Kiswahali

Jambo, harbari yako? Tuna nzuri. Tuli jifunza Kiswahili kwa tatu jama. Tunapenda kula Kenya chakula. Tunataka wewe kuja katika Kenya. Hakuna Matata.
Kwaheri ya kuonana.

Translation:
Hello, how are you? We are fine. We have been studying Swahili for three weeks. We love to eat Kenya food. We want you to come to Kenya. No Problem.
Good bye until we meet again.

For the past three weeks we have been attending Kiswahili classes at the Anglican Church of Kenya Language School in downtown Nairobi. We attend class from 9:00 AM until 3:30PM. We have four different instructors who have been working hard to help us. The classes are tough, especially for those of us who haven’t attended any schooling in so many years, but the traffic getting to class in the mornings has been the major stressor. The morning commute takes us around one and a half hours and it is only about 10 miles. It is just simply bumper to bumper the whole way. The road we live on is the busiest road around. It takes us one full hour to go the first three and half miles from our house! Needless to say, this has been “driving” Jeff crazy and not been good for either of our nerves. Friday we were able to convince the school to send one of the instructors to our office to teach us. We are so excited about this. We will take next week off while they make the arrangements and start back with classes on February 2. Thanks to so many of you for your prayers in this area. Please continue to pray for us to learn enough of the language to be able to communicate. God can and does still work miracles.

As for those of you who have been asking how Molly is adjusting to Kenya, we think this picture says it all.

Wall Construction

As we mentioned in previous post, the road in front of our compound is very busy. The city has decided to widen the road and will be taking down our present shrubbery and fence. This is a huge security concern, so the mission is having a new block wall constructed across the front of our property. ALL of the work is being done by hand.

This is a picture of the ditch for the footer for the wall. Here you can see men inside the ditch that they dug by hand. When completed, the length of the wall will be about one quarter of a mile. As you can see in the photo, the footer ditch is about five and a half feet deep. Here in Africa you can use manual labor to accomplish a task at a fraction of the cost of machinery.

Celebrating New Year at Amboseli National Park

To celebrate the New Year, we took a camping trip with some friends to Amboseli National Park in Southern Kenya. We woke each morning to see the sunrise at Mt. Kiliminjaro. It was beautiful. We would go out each day on game drives to see what animals we could see. We thought you might enjoy seeing some of God’s awesome creatures in their natural habitat.

This is Mt. Kiliminjaro.

One creature we saw plenty of was the elephant. We even woke up one morning to find an elephant in our camp ground.

This is the big bull who decided to visit us in the campground.
This strange looking creature is a Wildebeest. One day we saw three cheetahs surround this herd of wildebeest. They made a short run for them, but then stopped abruptly and laid down.

This is a spotted hyena. We were surrprised at the size of these animals. It's difficult to tell because there is nothing in the photo to give it perspective but, they are much larger than a large dog.

Another plentiful animal was the Zebra. We were able to observe them, walking, running, lying down and even one rolling over on it’s back!

Giraffe

Guess what this one is.

Fish Eagle

We came across these cute little creatures and had to look them up in our animal book. We discovered they are Bat eared foxes. A car drove up just as we were looking at them and asked what we saw. We decided to have some fun so, in his best British accent, Jeff told them “It's a Bat Eared Fox, just there, behind the bush”. To our surprise, in her genuine British accent she replied, “Oh reaaalllly!” By her response, you would have thought that she had been waiting her entire life to see a Bat Eared Fox. We laughed about this for days.

These beauties are called Grey Crowned Cranes. God gave them beautiful colors.

These are Superb Starling. The were all around our campsite.

Two different days we saw lions in this same area. On this day there were two lions on each side of the road. We stopped to take photos and video. While we were there, two lions crossed the road to the side where the others were resting. All of the sudden the two who had crossed the road attacked the two on the other side, one at a time. The dust and paws were flying and the roars were awesome. This was a rare treat for any group on a game drive. We were in awe.

Hippo

Cape Buffalo. These animals can be incredibly hostile. One attacked another missionary’s car in Nakuru National Park a couple of months ago. It didn’t work out well for the buffalo.

Wart Hog with babies

Water Buck

Grant's Gazelle