Thursday, August 27, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Safari Roadtrip: Week 3, Retour
Last time we tuned into the saga of a safari roadtrip, our favorite family of five had just finished a vacation on the Indian Ocean… Now it is time for them to head home:
Day 19: Sunday in Nairobi. Anytime we are able to we enjoy visiting with our favorite Kenyan pastor and his family. I was too sick to attend church this morning, but Kent and the kids went. Later, as Kent was loading up for our big trip back tomorrow I was napping with Anna when I heard a knock on the door, ever so quietly. I wasn’t expecting anyone and wasn’t feeling well so I treated it like a snooze button, figuring it was the guesthouse manager or someone else who would soon go away. Knocking again. Snoozing again. Finally I hear voices, like they are coming in! In a slight panic I rushed to the door to find Pastor Karani and his family coming to visit me because I was ill. How sweet is that? Thankfully Anna didn’t wake up, and we had a lovely visit outside in the garden area. I guess visiting the sick is biblical and all, but we don’t seem to do it much in the US. Maybe it’s because we don’t really seclude ourselves either. Just take cold medicine and keep working, exercising, driving around… Anyway, my ‘hospital procedure’ is early tomorrow morning and I’m not allowed even water to drink after midnight tonight, so off to get a big snack!
Day 20: This morning Kent has to do all the packing and loading on his own. Kind of a nice break for me, except for the need to be in the hospital. I taxied across town at 7am just to beat as much traffic as possible. My appt. was for 8am and in rush hour driving could take an hour. I was early. It was fun to revisit the same wing where Anna was born two and a half short years ago. Still the plush carpets, wide hallways and gorgeous fresh flower arrangements. I still had a raging head cold and couldn’t take medicine, but they let me do the procedure anyway. I don’t remember much past the IV needle and being accidentally called by my middle name. They were putting a camera into my stomach to check it out. I was warned I would feel really groggy the rest of the day, but woke right up after a couple hours and was so bored waiting to get checked out of the hospital that I read a few chapters of my book. For extra fun I was wheeled to another building for an ultrasound of my gall bladder (which was totally normal btw).
Kent was meanwhile wildly packing, dressing kids, loading, doing office stuff and getting pizza for lunch (eat all you can, while you can!) before picking me up and heading out of town. This is our shortest day of driving on the whole trip: Only 4 hrs! Saw more flamingoes from a distance and zebra everywhere. One herd(?) crossed the road in front of us! We arrived at the missionary campsite in the rain and to James’ dismay were given a different cabin (without toys or books). Mac n cheese for dinner helped a little.
Day 21: The LONGEST day! At least this time we expected the cold. We hit the road early after hot oatmeal packets (the stores didn’t have raisins, so we finely chopped apricots and added a dash of nutmeg – it was good. How can you go wrong with brown sugar?) This is the day I learned that finding a good bush/tree is the quickest (and probably cleanest) potty stop, a skill that served us all well over the next three days. Car talk podcasts also helped a lot! We hit the border midday and both boys had accidents (the good news is we had just arrived at the nicest public toilets on the whole trip; the bad news is that we didn’t plan for changes of clothes and had to unload the roof rack to get to their suitcase). I got the kids out and ran them around in the grass while Kent did all the paperwork. What a guy. For various reasons it took us almost 2 hours to get back on the road in Uganda. The roads were great and we made good time. Caught a glimpse of Lake Victoria and got into Kampala just after dinner (sausages and French fries at a roadside tourist trap) to find that our reservations were written down for tomorrow! They had room for us, but the problem was that they had had power outages and no water and very few clean sheets or towels left. After nearly 12 hours in the car and still dealing with the cold (and watching our kids get so excited about a place they recognized and remembered) there was NO getting us back in that car! I told her we would sleep on the floor and use our MSR pack towels if she would only let us stay!! They were super nice and found some ‘uglier’ sheets we could use. And their power came back so we had hot showers! Yes.
Day 22: Today we stayed in Kampala to see doctors and do some shopping. If we can’t get enough done we may stay an extra day. After a rare moment of Email/internet access (while rush hour died down), we headed off to the doctor’s office. Joel was due for his ‘5-yr’ booster shots and I had a bizarre blood blister they eventually froze off. Sorry if that’s too much information. We didn’t finish until lunch, so we took the kids to a local shopping mall for burgers and fries at a food court. We are not really ‘mall’ people. Afterwards we were all SO ready for naps, but there was still tons of shopping to do. Kent decided to drop slightly-comatose me and the napping kids back at the guesthouse and hit the stores with my long list of staples we can’t get in Congo: soft TP, diapers, wipes, silverware, raisins, cinnamon, and good shampoo to name a few. I try to bring in about 3 months worth at a time, so there’s lots of math involved to figure our rates of consumption (good thing God gave me a math teacher and expert planner for a Mom! =))
Kent chose a store that was a bit further away, but most likely to have everything in one trip. The other benefit is that it is the only place in town that accepts credit cards (since we are only in the country 2 days we are using cash mostly for gas or food). SO… off he went filling his cart with James’ help. They pile 2 carts high with the list full of stuff, get to the front to find that the store’s power is out. The registers run on power. The generator is broken. He cannot pay by credit card. He cannot even pay in cash. They are essentially closed (with a store full of customers). They say it will just take a while.
A ‘while’ later he abandons the full carts and screaming customers to get the food items next door at a South African grocery store. He finds everything, buys it and returns while everyone is still waiting at the registers. After about 90 minutes of waiting the store gets up and running again. For whatever reason, they have to start scanning every item over again! With 5:00pm rush hour looming it was stressful to say the least. They made it back by 6:15 and we all spent the dark evening hours sorting and loading shopping bags in the parking lot. The only thing we didn’t get done was shopping for upholstery fabric for our future couches, but I was too sick to care by that point. With 2 more long days in the car to go and no electricity from here on out I decided to start an antibiotic for bronchitis. No use fighting infection while you’re traveling.
