Christmas in Kenya

So I've had a lot of people asking me for details from my trip to Kenya. There is so much to tell that I thought it would be easier to just do it this way.

I'll start by saying that this is the fourth time I've been to Kenya, but the very first time for the sole purpose of visiting family rather than a short term mission trip. It was a completely new experience! It was what I imagine it will be like when Patrick and I are working there as long term missionaries rather than short termers.

I spent a lot of time worrying about the girls in preparation for this trip. I thought to myself that it is one thing for me to get malaria or whatever other risks there are, but it is a completely different story when it involves my children. So any slight consideration to be had for them became huge worries for me and I spent a lot of time preparing as a result. At a Moms & More meeting at church one Thursday (when I was at the height of my worrying) I was reminded once again that Mwende and Mwelu are God's daughters and their lives are within his control. He has a plan for them just like he does for me. This gave me great comfort and enabled me to give all those worries to Jesus.

We bought a few things in preparation for the trip. We bought two Boba Carriers (one of which we accidentally left at home). The one that we brought ended up being INVALUABLE. It would have been even better had we remembered the other one! (Mwende still fits!) For the car, we bought a RideSafer Vest. This didn't end up being as useful as I had hoped. Most of the time we just ended up putting Mwende in the back middle with people on either side of her. We didn't bring a car seat for Mwelu. I had discussed the matter with her doctor and we had decided the most practical would be for her to just be held on my lap. I tended to put her in the Boba Carrier in the car as well. It just seemed more secure to me.

I went all out for the plane. For safety I bought Mwende the CARES system. I felt safer with her in it, but she tended to want out of it to lie down. So we used it about half the time. For Mwelu I bought the Baby B'Air flight vest. This was definitely useful and gave me a lot more peace of mind about Mwelu's safety in case of turbulence. It also turned out that Kenya Airways and Swiss Air gave us infant safety belts for takeoff and landing which threaded through my belt. By the way, I have to credit the discovery of a lot these items to Shelly Rivoli's book, Travels With Baby. Very useful book and website! In their carry-on and diaper bag I packed all sorts of things to keep the girls entertained. My sister gave Mwelu an Air Play tray table cover for Christmas. She liked playing with this on and off the plane. For Mwelu I also packed a couple of picture books, her baby doll, her Sophie Giraffe teether, and a duck puppet that quacks "Old McDonald". For Mwende I packed coloring books, sticker books, story books, a doodle pro, her baby doll and a surprise doll (in case of a meltdown) from South Africa that I picked up at a friends boutique. It turns out that most of this stuff for Mwende was pointless since international flights have movies.

I was also very concerned about medicines to take. I made sure to take every medicine that Mwende was able to take. This was pretty much limited to Tylenol, Benadryl and children's Tums. Mwende was also prescribed a anti-malarial by the travel clinic at Kaiser. Mwelu however was too young to be taking an anti-malarial, so we just had to hope for the best with her. I also brought medications for Patrick and I, but forgot the one medication that no one should ever go overseas with out. An antidiarrheal. :\

