease us for not understanding... and teach us Kenyan sheng(slang). Even if so often the joke really is on me, I love laughter and laughing at myself with those around me and how laughter can unite.

On another occasion, I 'helped' fix the driveway, or more accurately watched the kids fix the driveway while hanging out with some of the teachers and talking about how things are the same, and different... In Kenya, time is told based on the sun, and as the sun rises and sets pretty much the same time the whole year round, this works. So seven in the morning is saa moja, one o'clock, and you count from there with seven in the evening being saa moja again. It works... but I was explaining to two of the teachers how we don't tell time like that in America because the days change... getting long in the summer months and short in the winter months. I even gave the example of Alaska where in the summer it is daylight and the winter it is night. They were baffled and said if a Kenyan went to Alaska without knowing that, they would think the world was ending!

Then, for the Good Friday/Easter weekend, we celebrated Good Friday here and it was lovely fun and good feasting. I also got to witness a massive butchering operation of the twelve chickens which served as the highlight of our feast, and yes, twelve chickens can serve 200 people... as an addition to rice and beans. With the chickens, at least twenty of the primary boys were helping; plucking the chickens by placing them in boiling water, removing their organs and even the food the chickens had eaten that morning, and then cutting them into smaller pieces using a machete... Apparently we eat everything... the heads, the feet, and a good part of the organs... I told them that I had never seen a chicken be butchered before because generally if you are buying a chicken to eat in America, you buy it dead, but here, even if you are going to eat a chicken that you bought, you buy it live in the marketplace, butcher it yourself and eat it fresh...

Anyways, that is the news from my life in Kenya... I have been here in Kenya eight months this past week with three remaining... the days seems to be racing now, and I feel very blessed for how with time, the relationships get better and better and there are more and more opportunities to share life together in more and more ways. With both the good and the challenging, so much of life here feels like family life with its ups and downs. Like so much of the world these days, our budget is not all what might be hoped and the secondary school which should have been completed months ago creeps on towards completion... If you pray, pray for that, as when it is finally done, I think everyone will sigh a sigh of relief and most especially our Madam.

School opens again on May 3 and hopefully that all starts up smoothly and I am allowed to continue on with my classes. The children really have been having a lovely break and after a few days of just sitting in their classrooms they were rescued by the pastor into the sunshine for Bible study and even the other day had a singing lesson from a visiting teacher and for just general times of playing and relaxation. On several occasions when we had brought the toddlers outside, the children were free and played with them and that is always so fun to watch and oversee. It truly is family life here.

And everyone takes a breath and rests...

Breaks here are relaxing... a combination between work and rest... but the children spend more time playing and resting than working. Last week felt like a break although we did not close the school until Friday, but the primary children were only in class Monday and not even for real lessons(I kept busy taking the children out for impromptu PE to play), then Tuesday they were given their marks, but most of the week spent mornings working on the farm and cleaning their dorms and afternoons playing. This coming week is the proper break though with both secondary and primary free and most of the teachers gone home to see their families. I'm not sure if after this week it is back to classes or what, and am still not sure how I took a break when nobody else did(although they were supposed to... maybe) but am honestly happy to be here for the break, and to have had my break, so will not ask too many questions.

This past week I even helped on the farm a little bit. There are never enough tools, so the children take it in shifts, which keeps anyone from getting too tired so is a good plan anyways. They use jembes to break the ground, tools rather like a short handled hoe although the head is bigger. I tried to describe a pitchfork and they found that amusing, as they did my attempts at using the jembe. They told me I did a good job though, and I told them I was a farmer in America, which while a true fact, I am not sure they believed... They are convinced all farms in America are completely run by machines...

The other top activity of this past week was mancala. The children here go through game fashions. The first month I was here it was a stone game that I have not seen since, but all the little girls played it everyday. Then over December it was a dodging game played with a sock ball and then for a week the games all had to do with rolling four old tires. In the beginning of march they created a village out of building stones left over from the school, and now it is mancala on the sewer grates by the kitchen. They use the grates because in mancala, a game I think that comes from Africa but I play with my sisters, you have two rows of pockets(in our case four pockets for each player) and two banks for each persons stones. Then you move the stones in each pocket around, and if you land where there are already rocks, you pick up that pile and keep moving, depositing in your bank as you circle the board. Whoever has the most rocks in their bank at the end when all the rocks are taken wins. It is a simple game, but very fun and easy to join. I have had to explain it to some of the workers though and to two of the secondary teachers who always seem a little amused that the white women(myself and the young woman from England) are happy to play for ages on the grates with the little children... The children meanwhile were amused to hear I play the same game in America...