Day 23: We had to head out of the city super early to beat traffic. We were in the car in the dark by 6am. Thankfully the kids were getting used to this routine. Somehow I took us for a wrong turn somewhere (foreign city without road signs in the dark at 6am while sick… hm? If I had a MONTH to plan, maybe. =)) We only had to go in circles once and finally left the last we would see of ‘civilization’, whatever that means, for two days. The roads were great, the sunrise beautiful, and lots of children lined the highways walking to various schools. You knew you were near a school when suddenly everyone in sight is wearing the same shade of green, or blue or pink even. We once again saw the glorious Karuma Falls (Kent is convinced they are the falls used in the Bogart’s African Queen movie, which is supposed to be in Congo, but hey). We were all on the lookout for wildlife as we neared the game park entrance, and we were not disappointed. We had seen a wild elephant and rhinos in the distance last time. This time we saw 2 cape buffalo and just at the last minute noticed some splashing in the shallows of the Nile. Kent pulled over just before the bridge and we watched about 50 hippos splashing their ears and hanging out at the edge of the river! Hippos can be elusive, so this was a real treat. Unfortunately our camera battery was dead, so you won’t see pictures from the last day or two of the trip! Boo hiss! We said goodbye to the pavement and pulled into the last stop exhausted.
God blessed us all the same. The guesthouse where we stayed has a few other families living and working there. One is a couple with a 4-yr-old girl named Joy who our children really enjoyed playing with previously. This time Joy looked like she had been waiting for us and was ready to move in! She had all 3 of them over to play at her house, and they invited us over for dinner! This was great because there are no cooking facilities and our dinner was likely to be granola. On top of that after dinner he opened up his bookshop for Kent and spent lots of time networking in ministry. They run a Christian resources mission that acts as both reading room and book seller. They also had lots of materials in French (VERY hard to come by!) Kent came home with children’s Bible stories, materials for pastors, and a comic book version of Christ’s life called “Messiah”. Kent is to bookstore like kids are to candy stores… =) Funny. My Dad’s the same way.
Day 24: THE LAST DAY! We had checked with everyone at the border crossing to see when they open. It’s not like there’s a sign or website to tell you. Everyone said 7:30am. We figured we could show up at 8 and still make it home well before dark, which was our goal. Kent often drinks diet Coke to stay alert while driving, and they now make it in bottles and it is available in Uganda (but not where we live yet). SO, he had purchased some for the road and one or two bottles to bring back and show the Coke merchants at home what he was looking for. Providentially, in the process of loading the car, one of the glass bottles got knocked off the table and, as glass normally does on concrete, shattered into thousands of pieces. Bye soda! We got everything cleaned up and loaded, but it took MUCH longer with a mess like that to deal with. We didn’t arrive at the border until 8:45am. When we arrived we found many others waiting and the crossing locked. Apparently the car registration folks were there at 7:30, but the immigration official arrives when he feels like it. He sauntered in around 9:15, and we were very thankful we didn’t arrive much earlier and waste our time waiting in the car!
The next highlight of the day was taking a wrong turn after we crossed the border. I don’t know if I will ever understand the signs here. Obviously I didn’t get it right and we ended up taking a serious detour through a beautiful old mission station where people used to send their kids to a boarding school and take vacations. I can see why with all the lush green grass, huge wildflowers (can yellow daisies really be 5 ft tall?) and cosmos lining the road under the shadow of towering eucalyptus trees. These mountains really CAN be gorgeous. After our detour we had to get back on the right road. Kent stopped several times masquerading as a Swahili-speaker, and we got the gist that we were finally headed in the right direction. There were definitely a few moments of panic, but all in all we didn’t lose that much time.
Once we found the real road, we came to the stretch currently under construction that was thick with dusty loose dirt (I was sort of hoping our little wrong turn would end up bypassing this stretch of road). And about an hour from home, just at the end of the nasty dirt section and the beginning of the rockier section, we heard what Kent thought was mud hitting the back right wheel well; that ominous thud, thud, thud. Kent pulled over slightly to kick the mud off when he smelled burning rubber and saw our tire had been shredded for some time. It wasn’t mud hitting the wheel well, it was pieces of tire. I asked if we could pull over further to leave more room for big semi trucks cruising by, but Kent said there was no moving the tire.
So it was James and I to jump out and pull up huge weeds to lay in the road (East African flares), and then to count paces back to see how far back the tire bits went, and to pray that the lorries careening around the corner would see my weeds! Looks like we rode on it at least 120 yds before noticing, but the road is so bumpy anyway we didn’t feel a thing! Three or four passersby stopped to help change the tire or offer advice. We offered drinking water and simsim (crunchy baked sesame seeds in sugar like a sweet tahini granola bar – yum) afterward in return. We got back on the road after only 40 minutes or so, thank God. As Kent put the blown out tire on the back door (see picture in previous post), he noticed that it had at least 3 spots that had been repaired in the past. This tire was old when we bought the car. The trouble was we had no way of telling how bad the other 4 tires were… We were not yet in radio contact with friends at home, so we tried texting them so they would know we were driving without a spare and it was nearly dusk. They ended up not getting the message, but we ended up just fine and so happy to be HOME after 24 days on the road! We had 2 friends cooking for us, so we could just rest for a couple days.
Bliss.
3 days later I came down with our first case of malaria, but I’ll save that for a different post! =) Thanks for ‘journeying with us’ over the mountains, across the Nile, equator and Great Rift Valley (and back again) over 1000 miles in 3 foreign countries in 24 days. We would never have made it without so much prayer support!
Day 19: Sunday in Nairobi. Anytime we are able to we enjoy visiting with our favorite Kenyan pastor and his family. I was too sick to attend church this morning, but Kent and the kids went. Later, as Kent was loading up for our big trip back tomorrow I was napping with Anna when I heard a knock on the door, ever so quietly. I wasn’t expecting anyone and wasn’t feeling well so I treated it like a snooze button, figuring it was the guesthouse manager or someone else who would soon go away. Knocking again. Snoozing again. Finally I hear voices, like they are coming in! In a slight panic I rushed to the door to find Pastor Karani and his family coming to visit me because I was ill. How sweet is that? Thankfully Anna didn’t wake up, and we had a lovely visit outside in the garden area. I guess visiting the sick is biblical and all, but we don’t seem to do it much in the US. Maybe it’s because we don’t really seclude ourselves either. Just take cold medicine and keep working, exercising, driving around… Anyway, my ‘hospital procedure’ is early tomorrow morning and I’m not allowed even water to drink after midnight tonight, so off to get a big snack!