Anyway, that pretty much concludes the preparations part of it. The flights went much better than I expected them to. Some might recall that Heathrow Airport in London shut down shortly before Christmas. We came to find out that some of the people on our flight (not including us) were called and told that the flight was canceled. We weren't aware of this and showed up to the airport and were told that the flight was indefinitely delayed until Heathrow authorized the flight to come. So we made ourselves comfortable on the floor of LAX and the girls ran around and flirted with various people. It turned out it was only delayed 2 or so hours (I can't quite remember) and then we got to board shortly after 6pm and take off. The flight from Los Angeles to Heathrow went really smoothly. Mwelu promptly fell asleep and Mwende spent the first hour and a half watching Beauty and the Beast before she fell asleep. The flight was 10 1/2 hours long and they didn't wake up until we landed at Heathrow around 1pm, London time. I can't say the same for myself since I had Mwelu on my lap and was fearful of falling asleep with her there. Since we had, at this point, a 4 hour layover we just found it easier to relax and let everyone else get off the plane before we attempted it. We got off to a whole lot of confusion. It turned out the buses that normally go between terminals had stopped running due to the weather, so we had to go through customs in order to leave the airport and take the train to the correct terminal. The problem? We didn't bring coats and it was negative degrees outside. Turned out to not be so bad as all that. We never really went "outside", only into a train terminal that didn't have any heat. I had packed a lot of blankets in the carry on for sleeping on the airport floor, so we bundled up the girls really well and went for it. When we got to the correct terminal we found out that we didn't yet have a gate assigned. We managed to eat and then found an abandoned corner of the terminal that had plenty of space for the girls to play and a hookup for internet for Patrick and I to play. ;) Our plane ended up being about 3 1/2 hours late, but we certainly weren't complaining since there were many people that had been stranded in the airport for 3 days and didn't have an end in sight. All in all, we were very blessed to get in and out of Heathrow in the amount of time that we did. The girls didn't sleep as much on the 8 hour flight to Nairobi. But they were still very well behaved. Mwende watched a lot of movies and Mwelu was content to play with her toys. The low point came about two hours before we landed. Mwende had been complaining that her tummy hurt before falling asleep. Then she abrubtly woke up about 10 minutes later and started vomiting everywhere. Patrick handed off Mwelu to the woman in front of us and we got Mwende (and me) cleaned up. Unfortunately Mwende was in the last of 3 outfits that I had packed in the carry on for her, so we stuffed her into some of Mwelu's clothes. The rest of the flight went smoothly and we got through customs in Nairobi without a problem. By the way, Patrick was making fun of me on the plane because (even though I know better) I always scrutinize the tall grass as we're landing in hopes of spotting some lions or something. This time though we saw a whole herd of zebra right off the runway! So there! I'm not crazy. Anyway, waiting to greet us was Patrick's mom, his brother Sammy, his sister Peninnah and her daughter Fernice as well as our matatu driver friend David, whom we hired to transport us and all our luggage to the village. By this time I was extremely tired since I hadn't slept for more than 20 min since Saturday night (this was Tuesday). But we took a pit stop through Lucy's apartment (Lucy is Patrick's sister) while she was at work to take showers and eat some lunch. The shower was very much appreciated by me, especially since I knew it was the last one I would get for awhile. Then came the 2 or 3 hour drive to the village of Kamanzi in David's matatu. (Kamanzi is a small village slightly SE of Nairobi past Kangundo and Machakos. You won't find it on a map though.) It was a very bumpy ride since the roads in Kenya are not well kept. They are rocky and full of pot holes. I don't remember much of what happened immediately after we arrived at mom's house in the village (I still hadn't slept at this point). But I do remember that we were greeted by a group of 26 children. Mwende immediately labeled them as her friends and started trying to talk to them. Needless to say they couldn't understand her and she couldn't understand them. She kept telling them that she wanted to play and they would just stare at her. Finally her Uncle Sammy intervened and told the group that Mwende wanted to play and that it was their responsibility to teach her Kikamba (the local language). From that point on there were no problems playing. It turns out that young kids don't necessarily need to share the same spoken language in order to have fun playing together! Mwende also met the goats, chickens, dogs, milk cow and calf. Like I said, I don't remember much else from that day. I probably crashed and crashed hard.

You're probably thinking at this point that I am giving an day by day, minute by minute account of this trip. No worries! At this point I'm just going to share details of some of the highlights and memorable events of our time in the village. I will start by giving you a brief synopsis of a "typical" day, then go on to sharing the negative events of our time there before moving on to the positive highlights.

