Things that surprised us

We were surprised by some things on our trip. This list is things we didn't expect, or at least one of us was surprised by.

Surprises

Kikoy tailoring- it was less expensive to have custom pants made for Paige at the beach than to buy them in a store in Nairobi. We took a Kikoy, basically a large piece of fabric with a fringed edge, and the lady at the beach had that made into really cute capris for Paige, for about $4.50 labor cost. Since it was so affordable, she got shorts too!

Jungle in Nairobi- there is a downtown part with tall buildings and parking lots, but there is a LOT of Nairobi that is very green, wooded, etc. You wouldn't know you were in a major city.

Cell phones everywhere- even the people out in the bush, with no electricity or running water had cell phones. They go into town to charge them.

Cool mall (village market)- it would be a big hit in St. Charles!

Airport and mall security- by the end of the trip, we were used to all the guys with AK47s, but it surprised us at first!

How bad the roads really were- even major roads were VERY bumpy

Security in Malindi- that tiny airport had a big X-ray machine for our bags, etc. but if you just walked about the building, you were out on the runway, along with the dogs, chickens, etc. and could walk right into the departure lounge.

Primitive kitchens- in the training centers, the kitchen was a counter, a sink (not necessarily with running water) and drain and a few open shelves.

Dressed up and dignity- People in Nairobi wear suits and dresses, very dressed up in their best clothing, even if they live in a slum, they dress up for work or going to town

Friendliness - the passport people, the security checkers, the cab drivers, all wanted to know how we liked their country and hoped we would come back. The Crum's friends welcomed us into their homes, just a gracious as could be.

Turning on water heaters and electric outlets- there are switches on the outlets to turn them on, and the water heaters have switches, like light switches on the wall, to turn them on and off.

Paige found monkeys creepy- they were on the roof at the Crums, at the tent camp, at the resort, kind of all over.

The # of Kenyan men who live far away from families- many men work in Nairobi, but their families live "up country" and they only go visit occasionally

Milk comes in plastic bags at the grocery, you clip off the corner and pour it and soda was very inexpensive

Birds sounds - there was a bird that sounds just like an alarm clock

RED dirt- it was everywhere!

Amount of corn, and number of goats and cows

Quantity and mixture of animals- zebras, baboons, warthogs, wildebeest, all hang around together.

Animals inside vs outside the park- we saw more animals out in the wild before we were on the Maasai Mara property. The animals don't know or care where the boundaries are, they just roam

Paying the park fee’s, there was great confusion over paying to go into the parks- one guy came to the tent camp and got us out of bed to pay some park fees, but then another guy came in the morning and said we should pay him, not the guy from the night before. They need a better system there.

70 churches 20 buildings in the CCC, Maasai church.

No paid pastors, they serve as volunteers

CMF helps with 50% of church building costs, that way the local church has ownership of the building, they have invested in it.

Some of our lists

Jet lag really caught up with me, and then I spent 3 days sorting photos and video. I managed to narrow it down to our favorite 250 pictures - thank you Kodak for timing your print sale for us.. and then edited the video down to much less than an hour. Nobody needs to see it all, even us! That's the first cut, we will continue to make it shorter so we can share our experiences without boring people!

Top 10 +1 (no particular order)

1. Lion (see Monday's post)

2. Our stay with Ole Salepu

3. Listening to Dan Speak Maa

4. Landscape - Kenya is so beautiful!

5. Getting to know the CMF Maasai Team ( including getting to know the Crums better!)

6. Listening to hippos and lions while we slept

7. Going to lunch at Augustin's Home

8. The Nest, orphanage in Nairobi

9. Turtle Bay

10. Giraffe Farm

11. Church Under the tree


And then here's our list of interesting facts....

Facts

70% of Nairobi's population live in slums; there are over 1million in one particular slum.

Cultural difficulties exist for adoption in Kenya- there is no socially acceptable way for a mother to safely give her baby up for adoption, so many are just abandoned.

We saw first hand the importance of infrastructure-roads, water, electricity, communication.