Day 20: This morning Kent has to do all the packing and loading on his own. Kind of a nice break for me, except for the need to be in the hospital. I taxied across town at 7am just to beat as much traffic as possible. My appt. was for 8am and in rush hour driving could take an hour. I was early. It was fun to revisit the same wing where Anna was born two and a half short years ago. Still the plush carpets, wide hallways and gorgeous fresh flower arrangements. I still had a raging head cold and couldn’t take medicine, but they let me do the procedure anyway. I don’t remember much past the IV needle and being accidentally called by my middle name. They were putting a camera into my stomach to check it out. I was warned I would feel really groggy the rest of the day, but woke right up after a couple hours and was so bored waiting to get checked out of the hospital that I read a few chapters of my book. For extra fun I was wheeled to another building for an ultrasound of my gall bladder (which was totally normal btw).
Kent was meanwhile wildly packing, dressing kids, loading, doing office stuff and getting pizza for lunch (eat all you can, while you can!) before picking me up and heading out of town. This is our shortest day of driving on the whole trip: Only 4 hrs! Saw more flamingoes from a distance and zebra everywhere. One herd(?) crossed the road in front of us! We arrived at the missionary campsite in the rain and to James’ dismay were given a different cabin (without toys or books). Mac n cheese for dinner helped a little.
Day 21: The LONGEST day! At least this time we expected the cold. We hit the road early after hot oatmeal packets (the stores didn’t have raisins, so we finely chopped apricots and added a dash of nutmeg – it was good. How can you go wrong with brown sugar?) This is the day I learned that finding a good bush/tree is the quickest (and probably cleanest) potty stop, a skill that served us all well over the next three days. Car talk podcasts also helped a lot! We hit the border midday and both boys had accidents (the good news is we had just arrived at the nicest public toilets on the whole trip; the bad news is that we didn’t plan for changes of clothes and had to unload the roof rack to get to their suitcase). I got the kids out and ran them around in the grass while Kent did all the paperwork. What a guy. For various reasons it took us almost 2 hours to get back on the road in Uganda. The roads were great and we made good time. Caught a glimpse of Lake Victoria and got into Kampala just after dinner (sausages and French fries at a roadside tourist trap) to find that our reservations were written down for tomorrow! They had room for us, but the problem was that they had had power outages and no water and very few clean sheets or towels left. After nearly 12 hours in the car and still dealing with the cold (and watching our kids get so excited about a place they recognized and remembered) there was NO getting us back in that car! I told her we would sleep on the floor and use our MSR pack towels if she would only let us stay!! They were super nice and found some ‘uglier’ sheets we could use. And their power came back so we had hot showers! Yes.
Day 22: Today we stayed in Kampala to see doctors and do some shopping. If we can’t get enough done we may stay an extra day. After a rare moment of Email/internet access (while rush hour died down), we headed off to the doctor’s office. Joel was due for his ‘5-yr’ booster shots and I had a bizarre blood blister they eventually froze off. Sorry if that’s too much information. We didn’t finish until lunch, so we took the kids to a local shopping mall for burgers and fries at a food court. We are not really ‘mall’ people. Afterwards we were all SO ready for naps, but there was still tons of shopping to do. Kent decided to drop slightly-comatose me and the napping kids back at the guesthouse and hit the stores with my long list of staples we can’t get in Congo: soft TP, diapers, wipes, silverware, raisins, cinnamon, and good shampoo to name a few. I try to bring in about 3 months worth at a time, so there’s lots of math involved to figure our rates of consumption (good thing God gave me a math teacher and expert planner for a Mom! =))
Kent chose a store that was a bit further away, but most likely to have everything in one trip. The other benefit is that it is the only place in town that accepts credit cards (since we are only in the country 2 days we are using cash mostly for gas or food). SO… off he went filling his cart with James’ help. They pile 2 carts high with the list full of stuff, get to the front to find that the store’s power is out. The registers run on power. The generator is broken. He cannot pay by credit card. He cannot even pay in cash. They are essentially closed (with a store full of customers). They say it will just take a while.
A ‘while’ later he abandons the full carts and screaming customers to get the food items next door at a South African grocery store. He finds everything, buys it and returns while everyone is still waiting at the registers. After about 90 minutes of waiting the store gets up and running again. For whatever reason, they have to start scanning every item over again! With 5:00pm rush hour looming it was stressful to say the least. They made it back by 6:15 and we all spent the dark evening hours sorting and loading shopping bags in the parking lot. The only thing we didn’t get done was shopping for upholstery fabric for our future couches, but I was too sick to care by that point. With 2 more long days in the car to go and no electricity from here on out I decided to start an antibiotic for bronchitis. No use fighting infection while you’re traveling.
Day 23: We had to head out of the city super early to beat traffic. We were in the car in the dark by 6am. Thankfully the kids were getting used to this routine. Somehow I took us for a wrong turn somewhere (foreign city without road signs in the dark at 6am while sick… hm? If I had a MONTH to plan, maybe. =)) We only had to go in circles once and finally left the last we would see of ‘civilization’, whatever that means, for two days. The roads were great, the sunrise beautiful, and lots of children lined the highways walking to various schools. You knew you were near a school when suddenly everyone in sight is wearing the same shade of green, or blue or pink even. We once again saw the glorious Karuma Falls (Kent is convinced they are the falls used in the Bogart’s African Queen movie, which is supposed to be in Congo, but hey). We were all on the lookout for wildlife as we neared the game park entrance, and we were not disappointed. We had seen a wild elephant and rhinos in the distance last time. This time we saw 2 cape buffalo and just at the last minute noticed some splashing in the shallows of the Nile. Kent pulled over just before the bridge and we watched about 50 hippos splashing their ears and hanging out at the edge of the river! Hippos can be elusive, so this was a real treat. Unfortunately our camera battery was dead, so you won’t see pictures from the last day or two of the trip! Boo hiss! We said goodbye to the pavement and pulled into the last stop exhausted.