A typical day starts at sunrise which comes shortly after 6:30am. Mom goes out to milk the cow and breakfast is made. Breakfast consisted of tea and bread with butter, jam and peanut butter. (I learned later that having bread every morning was a luxury). Water needed to be fetched from the tank and they did that in large barrels. Our family drank bottled water that we brought from Nairobi. When we ran out, we boiled the water before drinking it. If we needed to use the toilet, there was an outhouse with a pit toilet inside. Theirs was nicer than many others I saw. They kept it clean and it was roomy. When we needed to use the toilet at night the Beam N Read flashlight that I won off the travelswithbaby.com website turned out to be invaluable. Lunch was usually leftovers from the night before, heated in a pot on a small gas stove in the house. Dinner was cooked in the kitchen, which was a separate building, over a wood fire. Dinner usually consisted of either chicken or goat stew with onions, tomatoes and potatoes. That was usually accompanied by a plate of either ugali or chapati and cooked cabbage or sukuma wiki. They also frequently had a dish with beans, corn and peas. But I'm not a beans fan, so I passed on that. Mwende and Mwelu loved it though! Mom has a shop on her compound, so some of the smaller things that we needed were easy to come by. Mwende made a habit of convincing her Uncle Sammy to buy her lollipops. We also were able to have soda most anytime we wanted thanks to Mom's shop. Laundry was hand washed in basins and hung out to dry. I was fortunate to be able to hire someone to do most of our wash for us. I only had to wash our undies! Bath time was always interesting. By the end of my time there I learned how to do the whole process myself. It involved fetching water from the tank, heating the water over a fire which needed to be constantly tended, getting the water to the house and mixing it with some cold water for just the right temperature. The girls were "easy" to bath. We just stuck them in the basin and splashed the water over them, just like in the bath at home. The problem came when they started to get scratches from playing so hard. Then bath-time became a fight. Bathing for us was standing over the basin. I used a cup to pour the water over me. Washing my hair was a pain. What always started as clean water usually resembled something closer to mud by the time we were done! But we didn't throw it out just yet. We'd use that same water to wash our feet before we went to bed. After bathing we ate dinner. Usually by this time the girls were so tired we could hardly convince them to wake up to take a bath, much less to eat dinner. So bedtimes were easy! In between meals, when we weren't off visiting people, we would just hang out keeping an eye on the kids to make sure no one got hurt. Bathing and dinner were all taken after the sunset which happened just before 7pm every night. We made sure to get all the water we needed for the night before it got dark as snakes coming to the tank for water were a danger.

Now on to the events of the trip. First I'll share about Monica. Monica was a woman who Patrick's mom hired to help in the house. When we arrived I met her briefly before Patrick explained to me that she was HIV+ and that she was taking a sick leave. When I met her she was sitting on the couch in mom's house and we talked briefly. Several days later Patrick and I went to visit her at her home because we heard that she had taken very ill. When we arrived I didn't recognize her as the woman I met in the house. She was covered in blankets with lace over her face to keep the flies off. Her eyes were glazed over and it was painfully obviously that she was having much difficulty breathing. She was attended by family. Nothing was said at that time, but it was painfully obvious even to me that this woman was dying. I asked if she knew Jesus as her Lord and Savior and was thankfully told that she did. We learned two mornings later that she had passed away. This made a deep impact on me. I don't think I've ever really seen a person that was dying, much less of HIV/AIDS. Patrick told me later that based on what he saw, he believes that she died of complications from Tuberculosis. I thank God that she is free from her pain now and in heaven with her savior. I also pray for the children that were left behind as orphans.

Another unfortunate event that occurred while we were there involved a man caught stealing onions and the implementation of mob justice. It is very unfortunate that in the rural areas there is no police presence. So when a crime occurs, the mob becomes the judge, jury and executioner. In this case two men were discovered stealing onions from someone's farm. One man escaped, but the other was caught. Patrick and I were woken up to a lot of shouting. Patrick went to see what was going on, but came back because he didn't want to leave us alone. What ended up happening was that this man was severely beaten and then burned for his crime. His funeral was held about a week later. Very scary and very sad.

