Sunday night

The weekend has been good. It's been a break between the intensity of the course and the travelling and experiences of the coming week.

We saw the elephants at the orphanage in the Nairobi National Park - they brought out the 7 little ones (from 7 months to 2 years) to give them their bottles and let us watch for a while, then the 3 older ones (between 2 & 3 years old). The littlest one was the cutest. I got some video of them... We also saw pumba there - warthogs. Then we did lunch at the Karen Blixen gardens (That name will sound familiar if you know the movie Out of Africa). Then to the big treehouse in the Giraffe Center to feed the giraffes and get slimy giraffe kisses. Didn't get quite as many photos there, as my battery was wasted from the videos. When we get back to Toronto, though, we are going to put all 8 of our photos on one CD so we can have a copy of everyone's shots. That will fill in the gaps nicely.

Today we went to a church service that was multi national, and not too unlike what we'd see at home. Even the size was similar, except this church met in a tent - it's a big permanent structure that reminded me of a circus tent - only the colors and the flags were missing. The next two Sundays we will be going to churches in our partner's denominations. Next Sunday, one of our guys has been asked to preach.

After lunch we had some different options for our free day - I elected to stay here and do some laundry and read and rest. There were a few of us who stayed, and it turned out to be a great day. I'm not tired of always being with people, but some preventative measures are good - hopefully we get enough down time like that so we don't all get sick of each other.

I'll fill you in on the next couple of days since we'll be gone - tomorrow and Tuesday we will be in Garissa which is 5 hours away. While we're there we will spend some time with a Muslim man who converted from Christianity, we will teach in a school - each of our groups will have about 45 minutes with about 15-25 students. We're adapting a Bible story to tell, and will fill the rest of the time with questions, songs, and games. We're also working at the center they do ministry out of; two groups will be priming a couple of rooms for painting, and the other two will be playing with children. (I'm in the play group.) The rooms need to be painted because during the conflict, the center housed a lot of children whose parents left them there to be safe, and that many children living there for that long left the rooms very dirty. So we get to help fix it up.