God blessed us all the same. The guesthouse where we stayed has a few other families living and working there. One is a couple with a 4-yr-old girl named Joy who our children really enjoyed playing with previously. This time Joy looked like she had been waiting for us and was ready to move in! She had all 3 of them over to play at her house, and they invited us over for dinner! This was great because there are no cooking facilities and our dinner was likely to be granola. On top of that after dinner he opened up his bookshop for Kent and spent lots of time networking in ministry. They run a Christian resources mission that acts as both reading room and book seller. They also had lots of materials in French (VERY hard to come by!) Kent came home with children’s Bible stories, materials for pastors, and a comic book version of Christ’s life called “Messiah”. Kent is to bookstore like kids are to candy stores… =) Funny. My Dad’s the same way.
Day 24: THE LAST DAY! We had checked with everyone at the border crossing to see when they open. It’s not like there’s a sign or website to tell you. Everyone said 7:30am. We figured we could show up at 8 and still make it home well before dark, which was our goal. Kent often drinks diet Coke to stay alert while driving, and they now make it in bottles and it is available in Uganda (but not where we live yet). SO, he had purchased some for the road and one or two bottles to bring back and show the Coke merchants at home what he was looking for. Providentially, in the process of loading the car, one of the glass bottles got knocked off the table and, as glass normally does on concrete, shattered into thousands of pieces. Bye soda! We got everything cleaned up and loaded, but it took MUCH longer with a mess like that to deal with. We didn’t arrive at the border until 8:45am. When we arrived we found many others waiting and the crossing locked. Apparently the car registration folks were there at 7:30, but the immigration official arrives when he feels like it. He sauntered in around 9:15, and we were very thankful we didn’t arrive much earlier and waste our time waiting in the car!
The next highlight of the day was taking a wrong turn after we crossed the border. I don’t know if I will ever understand the signs here. Obviously I didn’t get it right and we ended up taking a serious detour through a beautiful old mission station where people used to send their kids to a boarding school and take vacations. I can see why with all the lush green grass, huge wildflowers (can yellow daisies really be 5 ft tall?) and cosmos lining the road under the shadow of towering eucalyptus trees. These mountains really CAN be gorgeous. After our detour we had to get back on the right road. Kent stopped several times masquerading as a Swahili-speaker, and we got the gist that we were finally headed in the right direction. There were definitely a few moments of panic, but all in all we didn’t lose that much time.
Once we found the real road, we came to the stretch currently under construction that was thick with dusty loose dirt (I was sort of hoping our little wrong turn would end up bypassing this stretch of road). And about an hour from home, just at the end of the nasty dirt section and the beginning of the rockier section, we heard what Kent thought was mud hitting the back right wheel well; that ominous thud, thud, thud. Kent pulled over slightly to kick the mud off when he smelled burning rubber and saw our tire had been shredded for some time. It wasn’t mud hitting the wheel well, it was pieces of tire. I asked if we could pull over further to leave more room for big semi trucks cruising by, but Kent said there was no moving the tire.
So it was James and I to jump out and pull up huge weeds to lay in the road (East African flares), and then to count paces back to see how far back the tire bits went, and to pray that the lorries careening around the corner would see my weeds! Looks like we rode on it at least 120 yds before noticing, but the road is so bumpy anyway we didn’t feel a thing! Three or four passersby stopped to help change the tire or offer advice. We offered drinking water and simsim (crunchy baked sesame seeds in sugar like a sweet tahini granola bar – yum) afterward in return. We got back on the road after only 40 minutes or so, thank God. As Kent put the blown out tire on the back door (see picture in previous post), he noticed that it had at least 3 spots that had been repaired in the past. This tire was old when we bought the car. The trouble was we had no way of telling how bad the other 4 tires were… We were not yet in radio contact with friends at home, so we tried texting them so they would know we were driving without a spare and it was nearly dusk. They ended up not getting the message, but we ended up just fine and so happy to be HOME after 24 days on the road! We had 2 friends cooking for us, so we could just rest for a couple days.
Bliss.
3 days later I came down with our first case of malaria, but I’ll save that for a different post! =) Thanks for ‘journeying with us’ over the mountains, across the Nile, equator and Great Rift Valley (and back again) over 1000 miles in 3 foreign countries in 24 days. We would never have made it without so much prayer support!
The Kim Flu
Please pray for Kim's health right now. We've been going through several bouts of illness as a family, and were just starting to make significant progress again on setting up the house, but Kim's down again. There are indications that it may be a serious flu strain, so we've been advised to keep her in our bedroom as much as possible, which means I'll be running much of the house for awhile.
Please also pray for us as we try to reorganize to get the essentials done, and make progress on settling as quick as possible, so we can get out of emergencies, and into routines.
Please also pray for us as we try to reorganize to get the essentials done, and make progress on settling as quick as possible, so we can get out of emergencies, and into routines.
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Photo Travelogue: Supplimental
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Friday, August 14, 2009
Safari Roadtrip: Week 2, Conference & Vacation
Day 9: How amazing is it to wake up in a resort where someone else will make my bed and create fun breakfasts for the kids?! This morning I woke up totally lost as to where we were. I guess that happens when you’ve slept in 5 different rooms in the same week! Quickly, it came to me – vacation!? How do I do that? It’s been 6 mos at least. I spent most of the day trying to force myself to relax. It was Joel’s birthday today too, so there was lots to do. We kept asking him what he wanted to do, but it seems sitting in the kiddie pool surrounded by other little MKs was bliss enough. I thought he’d at least ask for a camel ride! After Kent saw that Joel was not going to be high-maintenance, he took off for a nap in the room while I read by the kiddie pool. I was really surprised not to see him for another 2+ hours! That was some mid-morning snooze! Then I remembered that it was Kent who had driven (in rough conditions no less) nearly 1,500 miles across Africa. I hadn’t helped with even ONE kilometer! Large trucks with manual transmission for your left hand are not my forte. All in all we rested enough to head into meetings tomorrow. I love the Kenyan coast with soft white sand and corral reef and slow warm waves, baobab, palm, mangrove and frangipania trees. Ahhh!
