Weekend

It's going to be hard to condense and explain our time in Kawai as it was very interesting. Ole Salepu's place consisted of 2 houses and a couple of smaller buildings and fenced-in areas for the cattle and goats. One of the fences had a dent in it - an elephant had tried to ram through it recently! Yikes! Norakadau, Salepu's wife, has a house for herself. She was cooking over an open fire inside. The only light inside was from the fire and a small flame lamp. She was making rice and a potato/tomato/onion mixture as well as hot milk for the chai later. She would put a long branch in or out of the fire to raise or lower the heat under the pots. We ate in Ole Salepu's house about 100 feet away from the other house. That's the building we all slept in also. There were 3 rooms: the middle, dining area, then a sleeping area on each side of the middle room. The girls (me, Claire, Connie, Rachel and Rachel's friend, Steph) slept in one room and the guys (Pat, Kyle, Dan and Josiah) slept in the other. Except for the dog barking right outside the window now and then during the night, we slept pretty well. The mattresses were thin and a bit lumpy but we were warm and felt very secure and safe! So Pat and I decided that it was better than where we stayed in London where we were cold and felt very unsafe. There was no running water or bathrooms for us to use either, by the way. We brushed our teeth outside and found a bush to hide behind to go to the bathroom. We all survived just fine anyway! Oh, and the stars in the sky at night! WOW! What a sight. We have never seen so many stars! God is truly artistic!

Church Sunday morning was awesome, too. The people there were so welcoming and happy to have us there. We were all introduced in front of everyone. Dan and another man from the church interpreted for us. (Dan's fluent in Maa) An adult choir and a darling children's choir sang several praise songs. During the offering time, a lady brought up a gourd of milk as her offering. So sweet. The sermon was a bit longer than we are used to! We survived that, too! haha The people at the church love Jesus. You can see that on their faces! We all enjoyed meeting people that Crums have known and worked with.

Being at Ole Salepu's place with his family was significant for us since our Sunday School class has a connection with them. About 8-9 years ago, their 8-year-old son had cancer and Salepu sold 90 of his 100 cows to pay for his treatment in a Nairobi hospital. He let Dan and Connie know and they contacted their supporters to see about raising about $2000 to help him rebuild his herd. The letter about all this ended up going to more people than originally planned and about $20,000 was raised! 19 other farmers were helped that year from that area! Our class raised $500 toward buying Ole Salepu a cow so he asked Dan to ask me about taking his picture with his cows Sunday morning. I'll post a picture asap.

We spent Sunday night at the missionary house again and headed back to Nairobi on Monday morning. We were able to stop at the CMF training center near Narok for lunch and a tour from Dan. CMF has 8 medical clinics in the Maasai Mara district that saw 30,0000-40,000 people last year. Narok is where the main clinic is located. We have heard about the training center for years, so it was so awesome to actually walk around there!