Kenya Bound

Out of Dillsburg (to Kenya)

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

We’ve been waiting for this day for nearly a year—some of us really longer than that. So here we are in a Boeing 777 en route to London where we’ll have an hour to catch our plane to Nairobi. Can’t believe I’m writing this.

Have we had any adventures yet? We rode for two hours to Dulles Airport in a WSEFC van (thank you Sandy Auxt!). Everyone had their passports. I forgot my binoculars, but Carole says she brought 2 pair so it’s ok. Nancy had to buy a chapstick because hers got checked. Nancy, Jim, Cyndi and I had a great dinner at an airport restaurant (let me know if you want to know the name of the restaurant and I’ll look at my receipt) and ate blackened turkey burgers and some kind of a Cuban sandwich, all fresh ingredients and delicious. Carole watched the bags while we ate so nothing was stolen or destroyed. The plane took off when our itinerary said it would and now we’re all in flight. Carole is reading up on animal life in Kenya. Jim is drinking something, and Nancy and Cyndi are already asleep. No, I don’t think we’ve had an adventure yet—we’re doing the stuff we normally do at home.

But tomorrow we land in Nairobi. And tomorrow is going to get here faster than normal as we’re losing time in our travel east. By the time we get to London we’ll have lost 5 hours even though the flight is supposed to take 7. But that’s too much for me to figure out right now.

What are we going to do in Kenya? Good question—I’ll make some educated guesses and then I’ll make a wishful guess.

Educated Guesses: we will be visiting what normal tourists see when they go to Kenya—an elephant orphanage, a giraffe zoo, the Kizuri Bead Factory and maybe the Karen home (think Out of Africa and Meryl Streep (I’ll think Robert Redford)). When we get our Africa feet and deal a bit with our new time zone, new smells, and some of our jet lag we’ll travel to Kijabe to visit Christine Kithome, spiritual director at Cure International’s first hospital. That’s a return visit for Carole and me and a first time for Nancy, Jim and Cyndi. We plan to visit the Threads of Hope community, a ministry to widowed women in the Rift Valley and later in the week Helen and her Village of Protection, the main focus of our trip and the locus of the WISP-her project. More on that later. For now, the answer to “What will you do in Kenya” is about visiting and getting to know Kenyan women. Carole takes great delight in taunting us about making a dung hut together (you know what dung is, right?)—some of us are looking forward to that. Since making dung huts is women’s work in Kenya, Jim gets a pass and will be most likely be killing goats with Ntutu, a Masai warrior.

Yes, there may be some freaking out.

Wishful Guess: Hopefully we’ll be listening to Kenyan women’s stories. That may have its challenges as none of us speak any one of the 40-some different languages in Kenya. But at Pentecost, people were able to understand what they needed to, right? Surely we will as well.

By the way--does anybody know hat time it really is?

PS We eventually arrived safe and sound and at 1 AM Thursday morning Kenya time found our beds. Since we arrived to Nairobi in the dark, we weren't able to see much. Tomorrow we see Africa!