London... without hesitation, repetition or deviation

Lately I've been thinking that it'd be a good idea to cut down on my intake of news. I admit that there are lots of good reasons to be aware of what's going on but several recent news stories have been the sort to continue on for days at a time, drip feeding details to the waiting media. So this past week I decided to cut down. Both at the home and the office I'm choosing not to tune in and its been a pleasant change. The one hiccup in the week was Tuesday...

We rearranged our week and took the opportunity to travel into London from Oxford. The bus was pleasant and and speedy and costs a lot less than the train off-peak day return cost of £44 each on Chilterns Trains (!). Our target was New Broadcasting House, home of the BBC in London where we had managed to secure tickets to see Just a Minute being recorded. After a queue of perhaps thirty minutes we reached the front of the queue and passed through security to the light airy corridor beyond. I don't know what I was expecting but I had not expected to be face to face with a mocked-up Dalek or Dr Who phone box. Neither had I expected there to be a very large and lovely cafe. To the left stood someone presenting the weather and spread out below was the BBC Newsroom. Behind the glass a camera occasionally rolled along its track waiting for the cue to begin the establishing shot for the headlines on the hour and half hour.

(c) Andy Hebden

Recording of Just a Minute was running behind schedule and so we spent perhaps an hour being bombarded by all the news taking place around the world - quite a contrast to what I had intended.

Eventually we were able to make our way through to the Radio Theatre where two programmes of Just a Minute were recorded. The rules are simple: speak on a subject for one minute without hesitation, repetition or deviation. It was really good fun and well worth an afternoon away from the office. As a day out it was up there with my school trip to see Blind Date being recorded back in the last millennium...

One year of university completed ... in little over eight months.

On Tuesday I finished my university course (bar any need to retake my exam or coursework) and with it comes a lifting of the pressure that builds throughout the semester. It feels quite different from when I completed the first semester, perhaps because this time I know that I don't have to do it all again.


Undertaking the course has been an interesting experience. I've enjoyed the opportunity to get to know a group of people outside of a church setting. I'm going to miss catching up with them for one afternoon each week.

It's been an interesting contrast with my undergraduate degree. Back then I was studying international politics and I found it hard to pull out the salient points from the books and articles. This time before starting the course I sought to correct this and so I picked up some tips on how to summarise and synthesise. I've also found the subject matter more accessible. Rather than trying to understand an author's opinion I'm instead trying to understand models of practice and as a visual learner that more easily sticks with me.

I've been given wonderful support this year, both from the office where I've only been required to work part time, and from my wife who's invaluable in her support at those times when I'm exhausted and emotionally drained.

 My third support has been a kitchen timer. This little chap has corrected, rebuked and trained me in righteous working and encouraged me. He doesn't shout and he's happy to be paused but he's held me accountable. What a friend.

What next from all of this? Well, we're due to go back to Kenya and I'll be working in a personnel role full time. I'm not sure how much of my particular training from the course will be of direct use - may we never need to instigate a disciplinary procedure or get brought to an employment tribunal. For the past few years in Kenya I have been meeting up on Saturday mornings for breakfast with a friend who helps run a small NGO called Spur Afrika. They are really interested in the need for mentoring young men in Kibera, one of Nairobi's slums. I completely agree with their thinking - to get out of poverty one is expected to become a self-employed man or woman of business - getting a bank account, a loan, navigating government regulations, avoiding risk and illness, and if that wasn't enough, finding the right product for the right niche. That's a tough first job. Maybe I'll have something to plug into their training course.

But before all this we need to arrange the steps that will get us back to Kenya... more blog posts to follow...

A busy autumn

I'm long overdue writing on the blog and so I'm snatching a few minutes this Monday morning as I'll not be able to make headway on the main task of the day until the afternoon.

Hope has the autumn been? Busy is what it's been:

On my part-time postgraduate course I have felt under pressure on several occasions, mainly around a finance exam and two coursework deadlines. I'm not sure I've found the sweet spot in my studies. After the long Tuesday I'm quite tired on the Wednesday and I never quite seem to shake it off before the end of another week. Redeeming the evenings after a day at work seems hard too with the work day finishing an hour later than it would in Kenya - I blink and  miss it.

I've learnt some things about myself in the course such as that I understand more of what I am reading when I don't take notes. I could almost say that I enjoyed the reading because I could see myself internalising and processing what I had read. There is a need to write some things down as my memory cannot hold it well for very long and so I need to work on this a bit. Now that we're into the eighth week of the course the reading been pushed to the back burner while the coursework comes to the fore. I'm not enjoyed the coursework as much as I would have liked - perhaps because our field of work is so complex and obscure to the academic world of human resource management.

