Visitors from afar

The past few weeks have brought a flurry of visitors through Nairobi.

Firstly we had Ed Moulding who works in South America normally. He was passing through Nairobi and had an eighteen hour lay-over between planes. Ed was one of my housemates in 2002-3 at university in Aberystwyth. I had not caught up with him since perhaps 2005. It was a pleasure to take him out to the elephant orphanage and on for some Ethiopian food. The conference he had been attanding was a very interesting one too by the sound of it. It was run by Foundations for Farming, a Zimbabwean NGO. I appreciated hearing Ed talk about the four foundations as I saw that they could be applied to my office work as much as to the labour of farming.

WE HAVE TO PRODUCE FAITHFULLY AND MAKE A PROFIT GOD’S WAY OF MAKING A PROFIT.

EVERYTHING WE DO MUST BE DONE:

1. ON TIME (Plan ahead; Prepare well; Start early; Never be late!)
2. AT A HIGH STANDARD (Do every operation and detail as well as we can, no shortcuts, be honest and honourable in all we do!)
3. WITHOUT WASTING (Don’t waste time, soil, water, sunlight, seed, nutrients, labour, energy, opportunity etc.)
4. WITH JOY (If you do these first three things faithfully without self pity, complaining, blaming others, making excuses, but with a THANKFUL HEART, God will take away any fear and hopelessness and give you hope and the joy, which is your strength.)

 After Ed's visit my parents came for two weeks. We managed to squeeze together two single beds into an impossible gap and make our second room large enough for them to survive their two weeks. Visiting Aboseli National Park was a highlight. For those of you you don't know where Amboseli is, watch Madagascar II which seems to be set in the park with Mouth Kilimanjaro as the backdrop to the film. It is an incredible thing, after turning off the Mombasa highway at Emali, to see something white high up in the clouds that looks slightly out of place, and then as the journey progresses to see the rest of the snow-capped mount come out of the blue haze. We saw many wonderful animals such as elephants, gazelles, zebras, hippos, crowned cranes, hyenas and camera-shy lions. This was my second overnight safari in Africa and it was a treat to be staying inside the boundaries of  a park - no long communte back to a tent outside the park at the end of the day. And later after dusk, the sight of an elephant grazing several meters away from our lodge was very special.

Perhaps the second major highlight of my parents' trip was visiting the Church on the Rock school in a slum known as Reuben in Nairobi. They have been partnering in some of their lessons with a school in London. As part of a special assembly my parents exchanged letters and greetings cards from the kids in the UK. We then went round each of the classrooms to be introduced to the kids and encourage them in their work, which in my experience seems to be the tradition when visiting a school in Kenya. At first it can feel awkward as you're expected to give something akin to a rousing speech about how they should work hard. After a few classes it does get easier. It was an eye-opening visit for my parents and it gave them much food for thought about what is the role of a school in the UK in shaping the way that a school in Kenya 'develops'.

For now I'll leave this here. I'll have to find some time to add more in the next few days.

DRC and the quest for clean and dry clothes

Today I've two things to blog about. Firstly, for those of you who pray, do so for the Democratic Republic of the Congo tomorrow (Monday 18th November) as they go to the polls. Heather Pubols has already written a nicely comprehensive blog post on the election here. One Friday, those of us in Nairobi who work with colleagues in eastern Congo met together for a thanksgiving afternoon meal and time of prayer. Four weeks ago I was a little uncertain what we would be hearing by this point in the build-up, but when it came to our time of prayer I'm pleased to report that there have been no specific issues for prayer coming our way. So pray tomorrow and hold the DRC in your thoughts through to the 6th December when I believe the results will be announced.

I was reading earlier last week from Studies in the Sermon on the Mount by Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones. As I was reading his comments on 'you are the salt of the earth', I thought about DRC. In thinking about the preserving properties of salt (and the flavourful properties too), and seeing that this is what Christians are called to, it sometimes seems that there is not enough salt to go around and that those who are Christians may often not be salty enough to 'preserve' the societies that we are in. I'm challenged as I continue thinking on this.

Secondly today, I wanted to introduce our new washing machine. I say 'machine', but in fact I mean twin-tub. We picked it up off a colleague who is in the process of relocating from Nairobi and after a wait that seemed like a life-time, here she is:

The tub on the left is for washing clothes. It has some fins on the bottom that swoosh the washing round. On the dial above is a timer going up to 15 minutes which is good old-fashioned non-electric style. You can see in the photo that a hose is in the tub - that's our shower attachment which is doing the job of filling it with water. Emptying is done like a normal machine, but into our bath.