Day 10: Somehow we forgot to prep the kids for the fact that they don’t get to swim today. Oops. They were somewhat shocked and mad that they have to go to classes today instead of swimming. The team of 20 young people from Calgary who came to minister to our kids (kind of like running a VBS program for them this week) are awesome and wonderful! A few others came along as our worship team too, which has been really fun. Last night we were able to meet our children’s teachers and thankfully they were not at all freaked out by the 1 page, single-spaced, that I gave them on James and how to care for him. They really came to minister to us and our kids and it showed. What a blessing!
Day 11: Okay, it’s harder than I thought to sit in meetings all day while everyone else is lounging by the pool! I don’t know if I’ll get even one swim in today. Thankfully, the kids are loving their new friends in the their classes (most of whom are MKs in Tanzania). Maybe it somehow validates their own experiences – they are not the only “lighter-skinned” people who grow up here. Anna is particularly excited about so many little girls. While others are bawling their heads off at check-in time, my daughter walks confidently in saying over her shoulder, “Bye Mom! I’m playin’ with the dirls!” I couldn’t count how many pictures she colored today. Somehow it makes it easier that they are enjoying themselves while I sit in the A/C and discuss and pray. Our speaker this year is a pastor who has had some great teaching too, which I wouldn’t want to miss.
Day 12: Sabbath!!! What better place to spend a Sabbath than sitting under palm trees, swimming and playing bocce ball in the white sand on the beach. The worship team and pastor provided us with something like ‘church’, and the afternoon was truly lovely.
Day 13, 14, 15 & 16: These days were some intense times of fellowship, prayer, discussion, some disagreements, reconciliation, some confusion, but not a whole lot of rest for sure! Kent had several significant conversations lasting over 2 hrs. Thankfully the kids were having a ball! The other bonus is that ‘kids dinner’ is at 6pm, while the dining room doesn’t open until 7pm, so we had time to feed them and put them to bed and go to a quiet dinner together afterward – like a date night, every night! (with 150 of your colleagues trying to do the same thing…)
Day 17: We finally have some time to swim, sleep, and play with the kids. Praise God for vacation! Really not looking forward to the trip home. Long. Arduous. Hot. Bumpy. Besides in 2 more days I have to have an endoscopy to check out the ulcer idea – really not looking forward to that either. To top it off I feel the cold descending upon me that so many others had last week. YUK! How can I travel across countries while sick?
Day 18: Okay, packing up wasn’t so bad. Kent was so gracious and paid for laundry service – alleluia! (So much better than hand-washing everything in the bathtub!) Now we have suitcases full of clean clothes and are ready to hit the road. Really feeling sick – head cold. I took my heavy-duty decongestant and hoped for the best. We decided, confidently, to skip the insane mud slide of a road and brave traffic on pavement instead. I was mentally prepping myself to help with the driving today. So much so, that I left my purse at the front desk, got behind the wheel, and drove down the beautiful Kenyan coast for 2 hours before realizing the my purse (the ‘everything’ purse) was missing! No driver’s license. No purell after potty stops. No maps. No phone (at all. Kent’s was dead). No game sheets. No medicine for my cold. How many times today has Kent said, “Where’s X?” and heard “In my purse!” So not my day. So many times I thought of Michelle Pfieffer and George Clooney in One Fine Day when she creates 2 impromptu costumes out of the contents of her purse, and he says “Where can I get one of those?” The ‘everything’ purse.
Again, God got us through. I pulled over once I realized I was driving without a license. We had to phone the resort about my purse. Someone had to find it before it was stolen. We really didn’t want to backtrack and add another 4 hrs to our 10 hr drive! If we could call a colleague leaving tomorrow, they could likely bring it for us. Oops we had no phone. BUT we had colleagues on the same route a half-hour behind us, and THEY had a phone! So Kent turned us around and put the kids on point to find our group’s van. Sure enough within 10 minutes (yeah for the slow traffic!) we saw them coming the other way. Kent flashed lights and honked his horn. The lead driver didn’t recognize us. We quickly pulled another U-turn to follow them and track them down. At that exact moment they had chosen to pull into a gas station to fill up! How incredible! We stopped with them, they lent us a phone, the purse was confirmed ‘found’ and would be carried for us the next day. Whew!
That day seemed more like a ‘series of unfortunate events’. After the lost magic purse, exhausted Kent had to drive… again. And we didn’t have maps. We weren’t sure of the distances between gas stations and ended up on fumes in a one-horse town where the locals had to direct us to a friend of a friend with a gas pump across the median full of construction materials. This was not a shining moment of triumphal attitude for me. Then it was lunchtime. The resort offers complimentary boxed lunches. We ordered 5. When we opened them for lunch on the road we found boiled eggs (again! And without salt…), dry white bread sandwiches with margarine OR dry white bread sandwiches with spam. Mmm. We downed what we could stomach and splurged on cheapo ice cream cups at the next gas station.
Lest I digress into despair, we were also clocked going 120 in a 100km/hr (that is going about 65 mph in a 55 – keep in mind this is the middle of nowhere! But to Kenya’s credit they have and are using radar guns to check speeds. This is a relatively new idea here and we were impressed. They had a plain clothes policeman taking makes/models of cars with speeds and then by radio or cell phone having his comrades stopping cars 3 km down the road. Very efficient. Every vehicle but one was pulled off the road with us. =) The one to keep ambling down the road at 30mph had 25 people piled on a pick-up and couldn’t possibly exceed the speed limit. I promised not to digress into only the sordid moments, so I will tell you the ‘good part’. =) Kent pulled every cultural punch he knows while the kids and I were praying in the car. He sauntered calmly over to the police car where 2 policewomen waited to write his ticket up. He took his time shaking their hands and greeting them. He explained how far we had been driving on this trip, asked them if they knew about Bible translation in Kenya and handed them a business card. After asking lots of questions they said they appreciate his work and put the ticket books away!