On a less severe note, during our 2nd week there, we all got sick. Patrick came down with some sort of respiratory illness which, now a week after our return, he is still trying to recover from. Mwende and I got diarrhea. Mwende a mild case and I a quite severe case of it. (which why I was lamenting the fact that I forgot to bring an antidiarrheal!) Mwelu got a scratch on her forehead which ended up getting infected and causing a fever. So Patrick took all of us to the medical clinic in Kivaani to have the doctor take a look at us. Mwelu was fairly simple. She had just reopened the sore, so the puss was draining. We were told to put Neosporin on it and leave it open to air dry. Mwende was given medicine and re-hydration solution. I got my antidiarrheal and a re-hydration solution as well. And Patrick got a cough suppressant. Mwende's and my illnesses lasted for about a week before they passed. However not before we had the opportunity to experience some of Grandma Beth's (Patrick's grandmother) traditional medicine. She came and gave Mwende and I stomach massages. It was apparent that she knew what she was doing. And wouldn't you know it, that was the turning point for me! I felt much better after that.

We had a bit of excitement one night when Patrick nearly stepped on a snake. It turned out to be a baby Cobra. Patrick yelled to me to come and bring a stick, a big stick. I told him I really felt like this was a man's job and called for his brother, Sammy. Sammy got a stick and thoroughly smashed the snake. Then they threw it down the pit toilet. Patrick wanted to make sure it was completely dead so he went and got some hot coals and threw those down the pit toilet too. No chance that snake was coming back!

Now on to the positive highlights of the trip. For me the most wonderful time of all was when we had Patrick's children Joan Mumbua (aged 11) and Joseph Kiio (aged 12) stay with us for the week between Christmas until just after the New Year. This is the first time all 4 siblings have been together, so I was really hoping for some serious bonding time. I'd met Kiio before, but this was the first time meeting Mumbua for me. What wonderful kids they are! Their mothers, despite the obstacles, have done such wonderful jobs raising them. Mwende followed Mumbua around constantly while Kiio played with his cousins, Ian and Arthur. This arrangement caused quite a stir in the village as many people couldn't believe what they were hearing. One man came out and said it to Patrick, "How do you manage to hide these children from your wife in plain sight??" They found it difficult to believe that Patrick had told me long ago and even harder to believe that I accepted and loved these kids.

During the week that we had Mumbua and Kiio, we took a "field trip" to Nairobi. Our matatu driver, David, came and picked us up. Going were Patrick and I, Mwende, Mwelu, Kiio, Mumbua, Mom, Lucy, Patrick's nephews, Ian and Arthur, and his cousins, Sammy and Kimeu. We went first to the Nairobi National Park where we saw mainly giraffe, zebra and gazelle. We were hoping to see a lion or some rhinoceros, but weren't that fortunate. From there we went to the Giraffe Centre where the kids had an opportunity to feed giraffes. It was a full fun day where we left as the sun came up and didn't get back into the village until after dark.

Also during the time that we had Mumbua and Kiio with us, we took the bedsheets that we had collected for Mwende's birthday to the medical clinic in Kivaani in order to donate them. They were gratefully received and we learned that the greatest need of the clinic right now is electricity.

We had two goat roast gatherings while we were there. One for the Musyimi family (Patrick's father's family) and another for mom's extended family. The gathering for the Musyimi family was intended to bring the family together to talk as there have been a lot of tensions in the family in recent years. It didn't go as well as hoped with a lot of hurt feelings coming out from many years back. Patrick felt like it was a failure, but I disagreed with him, saying that people finally got together and at least talked. Even if it ended negatively, there was still some communication going on. We're continuing to pray that these family members can put their hurts behind them and reconcile with their relatives. The gathering for mom's extended family went very well. A lot of people that I hadn't met before and it turned out very positively.