On the positive side of life we have managed to be hospitable with several friends and relatives popping in for cups of tea or staying over while passing by. This past weekend we went to London on Friday for the tennis ATP Tour Finals. We watched a good doubles match before witnessing Djokovic beat Berdych. BBC Sport wrote of the win that "When he [Djokovic] broke again in game three of the second there seemed little prospect of the muted afternoon crowd coming to life." That was us.

The Thame-ing of the Shoe

Today seems a good point to sit down and write a few lines - I know that we still need to write about our time on Mfangano island but that will require a longer stretch of time.

We arrived at Heathrow on the 17th July. The following day we drove our little Nissan Micra from London to South Devon. I (Andrew) had had some family holidays around there when growing up and having some familiarity helped us to find our way around.

Going straight on holiday is stressful - you have to repack your bags after all the earlier packing in Kenya and travelling on a night flight - but to me its the equivalent of two weeks on a boat sailing back to the UK - I've left where I was but I'm not yet where I am going - I'm in transit and that gives space for reflection.

Sunset over Hope Cove

Having been in Kenya I had different criteria than what might be expected for what constitutes a good holiday, and a good camping holiday at that. I wanted the long light evenings; the coolness of the air during the night, the dew and damp grass in the morning, the simplicity of cooking and washing up; and from a weather point of view I wanted a little rain, patchy cloud and some sun too. We were wonderfully pleased to have something of everything - even fog rolling up the valley.

After our holiday we have had some church holiday club, a jolly day out to Olympic rowing at Eton Dorney (in which we even got the opportunity to shout 'courage!' to a rower from Niger who was up against stiff opposition in his race).

Then last Friday we moved to a new town that will be home till mid-January - Thame. It's a small town close to Oxford. The house is right on the edge of the town and beyond the road behind the house is a nicely rounded field of wheat. On the first afternoon we went to the high street and popped into Clarks shoes. I tried a shoe on sale and liked the price and the fit. I asked to see the other shoe in the pair - if they could find it - ho ho. Several minutes passed and no shoe arrived. Another staff member went to have a look for their lost colleague. Eventually they appeared apologising that the other half of the pair was unmatching - the same sole but different stitching. They therefore offered the pair for £10 - a nice discount of 82% on the original selling price.

The town seems very interesting - it has a cattle market and a vibrant high street of bakeries, butchers, and boutiques and charity shops. The town is grounded in history with old buildings dotted around - wonky roofs and exposed beams, multicoloured bricks and tiles and rubble walls.

The following afternoon we set out to walk to a neighbouring village. The countryside was beautiful - rivers, greens, budding flowers and lush grasses, dragonflies, red kites, a buzzard and a water rat. Truly wonderful. We're really thankful for the provision of this home and town and we pray that it'll be a fruitful time.

Way out West: Part 1 - The first two days

Travelling in Kenya is not something that I get to do much. I feel that Nairobi is where I am accustomed to and going out of town brings me out in something of a rash - I become crisis-oriented and think of all the things that could go wrong. When I actually pick up my bag and embark on the trip, I seem to find that it's not so bad after all.

Two weeks ago Janet and I had a wonderful trip. On the Sunday it was the dedication of the Bible in Sabaot and after this we had the opportunity to visit Mfangano Island in Lake Victoria. Here's how it went.

We left Nairobi at around 9:15am on a chilly Saturday morning in a fleet of minibuses. We headed out of town on the road that runs North-West towards Uganda. There was not much to do but try and rest in preparation for the coming few days of continuing travels. It didn't seem too long until we stopped for lunch - maybe even around 11:30. A smokey cafe was the venue and many staff piled in and ordered fried chicken and allsorts else. No less than two of our colleagues told us that they were avoiding the food though - "You cannot trust these places". Clearly many many people do though. Janet and I had been ultra organised and had made sandwiches as well as having pre-cooked some chicken (this was after the experience of a 13 or so hour coach ride from Kampala to Nairobi where a "five minute stop" by the driver was construed to mean that the whole coach except me and my friend disembarked and returned with quarter chickens on sticks, while I made do with an oversized bag of honey-covered peanuts for the rest of the journey, a food stuff I have never wanted to eat again since).

