Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Living it up in Kenya

We are having an AWESOME time in Kenya! We arrived here on Friday (Kenyatta Day), and we've done so much already. Within minutes of being in the country we saw a giraffe on the side of the road, so we knew it would be a good place to visit. Some of our highlights:

* Feeding giraffes (oh my gosh - one of the coolest experiences of my entire life - looking into the eyes of a giraffe and feeding it pellets from my hand! John said he hasn't seen me that happy since our wedding day. It was just like a dream. I loved it! Pictures will come later...)
* Walking around Kibera (one of Africa's biggest slums - and the one that was featured in the movie "The Constant Gardener." Everywhere we went there were tin shacks, garbage, and kids screaming "muzungu! I'm fine! How are you?" We also had some sweet nursery school students sing to us - 85% of them are orphans, and it was very touching).
* Seeing storks (I don't think I've seen them in real life before, and there's a whole bunch of them that just hang out at one of Nairobi's big intersections) - oh, we saw a camel too.
* Slumming in the rain (our first morning in the country it was raining a bit, so I went out for my run. It started to pour, and I was free entertainment for so many people who cracked up laughing seeing a drenched white person. I also got quite lost, and ended up walking all through Kagemi - another large slum - up and down hills with the bright red earth. People were very helpful in getting me to the main road. John is loving the running here, because there are so many hills. He's even registered for a marathon on Sunday!)
* Going to the biggest corps (Statistically speaking, Nairobi Central Corps is the biggest Salvation Army church in the world. We went there Sunday morning for the English service, and for the first bit, it was only us and one other guy. I thought it was ironic. More people came later).
* Visiting an orphanage (we went to Kabete Children's Home today. It's run by The Salvation Army. I met two cuties - Faith and Susan).
* Going to Kithituni (we went outside of Nairobi for a couple of areas to visit a rural area called Kithituni, where The Salvation Army is doing some really cool community work. We met a beautiful woman named Agnes, who was orphaned at a young age, and has put 12 children - and many grand-children - through school. I asked her the key to a good, long life. "Trust God of course." Of course...)
* Eating Indian food, and home-made lasagna, and a chocolate brownie sundae and oreos (you know we love food! You can actually buy Lindor chocolate in Nairobi - imagine!)
* Taking a hot shower every morning (it's glorious!)

Man, it's amazing. We're staying with the Pelletier family - who are good friends of my brother's in-laws. They are a beautiful, kind, generous, wonderful family, and we're really enjoying spending time with them. They have 2 great kids - Josh and Jena. They adopted Jena from India. John totally wants a girl now! :) The adventure continues...

3 comments:

Darren Hailes said...

Oh man... what a huge list of things you've done on your holiday!!!

Anonymous said...

I have just found your blog after googling Kabete Children's Home. We asssist with sponsoring the home and know so little about it.... it was great to see that you have visited there. Do you have any pics?

Linn Marit said...

I've been there to!:D
And I actually visited lots of the same places you did:)
We lived at Kabete Childrens Home for about a week. We painted their dininghall. So we got to know the children. I actually became a sponsor for one of them:)
We to visited the Kibera slum, and that was a touching experience.. You get a deeper sight of things, when you see something like that..
And ofcourse, we did some normal tourism things to;) 3 days on safari in Masai Mara, and 4 days on the beach in Mombase:)

If you take a look in my blog, there's some pictures from Kabete and all the other places we visited:) It's written in Norwegian, but there's lots of pictures:) Just go to some of the last pages in the blog, page 4 I think..:)