This and that

Today is Sunday July 22 and we have been at Omwabini for one week now. So far it has been a wonderful experience, we are having fun and we are so blessed.

We went to the same church that we went to last week. This time we listened to a guest preacher from the Congo, who preached in French while the regular pastor translated into Swahili and some members of the congregation translated into English for us. That being said, the sermon was good, it had a good visual illustration and again surprisingly had a point.

A typical day for us starts with the local roosters crowing at 4:30 AM, us “waking up” at 7 AM, having breakfast at 8 AM and we begin to go to work by 9 AM. Tea time is at 11 AM and the Chai (Swahili for tea) is made with milk instead of water and has lots of sugar in it (Kenya style). Lunch is at 2 PM. and like most meals here, it has a lot of carbs and starch. We work till about 4:30 PM and second tea time is around 5 PM. We then typically rest, play cards, write in our journals or play with the kids at Omwabini. Supper is at 8 PM and we go to bed between 9 and 10 PM with full stomachs. (We think we are gaining weight here, sadly).

Breakfast is usually French Toast with one sausage for each and if there no sausages, it includes regular toast; or we have a type of pancake(s) with a sausage for each. Lunch and supper are typically similar and include boiled kale or fried cabbage mixed with onions and tomatoes and carrots as the vegetable. Then we have noodles in some type of tomato sauce or potatoes or rice or a combination of any of them. Meat could be a small piece of “free range chicken” from the back yard or a few small pieces of chewy beef. A couple of times we had stew and rice which was well liked by all of us. All in all the food is very good and tasty. The orphans at Omwabini eat boiled kale, and Ugali (ground up boiled corn that looks like white play dough) for three meals each day. Most locals also eat the same meal as it is the only thing they can afford.

Thursday we took the Omwabini farm tractor and trailer out to manually load at least 5 yds of sand that was hauled out of the local river and 5yds of rocks from a local farm. We then manually unloaded them at the site where we will be building a protected well. We will write more about how a well and home are built in the coming days. We then went to Gladys’ house to start building her new home. The local community there is very good and active and already had the post holes dug. We helped with the posts and strapping of the walls.

Friday we went back to Gladys’ to continue working on the strapping and completing the roof. Then the mudding and mud fights began all over again; the mud walls were mostly completed, wooden doors and windows were installed and we seriously needed showers.

Saturday we got up at 4:30 AM to go for a hike and to watch the sunrise. We were lead to a rock plateau where we had a spectacular 360 degree view of the country side. This view consisted mostly of farm land and some forest as we are in the food growing belt of Kenya and for most of Africa. As the sun quickly rose above the horizon (as we are 1 degree north of the equator), we witnessed a beautiful sunrise. Not only was the sunrise so beautiful, so was the ever changing landscape appearing before us. Again we were amazed at our Lord and how complex and beautiful this earth and creation are and how blessed we are. After the sunrise we went climbing in 100ft fig trees, ventured into caves and strolled through the country side meeting many local people and saying Jambo / Hello. We also went to Omwabini to play soccer again while the girls got their hair braided by 5 to 6 “hair stylists” working on each head of hair. We held a geography lesson with some of the kids with the map of the world we took along with us and together we learned more about the Rift Valley with information we took with us.

On Monday Christeena Nienhuis from Ontario will be leaving for home after volunteering and teaching in Uganda for 7 weeks and for 5 weeks at Omwabini and we will miss her.

Beautiful sunrise

Some of the view from the rock where we watched the sunrise

One of so many businesses in Kimilili....

Kimilili taxi service

And we now have a new saying that we learned from Moses, our construction supervisor from Omwabini: “Lovely jobley” and it gets repeated many times in a day J