So sorry this has taken a few weeks to update! We will try to do better! I wanted to share some of my adventure last weekend. I went with another girl and a Kenyan lady who started an orphanage out in a village called Port Victoria. It is all the way to the Uganda border - right on Lake Victoria, it took us 10 hours to drive there! This was such a fun trip for me. The orphanage is really more like a center now as they need funds badly for the building, food and many, many other things! Right now the children are from 2-18 years. The kids stay with guardians at night only then the older kids go to school - while the youger ones are taught there at the center. They kids are so precious! I think they had only one swing and just about 2-3 other toys! I keep praying about how I can help! The lady that started it "Rosemary". Has so many ideas for it, like starting a veggie garden to help with food, starting a clinic so the kids can be treated right there. That would be so awesome!

Anyway, let me start from the beginning of the trip - we left Nairobi at 7 a.m. on Friday and arrived at 5:30. We drove thru the Rift Valley, past Lake Navasha, past tea plantations, sugar cane fields and rice fields! It was so amazing! Then it got rather hilly and rocky and more dry when we got to the village. I don't think the villagers had seen any "white" people in some time - they seemed quite fascinated with us (Liz, the other white girl), when we would walk around the village we often had a crowd of kids singing and saying things! I don't know what all they said, but the word for "white person" often was mentioned! :)

This is a village that mostly survives on fishing for a living - they know of nothing else - even vegetable growing would be strange for them! Oh - mu how I just want to get out there and teach them - but its just not that easy! We spent most of Saturday walking around the village, spending time at the center, getting food for the kids, and taking a boat ride on Lake Victoria. We had all Kenyan food for the weekend which really was pretty good. The first night we had chicken with rice, for breakfast on Sat. it was the most wonderful tea I have ever had! and mandazi - a dough like thing in the shape of a triangle that is fried - quite tasty! For lunch it was suckumweki - cooked kale with onions and ugali, a kind of cooked cornmeal. For supper then it was beef pieces in a sauce with ugali and chapati's. Ok, I didn't eat any meat on this trip - but I did enjoy the rest! :) I think we had tea quite a few times and drinking water was a problem, so we had a lot of sodas! We had the same bkfst on Sunday and then left for the trip back. It really is funny how you resort back to your past when you go thru new experiences. It brought back so many memories of our first time overseas living in the Kahalari desert in Botswana! Wow!

Well, once I got back 2 says later Kurt left for an 8 day flying trip to Sudan and some of Kenya. We celebrated Micah's b-day early - went out to eat at Java House, a glorified Starbucks that serves mostly American food - we thought since he has tried many new foods he should be able to eat something "normal" on his birthday. He enjoyed a cheesburger and fries! :)

More next week on Kurt's trip!

The Cat - the House...the adventure....

We picked up what we thought would be such a fine kitty a week ago. Oh did we forget that it was not a normal north american "pet". The first night it jumped out of the front fence - Kurt and Micah chased it down from behind our place and then as it started attacking Kurt so he threw it up and over the fence to yet jump up on porch roof and sit...Sooooo, I crawled out of the bedroom window to catch it and bring it in. That lasted one day. I do think though he must have thought he had died and gone to kitty heaven - he was petted, had a soft kitty basket to sleep in, real catfood, a nice antibacterial bath, and dried fish aaahhh....well, he continued to leave each day, and after school Micah would come home and go look for him and bring him back. Finally, Sat. he left and didn't come back.....we later received a text from the family we got him from saying that he had returned there...we left him there. We will wait for a kitten.... :)

Here are also some pictures of the house as we have it now. Kurt is working on a valve in one of the water storage tanks. We have three, one in the attic which is where all of our house water comes from and two in the back yard. The normal hot dog is a foot long as you can see Micah holding.

Getting here

From Akron/Canton, to the snow of Detroit, to Amsterdam, over the Alps, over the Sahara, to Nairobi. Some of these pictures will help you visualize what we saw on our trip.

Welcome to our Blog site!

We hope that this blog site will help to keep up with us and what we are doing. We have been in Nairobi for two and a half weeks and are starting to get settled into our new house. Micah has been attending West Nairobi School and really enjoying his time there. (and the school bus ride) On his first day back from school his comment was; "it's almost like going to camp!" That due to all of the outdoor walking between classes and eating outside under a grass roof hut.

Kurt will begin flying this week. An overnight trip to northern Kenya and they hope to have the King Air up and going soon. Angie is adjusting to a slower pace than she was used to. She said she will be the primary caretaker to the new addition to our family. (Simba - the yellow cat) :-) We are working on getting adjusted to life here. The house now has the basic essentials, but lacks some furniture and shelving to put things on. Things just take more time here than in the U.S. Just the other day we spent 4 hours, driving to 4 different places, to find one of the only stores in Nairobi that sells a washing machine hose.

We hope that you enjoy our postings. We will try to keep it updated so check back every once in a while.

Kurt, Angie, & Micah