Cheap labor leads to short term thinking- why buy a jackhammer when for less money you can hire 30 guys to break up the old road with sledgehammers.

Everybody was selling something-our favorite was the guy on the road to the airport that was always there selling wall sized world maps.... like you're just going to be sitting in traffic and decide... HEY, I need a HUGE map.

The traffic in Nairobi is chaos. After a certain hour, everyone just ignores red lights, round abouts might not be the answer, speed bumps really do slow down traffic, but they are painful if you don't see them in time, there are no lane markings so you just make a lane wherever, and they don't seem to have rules of the road, more like suggestions...Cars have the right of way over people- so watch out!

Intelligent and happy people can live in very primitive conditions and be content.

Africa can be quite chilly during the US summer.

The CDC in Atlanta provided blood chemistry machines at a little rural clinic - our tax dollars at work actually saving lives in Africa!

first two of top 10 (plus one)

1.

We have our top 10 (plus 1) list and I think I'll just write about a couple each day. Here are the first two, in no particular order.

1. Lion- the first morning at the tent camp, we opted to skip breakfast, take boxed lunches and get out to look for wildlife at sunrise. We didn’t go immediately into the Maasai Mara park itself, but just across a small river behind our camp. Right away, there was a family of elephants! The baby was shy, but the others just kind of ignored us. We followed some tracks, not exactly roads, but obviously places where other vehicles had been. I hadn’t spotted much of the wildlife, the Crums had eyes trained to look for them and Kevin is always a great wildlife spotter, but I found the first lion. She was sitting on a little raised mound of dirt and staring intently into the distance. We watched her for a while, and then drove to a spot where we could be closer. I anticipated that animals would leave when they realized you were watching them, but some, like this lion, just pretty much ignore people and vehicles! At that moment I was SO glad we’d gotten the new video camera with the long zoom! After a while, she got up and started walking away. We followed her at a distance and when she settled down, we stopped to watch. She started to roar and eventually another lioness showed up.

They were so beautiful, and since they were active we decided to just stay, eat our peanut butter and jelly sandwich breakfast and see what happened. At one point, Rachel asked her parents if she could get out of the land cruiser and stand in the window on the opposite side of the vehicle from where the lions were. She slipped out the window and then could see over the top. The lioness turned to look at Rachel, licked her lips as if to say, “I could change my breakfast plans you know”, and Rachel slipped right back in.

A while later, the lioness got up and started walking straight at us. She just moved alongside the land cruiser, close enough that if we would have opened the door, we would probably have bumped her with it! They were tracking a wildebeest on the opposite ridge, Paige named him “Wilber” and we were kind of rooting for him to wise up and not come close, but we were also kind of thinking that it would be interesting to watch a kill. One of the lionesses went off into the distance and they roared back and forth for a while. Eventually the other one went off into an area that it would have been hard to follow and we moved on. We found another safari vehicle and we joined them to watch a male and female lion, and later some other lionesses, and while that was neat, the whole encounter with “our lioness” was about the most magical wildlife hour of our trip.

2. Listening to hippos and lions while we slept

When we traveled to the Maasai Mara area, we stayed in a tent camp called Olare. Finding the camp was an adventure as the “roads” are more like tracks through the grass and the signage consists of a rock now and then painted with a camp name and an arrow if you are lucky.

The tents were on a concrete platform and had complete bathrooms in each tent. The showers were great, but we had to wait until they turned the hot water on at 6:30 pm and the electricity was only on from 7-9:30 pm. The beds were like a 4 poster style with beautiful mosquito nets. The entire camp was surrounded by an electric fence, so the animals are free to roam wherever, but we were caged up. We stayed two nights and the second night, our party of 6 filled up the only 3 tents occupied in the entire camp. There were probably 30 tents total. The food was amazing, quite elaborate meals fixed out in the “middle of nowhere”. The dining tent faced the river and monkeys played in the area right outside, Paige was very creeped out by the monkeys! When we slept, we could hear the animals right outside, some of them were less than 100 yards from our beds. We came to recognize the voices of the hippo, and the lion and even though the elephants were less than ¼ mile away, we weren’t sure we heard them. The night was VERY
dark, and that night we were VERY aware that we were far from home!