Anyway, I disgress, the journey continued after lunch. Janet and I have a small iPod Shuffle and the day before we loaded it up with a number of radio shows and music. We whiled away a couple of hours with BBC Radio 5Live Film Reviews and Radio 4's The Now Show. Time stretched out. We were beginning to flag, but started to see signs of being near Eldoret, our destination. After the longest entry to a small town ever - during which the bus seemed to be full of talk as to which world class runners lived in which houses - we arrived at our hotel: The Marriott Hotel or the Marriot Hotel - both spellings were evident. I don't think the other Marriott hotel chain have heard of them. We arrived in a torrential rainstorm which necessitated the bus being parked centimetres from the lobby. The staff were friendly and helpful and soon we all setted into rooms before dinner and European football.

The next day we had been told that departure was at 7am and to be at breakfast at 6am. One of the challenges of time-keeping in Kenya is knowing when is something a request or when is it just a vague wish. The previous morning's departure had been set for 8:30am which was very easily missed. This Sunday morning, at 7:03 we were the second to last people on the transport which was today a large school bus. The seats were a little too child sized to fit several grown adults in a line, and so I sat sideways out into the aisle.

We stopped in the centre of town to collect more travellers going to the Bible dedication. I only say this because I enjoyed snapping the photo below in the town hall.

The journey to Kapsakwony took slightly longer than planned;  an hour and a half longer. The bus would go up one foothill and then down the other side which was only slighly shorter in height before the next climb would begin. The scenery was beautiful and a lush green. At one point we saw signs on buidling saying Kimilili. This surprised me somewhat as my brother's wife's brother and his wife live there. We carried on up the mountain. We started passing more and more people walking. It occurred to us that they were going to the same event. This is going to be big. Then a banner was over the road announcing the dedication of the Bible. And then we arrived at the sight of many coaches and vehicles parked up. Disembarking we followed the flow of people across the field. On the other side men and women were separated out in order to be frisked by the gender appropriate police officers. As an obvious non-Kenyan I was waved through the queue. Inside was a sea of people. I couldn't quite get my bearings there were so many. There were marquees arrange in a rectangular quad about 30 metres across the opening. After walking round three sides we found where we were supposed to be sitting. It was rammed with people and so I stood at the back with an umbrella to keep the sun off. Speeches were flowing - we had arrived very late. Even the politicians had beaten us there. No... wait.... a 4x4 drove into the middle of the quad, out got a woman with the most enormous head-dress. She walked towards the dignitaries and someone came running with a chair for her use.

Many of the speeches touched upon the role the Bible can play in reconciliation. Mount Elgon has had a recent history of violence. Time doesn't heal wounds very well but forgiveness does.

One of the highlights was listening to several people reading publicly from the Bible.  An older woman had a go. "This is very hard" she said in Sabaot, and she's sort of right. Sabaot is a langauge that has 20 vowels and 11 consonants. Swahili has five vowels and so for her, as someone who had managed to read Swahili, it's hard going. Following her was a young girl in a yellow dress with a clear and high pitched voice which rang out clearly. She launched into her reading, which was fast and seemingly perfect - there was no stumbling. The crowd, by now around 10,000 gave her the best reception of the day - cheers, ululations and massive applause. She said more than any number of speakers with eloquent words. Take a look 2 minutes and 32 seconds into this news report to see for yourself.

As the day wore on the microphone opened up to the politicians present. The headline politician was the honerable William Ruto who is running to be President of Kenya. He is born a Kalenjin and that language is related to Sabaot. It's exciting to think what could come from him holding the Bible in a neighbouring language to his heart. What could the Holy Spirit impart to him that may change the face of Kenya?

Janet and I did not have much time to hang around. We had a boat to catch, and so soon after 2pm we met up with Naphtaly and his taxi driver for the day, and we began our trip south to Lake Victoria. We stopped off in Kimilili for some lunch - chicken and chips. Once again I rued the lack of a phone number for Mike and Becky, my brother's in-laws. We later learned that they were living just around the corner. What a shame. We carried on our journey. Naphtaly spent a while lamenting the instructions he had been given to come to the dedication. "take the left turn before the T-junction" - several miles before the T-junction - was a particularly amusing point. We carried on onto wide plains of sugar cane around Mamias. We missed one road bump at speed - perhaps 50mph - always enjoyable.

We stopped at the equator for photos and then ploughed on. The clock was somewhere near 6pm and the sky was darkening with rain clouds. We took a short cut for perhaps twenty minutes of dirt road. Turning back on to tarmac roads the skies opened. Lightning all around as the sun set and it became dark. The road wound down to the coast. In the rain there was nothing but the faintest shift of hue through the windscreen to seperate the road from the vegetation. Every few seconds the sky would flash and light up the next corner for us to take.