Meanwhile, the big event recently was this past Saturday's celebration for our Pastor's graduation. He graduated a few weeks ago from his seminary school(after finishing classes and being here since November) but this was the family celebration. It was lovely. He was Madam's first child, and has grown up in this ministry, achieved his dreams, and now returned, so all the children can look to him as a sign of the possibility for their own futures. We had a nice commisioning service with my MCC reps as special guests, and then a feast of chicken, bananas, rice and beans, maandazi buns... Apparently the boys had started cooking at 4am to finish all the food in time.

 So all in all, life continues on in its fullness and challenges. It all feels a little unreal sometimes, but at others I realize this is also as real as it gets. Still, as I read headlines from around the world of chaos and absurdity and how the US government almost shut down over the budget, the fact that my life is a smattering of playing with rocks on grates and holding little babies(who now smile and laugh) and doing my best to live my days here on purpose and for the children, it can all feel a little unreal... My country reps asked if I had a countdown yet, and I confess I do, but it is more to make the most of each day than because I am homesick. What if we lived like each day really mattered? What if we lived on purpose? What if we lived without taking the people around us for granted? Those are the reasons I have a countdown, so I remember how precious each day is and that even when a day is hard, life is beautiful and I will not be here forever and to get up, go out, and live!

The rains are incredible... I never appreciated them when I arrived back in September, but after several dry and dusty months, I see that they are glorious. With each rain, one can see the world turning green again, the shamba growing... One knows that soon there will be cabbage and kale with the beans and maize, that the cows will have enough to eat, and everything will be grow as it should...

I have also changed since the rains were a common day experience. As I stood on my balcony overlooking the rains yesterday, waiting for them to let up a little so I could walk to the nursery, I realized that I had learned to wait... to be... things I struggled with a lot when I arrived. I could just wait, enjoying the beauty of the rain, the smell of rain that always reminds me a little of home(although yesterday it was mixed with the smell of cow...). I have grown into the rhythm of life here, the waiting and the living...

Speaking of cows, a highlight of this past week was learning how to milk a cow. We have quite a herd, and two cows that currently are milking(the smallest baby cow truly reminds me of a puppy in how playful it is...) So one morning before class I got a lesson in milking from one of the men who keeps the animals. He is a newer worker and truly one of the nicest people... with kids of his own back home, so having a fatherly air about him with the children. Milking a cow was both easier and harder than I thought... I could get the milk to flow, but nowhere near quickly or as efficiently as my teacher...

In other news, we had our end term exams this week, and for the most part my children performed very well. My standard sevens, however, truly struggled, but according to the other teachers, the exams become much harder when they enter grade seven, and so if we all work hard, they should be passing by the end of next term. Apparently, I leave right before exams for term two which is unfortunate. While waiting two hours for exams to start on Thursday(we were waiting for them to be picked up from the district) I had a very nice time just hanging out in the staff office with the teachers, chatting for part, and when they switched to Kiswahili, following as best I could but feeling welcome to wait with them...

Now it is the weekend which is always lovely. Yesterday was Saturday and after the children cleaned their clothes and dorms they just lounged on the grass and played until lunch. Then after lunch we had a hilarious time of games. Here in addition to the teachers, nannies and workers there are three boys who returned to work after finishing secondary this past November, and they are my favorites because they are hilarious... They are a big help around the place, but also big personalities in the adolescent way... One is really into dancing and sometimes on a weekend afternoon will have all the children dancing to music in the dining hall... and even the babies know how to dance here... another is teaching primary(and always has his own personal soundtrack coming from his phone and is always on facebook on his cellphone which I find amusing)... and the third is mostly in the kitchen, but likes to walk around and show of his authority always a little louder than he needs be, but he is awfully nice. Anyways, yesterday they had all the primary come play and it was a lot of fun and a good laugh in the way big brothers are... I even played football with them until we all had to run and bring our laundry in when the rains came...

I have high hopes for a pleasant Sunday, as life continues on...

p.s. I still really love emails... so if you feel inspired...