Nakuru

I tried to post this short little blog and photo album exactly two weeks ago. I had everything written and all the photos uploaded (which took about 2 hours), and all I had to do was hit “post”, but right then the internet conked out. After wrestling with it for another 30 minutes, I figured, oh well, I’ll just post it in the morning. Well… it turns out that that night was the start of the Great Internet Outage. So I’m posting it now…

What is now three thursdays ago, we took a trip to the town of Nakuru, which is about a 150 km drive to the west from Nyeri. Nakuru is located in the Great Rift Valley, which runs from Mozambique in southern Africa all the way up to Syria in southwest Asia. We literally got to look out over the valley from its edge, about 1500 feet above the valley floor (see pictures, link below). Aside from that, we enjoyed a long car ride with Eunice, the talkative and very bright manager here at Tumaini (who is 57 years old and looks 40), visited Lake Nakuru National Park, where there are buffalo, monkeys, and thousands of flamingos (see picture), played jump rope with a bunch of kids in the middle of a little neighborhood street (see pictures), and stopped at a roadside market to buy potatoes.

Here is a small photo album of the trip.

Nakuru and Rift Valley

A Kenyan Thanksgiving

Devoid of family and the typical Turkey Day yumminess (stuffing, cranberries, mashed potatoes, and even the bird itself), it was obviously an unusual Thanksgiving Day celebration for us here in Kenya. However, we decided to share our national holiday with some members of our new Tumaini family. After our own Thanksgiving “feast” of vegetable curry, we had the Form Four students over to share our O So Traditional Pilgrim-like Platter of…banana bread (believe it or not, the local market does not have pumpkin pie ingredients in stock :).

Jonathan opened by sharing the Thanksgiving story with them and I ended the party with a silly game but the best part of the night was spent going around the circle sharing what we were thankful for in the past year. The kids took it rather seriously and we heard responses such as “I am thankful to God to be alive.” This could be taken as a cop-out if shared around the table with our families back home but here it represented an honest sense of gratitude for life in a place where death is more of an accepted reality rather than an unexpected disaster (we’ve already experienced one death in the local community, a husband of an elder in the church). It was a special moment to get a small peak into their life and heart through this Thanksgiving tradition.

To say the least, it was an abnormal day of Thanksgiving but it was full of fun and laughter. Plus, for at least one year of our lives, we dodged the post Turkey Day “I can’t believe I ate so much!” food coma. ☺

[Our experience without Internet communication for the past 11 days has left us with a greater awareness of our separation from loved ones. We are extremely thankful for all of you and hope that everyone had blessed Thanksgivings full of love, gratitude and yumminess]

The Great Internet Outage of 2007

A few Fridays ago, when the always-sketchy Internet here at Tumaini began hiccuping, we didn't think much of it. It was normal. Almost two weeks later, we know better.

The first few days, we attributed the lack of Internet to environmental causes, like the weather. Or perhaps the guy who holds the data tubes together had fallen asleep. When we run out of water for strange amounts of time, I wonder the same thing.

Then, we began to ask the computer room teacher, Ann, what was going on. She asked us if we'd seen "those wires in the street." I thought for a moment--yes, running earlier that day, I'd seen some wire coiled up in the street. "The problem is those ones," she said. Apparently, that was the phone line for the area. And yeah, that would be a problem.

In what seems to be typical Kenyan fashion, every day we asked Ann whether she'd spoken with the communications company and if they were going to fix it, she said, "Yes, they're coming tomorrow to fix it." 'Tomorrow' kept one day ahead of us, however, and so Thanksgiving passed without e-mail contact.

We took bets on when the Internet would be back. We were all wrong! I began to worry--all my online projects might have suddenly failed and I wouldn't even know.

Finally, all the 'tomorrows' coalesced into 'today', and a Telkom employee came to fiddle with something this morning. The Internet works again! I can catch up on more days' worth of e-mail than I've had to in over 10 years. We can write blogs again--and stay tuned, because a lot of great stuff has happened in the past few weeks. Apologies for our absence!

Like water and electricity, the Internet has truly come into its own as a utility...

Hongera! Party for Form 4 Graduates

So it turns out that we got to Tumaini right as the Form 4 students (this means seniors in high school) were in the middle of their final exams. Having just walked into the middle of this without any exposure to everything that has led up to it, I think it has been hard for us (or for me, anyway) to get an understanding for how important these exams are. The setting when we first arrived here had these students in the middle of the exams, so there is a natural tendency for us to consider this situation to be the norm. But it is anything but the norm! These exams are once-in-a-lifetime, and they are a huge deal! They're like your SATs, GPA, and college applications combined into one. They basically determine where you can go to college and what you can study once you get there. They go on for 3 weeks, and they test basically everything you have learned over the course of your entire education.

(As an aside, having these exams didn't stop people like Karicho, Joseph, Merciline, or a few others from being genuinely welcoming to us or genuinely caring for the younger kids at the home here. Karicho would even take time several nights each week to help younger secondary students with their studies - this kid is a gem... I can't begin to say enough.)