Our last week in the village was characterized by sending kids off to school. Kiio went back home so that he could attend the Iie Itune Primary School which wasn't far from us. Mumbua went back to her mother's home in Tala (about 45 min drive on the way back to Nairobi) so that she could attend her school. I have to admit I cried a bit when these kids left. It will be years before I see their beautiful faces again. Ian (10y), Arthur (12y), Sammy (12y) and Kimeu (14y) went off to boarding school. The compound was significantly quieter with the absence of these boys. Sammy and Kimeu are orphans. Until we sent them to boarding school, they were in the care of their 80+ year old grandmother. We are hoping to adopt them sometime in the next 4 years and bring them to live with us. Mwende also went to school. They had a nursery school. We got her a uniform and everything. She was there from 8am to 1pm every day for a week. Starting on the second day, she started walking home by herself accompanied by a large group of children. It was nice to have a little break during the day! She did a lot of coloring and tracing numbers and letters.

At the end of this week we left the village to go stay with our friends the Ochanji's in Nairobi so that Patrick could do his work at Kenyatta University. Mwende's was happy to see her friend Ashley whom is a frequent visitor to our home in California. This was a bittersweet experience for me. I was very happy to have a real toilet once again! But I was back to trying to entertain the girls. I felt a bit depressed at this point for having left the village. I wanted to go back and so did Mwende. It was nice to be able to go get some of the foods that I am more used to. We ate a lot of chips (aka french fries)! Samosas were among my favorite treats there too. On a down side, Nairobi is infested with mosquitoes. (There really weren't any in the village). So the week that we were in Nairobi, I got eaten alive!

After Patrick finished with his workshops, we moved on to Lucy's house. If possible she had an even worse mosquito problem than the Ochanjis did! But she had a working shower with hot running water which was a beautiful thing. (washing hair like mine in a basin is enough to make me want to shave my head!) While we were there we took Mwende to have her hair done. It took about 2-3 hours and with the help of coloring books, soda and movies on Patrick's ipad, Mwende did a great job of sitting still. The day before we left we also visited the Masaai Market in Nairobi in order to pick up some souvenirs for folks at home. This was a fun experience. I think people looked at my white skin and instantly tried to charge me 10x the amount that they would charge their countrymen. They were surprised to find that I was aware of their scheme and fully ready to negotiate the price. Patrick would come behind me and tell them to address me in Kikamba (I have all the greetings down) and how could they possibly overcharge one of their own? So I got some really good prices on some really great items! After this we went for lunch at a Wimpy Burger. I'd never heard of it before and thought the name was pretty funny. But it was one of the best burgers I ever tasted! Definitely not a "wimpy" burger. ;) After this, we went to go pick up Patrick's sister, Peninnah. I finally got to meet her husband, Gideon and get a picture of their family. From there we went to Patrick's sister's house, Juliana, for a brief visit. I got to meet her sons PJ and Nate for the first time. I have yet to meet her husband. Some day though! Then it was back to Lucy's to pack up and head to the airport for our 12:20am flight. The girls fell asleep in the van and didn't really wake up until we reached Zurich.

The only other thing really worth mentioning is that the airport in Zurich has an AWESOME children's play area. It was confusing trying to get there, but worth it. It had two large rooms. One for older kids with slides and hula hoops, etc. Another for babies with age appropriate toys. It also had changing stations complete with wipes AND a nap room filled with cribs. We had a 7 hour layover there and spent most of the time there. Mwende played the entire time with a seven year old girl named Deanna. Mwelu spent most of the time chasing them around. Towards the end I fell asleep with Mwelu on a huge pile of animal shaped pillows in a corner. Best layover with kids EVER!!

Anyway, that's about it. The flight to LA went well. We arrived at 4:00 in the afternoon LA time. Had pizza that night and went to bed. I should mention that as I write this a week later, we are still struggling with jet lag. :|

To sum up, it was the trip of a lifetime and I can't wait to go back!