The right tub is a spinner. Chuck in a few pieces of clothing and let it spin them for a few minutes. Because of having separate tubs and things, we now have an order to be getting used to which goes like this:

• Fill
• Wash
• Drain
• Spin
• Fill
• Rinse
• Fill
• Rinse (hopefully clean rinse water coming out the machine by this point).
• Spin

It doesn't need too much watching over and having a machine like this will save many a collar on a T-shirt from become warped and twisted while hanging sodden on a washing line. We're very thankful.

"I'm Game if you Are..."

Yesterday, after a few postponements Janet and I finally got to the game park here in Nairobi. Here are a few stats and photos of our day:

Alarm time - 5:55am

Entry time - about 7am

Lions - 2

Giraffes - many

Buffalo - a few

Rock Hyrax - 1

Baboons - 0 [they're a bit mischievous anyhow]

Hours spent driving - 5

Sunburn on my right side through open window - mild/moderate

Love birds - 2

Petrol used - less than 1500 shillings

Terrapins - a few

Crocodile - 1

Dust on the car - much

Shock absorbers lost - 0

Air conditioning - priceless

Cheetahs and Leopards - 0 [something to focus on next time]

A lazy lion beginning the day

Early morning light across the plains

A gecko

Spooked giraffe lollopping off

Love Birds

An impala - real, not stuffed

A yellow-necked spurfowl

A grasshopper

A giraffe lost in thought in the middle of the road

How to break into a house in Kenya – preferably your own

On the 28^th of February 2009, I was a bit tired. Earlier in the day I had arrived back from the Masai Mara with my parents. And now we were heading out to have food with a few of my work colleagues (including Janet who had her parents staying).

We went to Carnivore Restaurant off Lang’ata Road, which is a honey pot for tourists are supposed to go and get their fill of game meat. (In fact, the Brazilian Barbecue at the Panari Sky Centre is better, not least because it is quieter). Anyway, on the journey I get that cold dread that I’ve latched the door and padlocked the grill with the keys on the inside.

So on arriving at Carnivore I was wondering what to do. I ate for the first fifteen minutes, before deciding that some action was required, so I excused myself saying I need to go and break into the house and I’d either be back while they were eating, or they would need to get a taxi back.

I called a couple of people and they met me at the front door with hacksaws. I rang the neighbour’s doorbell, and politely explained how I would like to climb over the high wall from their garden into the garden of my house. At this point it should be noted that I’d never met the neighbour before, as the house I was breaking into I was just borrowing. He was very helpful, and even began to explain his own methods of breaking and entering his own house. I stopped him before he had divulged too much.

In the neighbours garden (in the dark), we now climbed up the bars on their windows, onto the high separating wall, and then down the other side. The barred patio door was now before us. Conveniently, the latch in the sliding door no longer worked, and so we slid it out of the way to make room for the hacksaw. I was very pleased that I hadn’t put any wood in trough.

The hacksaw did nothing to the padlock. If anything, the hacksaw was wearing out quicker than the padlock.

 

Now it was time for Plan B. We drove about 7 kilometres to an office where we knew there was a very large pair of bolt cutters that had been once bought to break into a container when the keys got lost. If nothing else, the security guards must have been a bit bemused as it was by now around 10pm. Driving back to the house, we now repeated our steps through the neighbours and over the wall. Sliding the patio door out of the way once again, we fed the bolt cutters through, and each took hold of a different arm, and pushed then together. Three seconds later we were in. Shockingly easy.

And just five minutes after this, my parents arrived having been dropped back by a taxi.

And so, the lesson was learnt. My next question was wondering what to replace the padlock with – one that was breakable, or one that will last more than three seconds. I went for the latter and made made sure that a spare key was safely stashed away.

Tuesday 23rd December 2008

Seeing that I mentioned December 2008 in my last post, I thought the photo below may interest you. It's of a petrol tanker that has two minutes before caught fire while unloading fuel at a filling station. There were no serious injuries or fatalities. Unfortunately for me and my passenger we decided to scrap our visit to the giraffes, as though we may have been able to creep past the immense and occasionally exploding fire, it would have taken vastly longer on the return journey. (The photo was taken just as we have crossed the central reservation to return to town). Though much of the petrol station melted and burnt, it was not more than a few months before it was rebuilt.