Anyway, the Form 4s completed their exams today, and we thought it would be fun to throw a little party for them. So we did, and it was a ton of fun! Emilee made apple bread and Jonathan made biscuits, and we went and got 22 bottles of Coca-Cola from the store across the road. They were either very polite or they actually liked our food! (I think it was the latter - I'm not gonna lie, it was pretty dang good.)

We played two games at the party, in which we learned that Kenyans not only set the standard for distance running but also for... giggling. The first game was one where we went around a circle and made everyone say their name and then tell us something interesting about the person to their right. We got everything from "To my right is Mary and she is short", to "To my right is Reginah and she is a loyal friend". The second game was charades. They ate this one right up. One girl told me afterward that she wants to make it "her new hobby". The only disappointment was when Stephen drew Shakira and didn't shake his hips around.

But seriously, it was a great night, and this seems to be a pretty neat group of kids. We will be hanging out with them weekly throughout our time here and getting to know them better. Below is a picture from the party. Oh yeah, and "Hongera!" means "Congratulations!".

Tumaini Lives, Part I

"I used to look after some cows," the conversation began. Christopher, about 17 years old, had just seated himself on our couch and was twirling our massage stick in absentminded circles as he began to talk in a rambling way about his childhood. We hadn't asked any particular question; he seemed glad to sit and felt like talking, so he talked.

Christopher shared easily, with obvious confidence in himself, and with an even didactic air, knowing that what he was saying would be interesting and maybe shocking to us: pampered visitors from a posh and indolent country, who count even the most insignificant inconveniences as severe trials.

An hour later, after listening to the disconnected but always fascinating anecdotes, we were left, as you'd expect, with nothing to say. Apart from our periodic courteous mumblings of attention and empathy, Christopher had carried the conversation entirely by himself. Of course, we never heard another word about the cows.

Instead, we learned about the tribal wars between the Turkana and Samburu in Christopher's earlier years, how he had seen it break out, and the lives he had seen it claim. He told us of finding high school students dead in the thorn bushes, after being given guns by the local clan leaders--gifts for being in their final year--and asked to kill the enemy. He told us that when they searched the bodies (a practice he took for granted), they often found graded papers, returned that day by the teacher, and perhaps on their way home to be shown to parents.

He told us of the helicopter he saw shot down ("killed"), how it crumpled "like paper" and burned, with nothing to salvage. The men who shot it down, he said, had killed so many people they no longer thought it would be a bad thing to do. Then he looked at each of us and explained sadly, "Some times you can do so many wrong things that after a while your conscience doesn't know it's wrong anymore."

I agreed, realizing he knew a lot more about it than I did.

Interspersed with other random anecdotes (some, thankfully, much more lighthearted), we learned why Christopher had last cried almost 10 years ago, at the death of his grandfather. He had seen so many people die, that he said, "I can feel sadness in the heart, but it will never make it to my eyes." He agreed, however, that it is good to be sad.

All the while, Christopher's attitude and body language bespoke an unworried and unhurried mind. Every story of trial long-past was followed by one of thanksgiving. He prayed to go to secondary school, and, after his parents could no longer take care of him and he found himself admitted to Tumaini, he did. In another year he'll graduate. He prayed fervently that one day he would be able to play a drum set, and the church recently purchased one. Christopher now plays it every Sunday, untutored, but with natural ability.

His childhood was, we would say, defined by poverty and death. But simply because he's able to go to school, and can play a drum set that he doesn't even own, Christopher thinks God must love him. Christopher knows and feels God's love, in those simple gifts.

(Oh, how that shames me and my arrogant doubting! A churlish fool in such a cloud of blessing as I have been placed!)

But even words of thanksgiving don't stop him from telling yet more stories. And so shame is pushed aside as I struggle to parse Christopher's Kenyan English. We listen with surprise as he tells us that his father is accustomed to walking from Nyeri to Nairobi (a distance of about 150km) whenever business requires. Why pay the equivalent of a few dollars for a bus ride when you can walk for two days?

Apparently, it's a family skill Christopher's father wanted to pass on: when Christopher was in junior high, his dad woke him up one day and asked the boy to accompany him to Karatina and back (about 85km total). We asked Christopher why they went. He doesn't know, but he has a guess: "He just wanted to see how well I could walk." Not surprisingly, Christopher is now one of Tumaini's best marathoners.

Tumaini is such a wonderful place, we often forget that each of the 175 children here have stories much more like Christopher's than like our own. It is good to be reminded of that, when we have the capacity to hear it.

Tumaini is the New Hogwarts

Mere days after arriving here at Tumaini, Emilee, Michael and myself have found ourselves thrust into (somewhat dubious) positions of 'authority' as 'leaders' of the Three Houses of Tumaini.

I don't know where Eunice, the manager, got the idea to split the children into 'Houses', and I'm pretty sure it wasn't from Harry Potter. At any rate, she thought it best to have three houses (rather than four)--one for each of us volunteers to manage.