The last gift God gave us on this dark day was to see a family of giraffe grazing together just off the side of the road with a deep orange sun setting behind them. It was a gorgeous, gracious moment I needed and will never forget.
We pulled into Nairobi at something like 7:30pm as exhausted and hungry as can be. Our adoptive Mom, Dayle, had cooked a gorgeous meal and eagerly awaited us and our munchkins. We chowed down spaghetti and salad and checked into the nearby guesthouse to find only one bedroom, no bed for Anna and no hot water. After the purse fiasco, gas fiasco, and getting stopped by the police, driving for almost 12 hours with few breaks and sick with colds to top it off, we were to tired to care. Yay for the end of that day!
The ‘last leg’ of the journey, week 3, is coming up soon!
Day 10: Somehow we forgot to prep the kids for the fact that they don’t get to swim today. Oops. They were somewhat shocked and mad that they have to go to classes today instead of swimming. The team of 20 young people from Calgary who came to minister to our kids (kind of like running a VBS program for them this week) are awesome and wonderful! A few others came along as our worship team too, which has been really fun. Last night we were able to meet our children’s teachers and thankfully they were not at all freaked out by the 1 page, single-spaced, that I gave them on James and how to care for him. They really came to minister to us and our kids and it showed. What a blessing!
Day 11: Okay, it’s harder than I thought to sit in meetings all day while everyone else is lounging by the pool! I don’t know if I’ll get even one swim in today. Thankfully, the kids are loving their new friends in the their classes (most of whom are MKs in Tanzania). Maybe it somehow validates their own experiences – they are not the only “lighter-skinned” people who grow up here. Anna is particularly excited about so many little girls. While others are bawling their heads off at check-in time, my daughter walks confidently in saying over her shoulder, “Bye Mom! I’m playin’ with the dirls!” I couldn’t count how many pictures she colored today. Somehow it makes it easier that they are enjoying themselves while I sit in the A/C and discuss and pray. Our speaker this year is a pastor who has had some great teaching too, which I wouldn’t want to miss.
Day 12: Sabbath!!! What better place to spend a Sabbath than sitting under palm trees, swimming and playing bocce ball in the white sand on the beach. The worship team and pastor provided us with something like ‘church’, and the afternoon was truly lovely.
Day 13, 14, 15 & 16: These days were some intense times of fellowship, prayer, discussion, some disagreements, reconciliation, some confusion, but not a whole lot of rest for sure! Kent had several significant conversations lasting over 2 hrs. Thankfully the kids were having a ball! The other bonus is that ‘kids dinner’ is at 6pm, while the dining room doesn’t open until 7pm, so we had time to feed them and put them to bed and go to a quiet dinner together afterward – like a date night, every night! (with 150 of your colleagues trying to do the same thing…)
Day 17: We finally have some time to swim, sleep, and play with the kids. Praise God for vacation! Really not looking forward to the trip home. Long. Arduous. Hot. Bumpy. Besides in 2 more days I have to have an endoscopy to check out the ulcer idea – really not looking forward to that either. To top it off I feel the cold descending upon me that so many others had last week. YUK! How can I travel across countries while sick?
Day 18: Okay, packing up wasn’t so bad. Kent was so gracious and paid for laundry service – alleluia! (So much better than hand-washing everything in the bathtub!) Now we have suitcases full of clean clothes and are ready to hit the road. Really feeling sick – head cold. I took my heavy-duty decongestant and hoped for the best. We decided, confidently, to skip the insane mud slide of a road and brave traffic on pavement instead. I was mentally prepping myself to help with the driving today. So much so, that I left my purse at the front desk, got behind the wheel, and drove down the beautiful Kenyan coast for 2 hours before realizing the my purse (the ‘everything’ purse) was missing! No driver’s license. No purell after potty stops. No maps. No phone (at all. Kent’s was dead). No game sheets. No medicine for my cold. How many times today has Kent said, “Where’s X?” and heard “In my purse!” So not my day. So many times I thought of Michelle Pfieffer and George Clooney in One Fine Day when she creates 2 impromptu costumes out of the contents of her purse, and he says “Where can I get one of those?” The ‘everything’ purse.
Again, God got us through. I pulled over once I realized I was driving without a license. We had to phone the resort about my purse. Someone had to find it before it was stolen. We really didn’t want to backtrack and add another 4 hrs to our 10 hr drive! If we could call a colleague leaving tomorrow, they could likely bring it for us. Oops we had no phone. BUT we had colleagues on the same route a half-hour behind us, and THEY had a phone! So Kent turned us around and put the kids on point to find our group’s van. Sure enough within 10 minutes (yeah for the slow traffic!) we saw them coming the other way. Kent flashed lights and honked his horn. The lead driver didn’t recognize us. We quickly pulled another U-turn to follow them and track them down. At that exact moment they had chosen to pull into a gas station to fill up! How incredible! We stopped with them, they lent us a phone, the purse was confirmed ‘found’ and would be carried for us the next day. Whew!
That day seemed more like a ‘series of unfortunate events’. After the lost magic purse, exhausted Kent had to drive… again. And we didn’t have maps. We weren’t sure of the distances between gas stations and ended up on fumes in a one-horse town where the locals had to direct us to a friend of a friend with a gas pump across the median full of construction materials. This was not a shining moment of triumphal attitude for me. Then it was lunchtime. The resort offers complimentary boxed lunches. We ordered 5. When we opened them for lunch on the road we found boiled eggs (again! And without salt…), dry white bread sandwiches with margarine OR dry white bread sandwiches with spam. Mmm. We downed what we could stomach and splurged on cheapo ice cream cups at the next gas station.
