Thursday, December 11th dad was inducted into the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Hall of Fame! This is a very big deal and usually is reserved for people outside of ODNR that are famous for natural resource conservation in Ohio. Dad joins previous winners Bob Evans and Johnny Appleseed! Dad’s plaque will be on a wall at the ODNR headquarters with those guys.

The Monday night before Thanksgiving was a Retirement Dinner for my dad, Tim Gerber. Dad had spent almost 40 years working for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. Dad’s coworkers did a great job of tailoring the evening to what dad would want. Mainly that our whole family was included front and center, all 15 of us. There wasn’t any pomp and circumstance, just coworkers saying wonderful things about my father. Some things I already knew… some I didn’t.

I helped organize the family and then his coworkers to all chip in for a really nice digital SLR camera for dad. I think you can tell in the photo that dad was quite surprised! After it was over the whole family went over to see dad’s office for the last time. It was a great tribute to a great career!

Check out Joe’s Blog! He’s way more behind in updating it than I am , but it’s good stuff and from a different perspective than mine.
Check out Bouterse.org

At like 1:30 I was wide-awake. I decided to sneak into the family room and get online. It was dinnertime in Indy, but Katie wasn’t online. I sent her a couple of pictures and this journal and updated the blog with a quick video I had made about our visit to the Methare slums. To keep the size down for uploading, I compressed the video pretty small. However, I was hoping Katie would be able to use it at BLAST. (Which I did and the kids LOVED) Around 2am I went back to sleep. Driving out of the city we came upon the huge vista of the Great Rift Valley. Then off to a remote area that had a clinic that CMF runs. The road to Narok was not as bad as I remember it, but still really bad. On the way we stopped to videotape Dan doing the Maasai Team Annual Objectives video. We parked at a favorite tree of Dan and set up at this secluded spot. In the next 20 minutes probably 4 or 5 trucks went by. This seemed kind of like the back way to the Mara. Around dinner we arrived at the old Giles, Johnson, Snyder, ect… homestead in the middle of nowhere. We stopped here last time and Katie, Dan, and I watched a movie (The Patriot) because it gets dark at like 7pm. The sun was setting so Joe and I went to take photos. When we got back we were treated to fresh baked pies. The rest of the night, Joe and I played with the kids. We have various other species that would like to join us in the guesthouse. The most annoying one right now is the squeal of the bats. I took an Ambien to get better sleep and I’m already feeling a little loopy. I get top bunk. Lets hope I don’t fall off in my stupor.

Wednesday – Sept. 26th
I had a hard time getting up on time, mostly because I was on the top bunk and didn’t want to wake Joe. Breakfast was baked oatmeal with papaya. We set out pretty soon after breakfast. We headed for a remote CMF clinic we drove to two nearby lodges for safari tourists to check them out. The first one was really nice! It’s like the place that Survivor uses as a reward in a reward challenge. Apparently Barok Obama stayed in one that we passed last year. I think the url was basecampadventures.com? Then we went into the Mara to look for animals. It took a while to find anything. We probably drove for a half hour and just saw an assortment of dear, zebras, warthogs, and wildebeest. Dan kept following the riverbank. When we had almost given up on this stretch of the river, we found a pod of hippos in the water. We all got out and took pictures, video, and ate lunch. At one point, something made a noise and they all went crazy for a few seconds – long enough for me to get them in action. As we passed by a lone tree 40 yards away, Dan spotted cheetahs sleeping in the tree’s shade. They didn’t seem to mind as we pulled up with in 10-15 feet. There were three cheetahs are kind of laying on each other. As Dan says, “That was a treat!” we found a small group of four elephants coming up through the trees from the river and then grazing 30-40 yards in front of us. This was great. Although we then left the park and headed for Ewaso Gniro. We still hadn’t seen any giraffes and I hate to admit it, but I was disappointed we didn’t see any. 30-60 minutes down the road we saw half a down heads, then long necks climb over the horizon. There weren’t any trees around, but it was a wonderful group of giraffes being illuminated by the setting sun. They were magnificent! I saw everything I wanted to see.

Thursday – Sept. 27th
The clinic building has not really changed in four years. However, there are three new buildings that house clinic workers and the CMF HIV/AIDS missionaries. All that took until after noon. So we headed back to our room for a cho break and ended up breaking out every leftover food we had and ate an impromptu meal of crackers, cheese, apple, muffins, and peanut butter sandwiches. After that we picked up some Maasai men and they took us to a village of a Maasai man with AIDS. His house was not very traditional; it had a tin roof and was square. We went inside and he told us about how he learned he was HIV positive and how he is open to learn more about God because, “Nothing on this earth is good.” That is pretty powerful. His wife is also HIV positive and made us some really good chi – very sweet. I filmed the clinic worker we had translating for us as he sat next to the man in his bed. We stopped in Narok and stopped at the blanket store for some Maasai blankets and to the guy on the corner selling Maasai knives. The prices are better than in Nairobi, even though the blanket guy jacked the price up 40 shillings (60 cents). The knife guy said they were 900 shillings ($12), but got them down to 600 shillings ($9). We plan on spending the day in the Nairobi slums tomorrow.