reactions to re-entry

Now that we've been home for a few days, it's starting to feel normal to be here, but we are all missing Africa. We find ourselves going on the Turtle Bay website to hear the sounds of singing in Swahili, (if you go to the Turtle Bay link and then look for videos people have posted, there is one called Chuck the Duck visits Turtle Bay and the music is great!) we have had trouble explaining to people how different life in Kenya was for us and we are rather overwhelmed with all there is to do to catch up here. Grant did a great job keeping the house together, so we didn't have to deal with lawn mowing, cleaning or buying groceries immediately, but now I have a "to do list" again that kind of frightens me! ( I can't figure out how to turn off the underline, sorry!)

Reactions to re-entry

We have to look for toilet handles again-opposite side

The showers are hot, strong and immediate

The beds are soft

The bird sounds are different

Yogurt and cereal taste “normal”

Driving is weird- we'd gone 3 weeks without being behind the wheel

Almost everyone is white and speaks “American English”- we really miss the diversity!

The medicine is stronger, fixing my itchy skin

The internet is FAST

we have independence, we can go where we want, when we want

there is lots of media NOISE

our alert level went way down

we have lots of space

we can be out of each other’s sight for more than a few minutes

lightening bugs

blueberries and strawberries taste delicious

toilet paper is soft

back to the states...

Well, we made it home and British Airways assures us that the remaining two pieces of our luggage will be right behind us and come to our house by 6 on Saturday If you're going to lose luggage, that last flight is the one you can afford to lose them on, so we're all good. During our 5 hours in London's Heathrow airport, we sat at Starbucks and debriefed. We made lists.... The top 10 things (actually, we had to make it 11 as we couldn't leave any of those out) funniest moments, interesting things we learned, most beautiful things we saw, most significant moments, frustrating things, surprising things, random wonderful things, etc. Once those are edited, we will post some of them.

It was great to see the boys again!!! They both met us a the airport with a surprise...new haircuts. They said that since the house was intact, they didn't damage the cars, Grant didn't spend all the money we left, etc. they needed some way to shock us.

Now we're just trying to get sorted out and back on the Central time zone. We managed to head over to the Harks house for a 4th of July get together and we even stayed up for fireworks, but now I'm awake in the middle of the night, sorting through the volumes of e-mails, etc. that have been ignored while we were gone.

Thanks so much for your prayers for our safety. We are very thankful to be home and together with all 5 of us here! more later...I'm going to try to get back to sleep before the sun comes up!

almost ready to leave

Our time at the coast was so relaxing and fun. We switched over to a beach schedule, woke to put on our swim suits and only really got dressed for dinner. We met so many interesting people from all over the world! Some favorite moments included Paige playing water polo, watching a group of acrobats who presented the evening entertainment at Turtle Bay, and the last morning we had a group of Kenyan young men took us on a walk on the reef at low tide. They showed us star fish, crabs, jellyfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers and the highlight was the family of eels. If you put a piece of sausage on a stick, you can entice them out of their holes; that was SO fun to see. We went snorkeling in a marine park too! We worked on our Swahili phrases and just enjoyed this beautiful part of Kenya.

For our last full day in Nairobi, we did the more typical tourist things; we went to the Giraffe Farm, the Elephant orphanage and then ate lunch at the Carnivore.

This has really been a “trip of a lifetime” and when we look at the pictures from 21 days ago, it seems like ages, so much has happened. We’ve learned so much, met so many wonderful people, seen things that are beautiful, sad, thrilling, life affirming, fun and shocking. Condensing it into any kind of a manageable way to communicate it is going to be a real trick! We’ve taken over 2000 photos, hours of video and purchased a good number of things to remember our visit by. Somehow we will clip it down so we can share it with other people and not have them fall asleep or zone out. We do have our 109 favorite photos selected, so that’s a start!

We leave late on July 3 and arrive home the afternoon of July 4. It’s a trip of about 30 hours door to door, so we probably won’t be in very good shape to visit with for a few days!