Lest I digress into despair, we were also clocked going 120 in a 100km/hr (that is going about 65 mph in a 55 – keep in mind this is the middle of nowhere! But to Kenya’s credit they have and are using radar guns to check speeds. This is a relatively new idea here and we were impressed. They had a plain clothes policeman taking makes/models of cars with speeds and then by radio or cell phone having his comrades stopping cars 3 km down the road. Very efficient. Every vehicle but one was pulled off the road with us. =) The one to keep ambling down the road at 30mph had 25 people piled on a pick-up and couldn’t possibly exceed the speed limit. I promised not to digress into only the sordid moments, so I will tell you the ‘good part’. =) Kent pulled every cultural punch he knows while the kids and I were praying in the car. He sauntered calmly over to the police car where 2 policewomen waited to write his ticket up. He took his time shaking their hands and greeting them. He explained how far we had been driving on this trip, asked them if they knew about Bible translation in Kenya and handed them a business card. After asking lots of questions they said they appreciate his work and put the ticket books away!
The last gift God gave us on this dark day was to see a family of giraffe grazing together just off the side of the road with a deep orange sun setting behind them. It was a gorgeous, gracious moment I needed and will never forget.
We pulled into Nairobi at something like 7:30pm as exhausted and hungry as can be. Our adoptive Mom, Dayle, had cooked a gorgeous meal and eagerly awaited us and our munchkins. We chowed down spaghetti and salad and checked into the nearby guesthouse to find only one bedroom, no bed for Anna and no hot water. After the purse fiasco, gas fiasco, and getting stopped by the police, driving for almost 12 hours with few breaks and sick with colds to top it off, we were to tired to care. Yay for the end of that day!
The ‘last leg’ of the journey, week 3, is coming up soon!
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Monday, August 10, 2009
Happy Birthday Joel!
He asked for a Star Wars party, and was content with a Star Wars
tablecloth and toy at a beach resort on the Indian Ocean. He's now
celebrated 3 birthdays there, 1st, 2nd and 5th! (photos of odd years
this time: birth, 1, 3 and 5)
Happy Birthday Joel! You are such a gift to us! I have never known a
more servant-hearted, obedient, willing, mango-loving, friendly
5-yr-old! You are so at home in Africa. Whether we are visiting
people in a mud hut or a resort hotel, you make friends. You can see
through their circumstances to their humanity, and that is a gift.
What a privilege to be your parents! Happy 5th!
Saturday, August 8, 2009
Safari Roadtrip: Wildlife sighted
3 warthogs
5-6 giraffe family (in the sunset!)
long green snake (dead in road)
5 reedbucks
countless olive baboons
2 groups red/white monkeys
1 unidentified rodent (why did the rodent cross the road?)
1 wild elephant
2 rhinos
40+ gazelle
100+ zebra
3 bush bucks
hawks
turtle crossing the road (why did the turtle cross the road?)
100+ flamingos
quail-ish birds
50+ camels
2 cape buffalo
50 hippos splashing in the Nile
...and of course, countless domestic animals: cattle, pigs, goats, and chickens (why did the chicken cross the road?) I think I found the origin of all those jokes: every time we came near a chicken scratching on the side of the road it would spot us approaching and dart across the road! WHY!? Makes no sense to me. We came close to hitting chickens many times. We also wrote several answers for 'why the chicken did cross the road'.
(and saw all that without 'entering' any official game parks!!)
5-6 giraffe family (in the sunset!)
long green snake (dead in road)
5 reedbucks
countless olive baboons
2 groups red/white monkeys
1 unidentified rodent (why did the rodent cross the road?)
1 wild elephant
2 rhinos
40+ gazelle
100+ zebra
3 bush bucks
hawks
turtle crossing the road (why did the turtle cross the road?)
100+ flamingos
quail-ish birds
50+ camels
2 cape buffalo
50 hippos splashing in the Nile
...and of course, countless domestic animals: cattle, pigs, goats, and chickens (why did the chicken cross the road?) I think I found the origin of all those jokes: every time we came near a chicken scratching on the side of the road it would spot us approaching and dart across the road! WHY!? Makes no sense to me. We came close to hitting chickens many times. We also wrote several answers for 'why the chicken did cross the road'.
(and saw all that without 'entering' any official game parks!!)
Safari Roadtrip: Week 1, Congo-Uganda-Kenya
Well, I must first confess that I didn’t write a journal on this trip. I wouldn’t be able to read my own writing if I did due to the bumpy roads! BUT… if I had written, it would’ve looked something like this:
Day 1: It is truly miraculous that we are ready to leave on this trip, which feels like the hugest thing I have ever planned for. Three young kids across three African countries over completely uncharted 4 x 4 roads… hm. For a while I was in denial that this was actually my life. Then I started what comes naturally to all Sage women: PLANNING! =) I downloaded and printed page after page of car games from momsminivan.com (very handy). We have all the words I can never remember to ‘My Poor Meatball’, battleships, tic-tac-toe, etc.; even a few pages of kid jokes.
Then there’s the food! For the first 2 days of driving (and likely the next 3 as well) there are no restaurants or drive thru Wendy’s, so everything we need to eat has to be prepared ahead of time. I suddenly remembered a travel food section of a cookbook someone gave me as a wedding present -great recipes for packing your own instant oatmeal packets. We bought, chopped and froze 2 lbs. local cheese for munching on the road as it thawed. We froze labeled water bottles for a cool afternoon drink. Next I needed crackers! Well, they don’t exist here. So we had to make them. I had a few more onion flakes left from our shipment stash and made onion crackers. The recipe we used took forever! The advantage was that there were tons of crackers (after 5 hours of rolling and baking). Next we boiled eggs and made raisin bran muffins for our first breakfast. Eating 2 meals per day in the car allowed us to get going much earlier. Then we packed up our water filtration system to carry along and some plastic bowls and spoons for eating hot foods. Lastly 2 packs of pasta and my last 2 cheese packets (go Kraft!) for an impromptu meal of comfort food wherever we might boil water.
I know this may not be the most interesting story so far, but for all those planning Moms out there. It IS possible to have a week cooped up in the car with your kids and feed everyone and enjoy it! I was skeptical, but it works.
Kent returned from his trip into the forest with 3 working days left to get several official documents necessary for our trip. Due to the circumstances, the necessary offices were only going to be open ONE of those days! Getting all these papers lined up would usually take 2-3 weeks, but somehow we had all of them within 8 hrs (that one working day!) This was only one of several ‘mountains’ God moved in order for this trip to work.