The journey down to Lake Victoria from Andrew Sweet on Vimeo.

Finally the road petered out and we found ourselves in the dark looking out across water and boats. The rain was incessant. We waited. The rain slowed to that of a regular rainstorm. This was the cue for a boat to be bailed out and prepared. This was done under the light of the car headlights. Our bags were next stowed under a tarpaulin and next we clambered into the boat. We had an umbrella each - you should never travel without one - and we must have looked a sight. Iwas dressed somewhat smart casual, Naphtaly was in a smart grey suit and Janet was wearing a pink dress down to her ankles. The engine started into life at one of the first attempts, and we headed out into the darkness. 

The water was surprisingly calm. The long thin boat has much in common with a canoe and it sliced through any choppy waves there were. We angled our brollies forwards to keep the light rain off us. We had no lights on the boat or light jackets. The land was dark except for occasional dots of brightness. The storm was still close enough for lightening to flicker on the left and the right every second or so as we made our journey. The rumbles of thunder were hardly audible. The journey across the bay was about 30 minutes. It's hard to keep track of time on the water. It felt like a long time. I thought of Jesus asleep in the boat asleep while the disciples battled a storm. I wondered what insights I was gaining.

Arriving on the far shore we found a taxi waiting. We headed for some food of tilapia and from here we made our way to the International Center for Insect Physiology and Ecology. After such a long and eventful journey we felt so blessed to have arrived at such a welcoming centre with hot water in the taps. A good night's sleep commenced. Just one more boat ride till the island.

• More information about Bible translation in Kenya is available at http://www.btlkenya.org.

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.

Code and chips

French has taken a bit of a back seat in the past three months. After a promising start it's become quite hard to get back from work and down to French in the slot before starting to cook and things like that.

Something I have found enjoyable to fit into the cracks has been Codecademy which is an online course to help teach computer coding. I still feel a complete dunce, but the course is well structured. I feel that now that I'm actively trying to grasp more of an understanding, I'll be allowed to purchase a circuit board from Raspberry Pi when they reach the market at the end of the month. Raspberry Pi are a UK foundation that are manufacturing credit card-sized computers that run Linux (with components similar to those found in a simple smart phone all for between $25 and $35, the latter with ethernet and more RAM. I applaud them for seeing a need - namely a lack of programming opportunities among school kids - and then seeing through the filling of that need. That's entrepreneurism in practise.

Scrabble-icious

Thursday's game of Scrabble featuring scores of 353 against 298. Pretty epic.

What's been making the news in December:

Over the past month or so there have been a number of articles on the internet about Bible translation. Here are links to all the ones that I have come across.

The Bible should be available to read in every Christian's native language

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/dec/20/bible-translation-ivorian-village

Here is a comment piece written by the Director of Wycliffe Bible Translators UK. It's a good introduction to the issues and arguments for Bible translation.

The Bible Society of the West Indies translated the Bible into Jamaican patois. But traditionalists on the island have accused them of dumbing-down the scriptures. The BBC's religious affairs correspondent Robert Pigott reports, the project has awakened fierce controversy over the role Patois should play in Jamaican national identity.

Radio article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9663000/9663844.stm
Print article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16285462

It seems to me that the question here is not so much whether the finished Bible is more understandable, but whether Scripture is too 'holy' for some languages. Translating the Bible into certain dialects in Britain would probably get similar responses, perhaps because we would say Jesus would never have put a glottal stop in place of a 't' - he was perfect in every way, even in pronunciation.

Zambian farmers learn to write their Shanjo language

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15562729

For the first time stories passed down through the generations by word of mouth are being written down.

In the first exercise undertaken by the Shanjo translators, they were asked to use the Latin alphabet to write out advice on the benefits of training oxen.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15584923

It was wonderful to come into the office a few weeks ago and see this article on the BBC News Website. I first met James Lucas in 2006 when he was taking some training in Language and Culture Acquisition. It's exciting to see how the language that is perhaps perceived as having held them back is becoming a tool to wider development. I think of a Shanjo farmer trying to comprehend the number of people who have read this article about his language, a language that few people in Zambia may even be aware of. And in the future, maybe that farmer's children will be able to begin school in the Shanjo language, learning to speak the national language through their mother tongue, going on to be successful and break out of poverty without needing to turn their back on their cultural identity.

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.