The point behind splitting up into Houses is still a bit vague. As far as I can tell, it's only going to be officially relevant during certain competitive athletic events we're responsible for organizing. Still, for myself, I hope the House mentality takes deeper root in the every aspect of Tumaini life. I want different colored t-shirts (you know, like the scarves in Harry Potter), a good-natured (but seriously-taken), constant battle between Houses for no apparent reason, and mythical importance attached to the House namesakes.

I'm not sure why I want this (especially since I think nationalism, tribalism, and any other 'ism' that divides people arbitrarily are patently absurd). Perhaps it derives from childhood in Papua New Guinea, when our school would have sports days where we were divided into teams--Pirates, Vikings, and Lions--and I was a Viking. (We had red shirts).

Eunice, predictably, required that the House names be Biblical in some way. That ruined plans for "Cheetah/Lion/Leopard" and such cool totemic trios with obvious mascots. In the end, eschewing ideas like "House Mishpah" or "House Hezekiah" (because who knows when the home will admit a child named Hezekiah?), we settled on 3 of the great rivers mentioned, at least in passing, in the Bible: the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile.

In a sophisticated process involving the numbers 1-3 and a pen, we divided all the children up into these three Houses, and each picked our river. Emilee went for the catty Tigris, Michael the erudite Euphrates, and for myself: the all-powerful, monstrous, hypnotic, Nile! I win, at least in length, I think.

But now, we have to figure out what exactly what any of this means, besides getting a million knocks on our door every day which betoken the sudden appearance of unhappy children wanting to know if they can be in their friend's House.

Going on Outside Right Before I Came up to the Computer Lab!

What in tarnation is going on in this huddle of girls?



ohhhhhhh, I see:

Storytime!

These pictures are from our first Storytime with the Primary school students. Reading after school with the little ones is one of the activities we've started...it has been way too much fun!

Storytime

A Gift From Grace

Last Saturday I sat down with a girl named Grace who I've connected with a lot since we've been here. She is a beautiful, smart girl who loves to sing. As she was sharing her story with me, she shared a poem that she found a few years ago and started singing a song to me. The words nearly made me cry. This same girl also told me of her hopes of getting an education to stop child labor. I was blown away by her heart and clear conviction. It was an interaction that left me with many thoughts that I'm still sorting out. I've written the lyrics of the song and poem below...

Song:
My mother died when I was young,
My father did the same,
She laid her arms upon my chest
And taught me how to pray.

So now my mother has gone to rest
In Land of pureless joy
I wonder if she thinks of me
A poor little orphan girl

Listen I was only two years old
I will never forget the kiss of Love
She gave to me
I sometimes feel

Poem:
I was a child full of joy,
I was a child full of glory
I was a child full of hope
But what happened?

It was a time a united family
Yesterday my mother went away
Today my brother cried
Tomorrow my father will be buried
Because of what? because of AIDS

AIDS that kill without mercy
AIDS that kill without mind
Which left me an orphan child
Who will feed me, who will give me somewhere to sleep?
Who will help me? Who will tell me the truth?
Do not leave me alone I am a child like you.

Our New Home

Here are some of our first snapshots of our life here in Kenya! There will be many more to come...

Tumaini

Welcome to Hello! Fine.

In Swahili, Kenya's lingua franca, one of the standard greetings is the question "Hujambo?" This is a contraction of the phrase, "Huna jambo?", meaning literally, "You don't have any problems, do you?" The standard reply is "Sijambo!" -- "I don't have any problems!". Most people shorten both of these even further, such that the exchange is more like: "Jambo?" ... "Jambo!".

Anyway, when Kenyan children learn English, they obviously learn (paralleling Swahili) that the standard greeting is a question-and-answer: "How are you?"--to which the reply is "Fine." Here's how we know:

Just as any language-learners would do, the children seem to take any greeting we give them as this (standard) one, of "How are you?" The other greeting "Hello" seems to have been assimilated into it, such that, almost every time we greet a child with a warm "Hello!", we get back a cheerful "Yes, fine!"

This is very funny.

"Hello!"
"Fine."

Of course, it is just one of the many idiosyncrasies of the place we are calling home for almost 6 months--the Tumaini Children's Home, outside of Nyeri, Kenya. Apart from us 3 white Americans (and all caucasians are classed as Wazungu, or "Europeans"), the orphanage is home to about 200 children, who have been admitted for a number of reasons (the primary one being the death of parents due to AIDS), and a small handful of staff.

I (Jonathan) spent a few months here earlier this year during the formation of Hope Runs, an NGO started by some friends. Hope Runs uses running training to educate the children and provide them with opportunity, while raising global awareness of issues surrounding orphans and vulnerable children.

The three of us (Emilee, Michael, and myself) decided to come to Tumaini for a while, to keep these programs going, to start various others, and primarily to be friends to those here, while at the same time living as an extension of the intentional Christian community of which we are a part (located in Palo Alto, California).

Over the next few months, we hope to take turns writing little windows into what's happening here, from cultural notes to (hopefully funny) stories, and also to share some photos. So stay tuned! Because "Hello! Fine." is just the beginning of the conversation. The rest, we're sure, will be just as nonsensical!