So off we drove with very minimal maps and no road signs; we had to frequently stop to ask local folks if we were on the right road. It was VERY bumpy. We had to switch into 4-wheel-drive only twice: Once to go through somewhat deep water where the road had washed out, and another time through deep holes. We were only stopped by officials twice. The first time the policeman laughed when he found out that we actually HAD all the necessary documents! The second time the soldier asked right away if we had a Bible to give him! Oh how we wished we did!
The Blue Mountains were really beautiful, and the road was often lined on both sides with towering eucalyptus trees. Once we got into Uganda, we expected to see good roads right away, but were sorely disappointed.
Day 2: We didn’t hit our first ‘pavement’ until the second day of driving near Nebbi, Uganda, but after 4 months of dirt roads pavement was so exciting we stopped for a picture! Then there was crossing the Victorian Nile (a big bridge like the Columbia between Vancouver and Portland only without many lanes or other cars), and lots of wildlife.
Day 3: Our longest day of driving, 10-12 hrs depending on how the border goes. We were warned to expect hassles at this border. Once again God came through and not only did we NOT have huge fees to pay, we paid only $25 for our visas! We previously paid more like $250! We made good time and reached the next stop high in the Kenyan hills before dark. We did stop to take a picture of ourselves at the equator crossing. We actually crossed it 3 times, but decided one picture was plenty.
Day 4: SO COLD! We were freezing in the 50s and 60s high the hills. We all slept in 2-3 layers under 2-3 blankets. I could see my breath in the bathroom in the morning! I'm thankful someone warned me about feeling cold ahead of time and I was able to pack our winter fleece for everyone. Then as we crossed the Great Rift Valley, things really heated up fast and we continuously shed layers. We stopped by a cheese factory for some great cheese and were nicely surprised by the state of the roads as we left Nakuru toward Nairobi. From the highway you could see the cloud of pink on Lake Naivasha (hundreds of flamingos) but we didn't see any close up. We arrived 'back home' in Nairobi to fresh roses and a fridge full of goodies like grapes, low-fat yogurt, and chicken in a package!! We even ordered pizza sent to our door in 45 min. just because. And ate plenty of ice cream each day.
Day 7: After some rest, doctors appts, cooking for the return trip, and shopping, we headed off on our last day toward the Indian Ocean. Again we had to leave in the wee hours of the morning to avoid rush hour traffic. We drove out of town around 6:15am. This helped us make excellent time, and we saw some more animals along the way, which is always fun! Around noon we reached 'the shortcut' that is rumored to save time cutting north before the Mombasa traffic jams. We decided to find it. We found it. It was under construction and was mostly dirt. Then it rained super hard. It became mostly MUD. Deep mud. We kept thinking it would get better and it never did. It just got worse and worse. It was worse than anything we had to drive through in Congo! Kent stopped twice to drop a rock into a puddle covering the whole road to check its depth and whether we could pass or not. Kent learned a lot about 4 x 4 driving (never stop!) and Kim learned to shut her mouth and not look at the road and sing and pray. Anna fell asleep through it all. The boys thought it was hilarious fun. After nearly 2 hrs of slipping and sliding around the slick road (much like driving in deep, wet snow) we did reach the other side. And we were sitting by the pool by 4pm. What a miracle!
To be continued... Joel's birthday, resort life, conference, coming home.
Sunday, August 2, 2009
A long week
Everytime I sit down to begin blogging about our incredible safari roadtrip, it seems something new happens and competes for my limited thinking-time. How much I would love to see you all face to face to tell you all of this LONG week!
Do I start with the month-long trip with all its miracles? Or the earthquake (more or less a non-event btw)? Or how I ended up at the hospital clinic being treated for malaria and giardia Monday? Or how Saturday we needed to drive a friend to the same hospital with serious typhoid? Or how we were privileged to attend the local university graduation ceremonies on Friday? Or how Anna is wearing pink shorts, with a pink bow in her hair, a pink shirt with pink hearts, even a pink diaper cover and yelling with glee that she found a pink Bible? (Okay maybe that last one isn't anything very new and can wait a bit.)
Today's sermon title was, "Why does God let his people suffer?" out of Daniel 6. And we returned home to news that one of the ladies I knew from Bible Study in Nairobi had just been widowed at my age (her husband is a pilot and was killed yesterday in a bizarre crash). She is homeschooling their 4 children. Please pray for them.
So it's been a long week. We have guests coming into town tomorrow for 2 days. And I'm not quite sure where to start blogging, so I'll start by saying we are well and mostly back to normal health (I finish my course of quinine tomorrow). As soon as I have the energy and find the water-logged camera, you will get a 'real' post. There's my long week. Sounds like some of you had a long HOT week! Stay cool and stay tuned...
Do I start with the month-long trip with all its miracles? Or the earthquake (more or less a non-event btw)? Or how I ended up at the hospital clinic being treated for malaria and giardia Monday? Or how Saturday we needed to drive a friend to the same hospital with serious typhoid? Or how we were privileged to attend the local university graduation ceremonies on Friday? Or how Anna is wearing pink shorts, with a pink bow in her hair, a pink shirt with pink hearts, even a pink diaper cover and yelling with glee that she found a pink Bible? (Okay maybe that last one isn't anything very new and can wait a bit.)
Today's sermon title was, "Why does God let his people suffer?" out of Daniel 6. And we returned home to news that one of the ladies I knew from Bible Study in Nairobi had just been widowed at my age (her husband is a pilot and was killed yesterday in a bizarre crash). She is homeschooling their 4 children. Please pray for them.
So it's been a long week. We have guests coming into town tomorrow for 2 days. And I'm not quite sure where to start blogging, so I'll start by saying we are well and mostly back to normal health (I finish my course of quinine tomorrow). As soon as I have the energy and find the water-logged camera, you will get a 'real' post. There's my long week. Sounds like some of you had a long HOT week! Stay cool and stay tuned...
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