Today I sold my Amigo! I got what I was asking for it, which is what I payed for it 3 years ago!

Right before we left for Africa we noticed that our front yard was a swamp by the well access. We turned off the breaker and left. I called a guy with a great reputation when we got back and they showed up today at 8:15. We’ll see how much this sets us back

*Update* They’re done and we have water in the pipes, not the yard! It’s a bit of a muddy mess! The bill came and we have the money to pay it, but I can think of things that are more fun to blow that kind of money on!

Yesterday Katie and I attended the funeral of a friend and co-worker of mine for the last eight years. A year ago Margaret was on a CMF staff retreat and chose to go on a grueling hike. Then in October when I got back from Kenya, I noticed she wasn’t herself. By November or maybe very early in December she couldn’t continue working and took a medical leave of absence. By the winter it was clear she wasn’t coming back and we held a retirement party for her in the Spring. She was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dimentia and soon had to be moved into a facility to be cared for properly.

Margaret was a wonderful co-worker. She enjoyed bragging about her beloved Oregon, baking hundreds and hundreds of perfect cookies for the CMF Board Meetings, and writing encouraging notes and attaching them to small presents that would show up on my desk on my birthdays.

The funeral was perfect for her and really celebrated her life. If you made it through to the end without crying, you didn’t make it past the announcement that her kids and grandkids had spent the last few days baking cookies and the grandkids were handing them out on the way out the door. That was very special!

Hannah found a friend pretty quick! The parade is a Shuttleworth tradition that hasn’t been observed for years.  However, this weekend we were camping in nearby Richmond, IN and couldn’t resist returning.

Our last day in Kenya was wonderful. Pat & I headed back to the Pangani one more time and asked for the children to make a sign that says “Thank You Jason” Jason is the guy who made the child sponsorship program. So they told us once we got back from Joska they would have it ready for us.

Keith (CMF) took Pat & I out into the country to their boarding school for grades 3-7. It is an amazing place and one that has grown so much in just one year. The parents are so happy that their children are out of the slums and can focus on a good education and not worry about running with the wrong crowd.

They have 2 girl dorms & 2 guy dorms. It is lined with bunk beds 3 high and each student gets a medal footlocker for their personal belongings. They get a bucket that is theirs to do their own wash. It teaches them great responsibility for life in general. The prayer is that they will pass Kenya’s big standardized test after 8th grade to allow them to go onto a High School Boarding School. It is really scary for girls, because if a girl gets pregnant her life is over, there is hardly any hope for her to succeed if that happens. This is also the place where a lot of the mosquito nets are going. They are building more buildings out there, a bigger dorm for the girls that will hold 300 per floor and there will be 4 floors. It’s HUGE!! Their goal is to begin going all the way up to high school but that takes more money and sponsorship.

We left Joska and headed back to Pangani to grab lunch and get the thank you picture done. Our lunch today consisted of corn meal in the form of a dough paste, greens, rice & mystery meat stew. It was pretty good, but I think we are both looking forward to getting back to American food ☺

As is the Kenyan way the teachers and students didn’t just prepare signs, they had a whole presentation that they probably worked all morning on. It was a good 20 min, singing, memory verse, dancing & a girl thanking Jason personally. They made three signs that went like this: “THANK YOU” “JASON” “For Making Soft-Were”. I didn’t misspell software, it was really cute and we are bringing the signs back with us.

After that we headed back to Lee & Ann Marie’s house to shower & finish up packing. We all headed back to the airport at like 4:30 for a 9:50 flight. We didn’t arrive until 8:00 pm, due to all the crazy traffic. I thought I was going to get sick in the back seat due to all the fumes and us just sitting there not moving. That was to begin our long trip back home.

We got through customs just fine, no worries there. Our plane was a little bumpy and smelly (we are guessing that the meal didn’t agree with people and that a few diapers needed to be changed.) I missed the smelling part due to me falling asleep. It wasn’t the best flight, with turbulence and then what felt like a nosedive as we headed into Amsterdam. We had 5 hrs to kill, so we went up to the lounge chairs where we all got to sleep for a little bit. Right before it was time to go we decided to have McDonalds because the airplane food hasn’t been that great. Boy, were we glad we got McD’s, because the food on the Amsterdam to Detroit flight was NOT GOOD AT ALL!! In fact I feel like we are all packed in like sardines and it is a little uncomfortable. I think we are all getting the itch to get into the USA and see everyone.

We arrived in the US! Praise, Praise, Praise! Now we only have to wait for about 3 ½ more hrs before boarding. Customs had long lines, but we made it through just fine. I felt bad because there was a mother and 2 daughters standing next to us pushing their way through, because in other countries it’s custom to push your way through. They got yelled at and had to go to the very end of the line. I felt bad, because I had told them they could go ahead of us and the mother said no. Anyway, we made it through just fine.

I hope you have enjoyed reading all about our adventures in Africa, we sure had an amazing time and can’t wait to share pictures and other stories with you all.

Thanks for your prayers
Pat & Katie

How to even begin to describe today events will be a tough challenge, so please bear with me as I am still processing everything we experienced and saw.

This morning Mike & the Gerber’s went off in two different directions. Mike, as best we can tell, helped Jeff (CMF’s Field Business Administrator for the Kenya team) with computer stuff and we did a ton of things today. (Thanks for your prayers, we were completely safe and most everything went according to plan.)

We first went to the Hope Center (Pangani) and while we were waiting to head out Pat went to shoot video of school being in session. Which was so much fun to watch all these children running around and so happy to be in school. I, on the other hand, went to the sewing shop and talked to the ladies who are learning a new skill. Once they graduate from sewing class they can begin making their own things to sell for their own business. It was great fun visiting with all of the women.

About 10:30 am we headed into the city with Keith, Wallace, Mary & a deaf child named Baraka. We were taking Baraka to his first speech therapy session since his hearing implant surgery. Well things didn’t go quite as they hoped because the speech therapist had never seen this implant before and wouldn’t begin giving therapy until he studied the type of implant Baraka was given. So it was a quick trip.

Since we were already in the middle of downtown Mary asked if we could stop by the government building so she could pick up her passport because they had called and said it would be ready. She said it would only take a minute ☺. As things normally go here it took around an hour and she didn’t even get her passport because they told her something wasn’t done right. So anyway, we got to sit in the car and see all the fun excitement on the streets of Nairobi.

Back to Pangani for a quick lunch of rice, veggie stew, cabbage and FANTA (love that orange Fanta). It was very good!!! Next we were heading out to different Hope Centers in the other sections of the Mathare slums, Kosovo & Bondeni. Bondeni is where Millisent lives, (the child we sponsor), we were to give her family a mosquito net & some food. We get to Kosovo first and it was during lunchtime, so we got to see all these students eating beans and rice and drinking Chai. There were little ones, Hannah’s size eating and they were so cute. I am sure Pat got some great shots of them. They are putting in bathrooms there so that they can have bathrooms on each floor (which is HUGE)!

Next we walked through the slums of Kosovo into the next slum over, Bondeni. This walk will be very hard to describe. Very narrow path with a constant stream of black water flowing down with a ton of trash everywhere. We crossed over a “River” that literally was pitch black with trash as far as the eye could see. The smell is indescribable and is so foul that it takes you a moment to get yourself together. These people live life this way all the time, they know how to survive this life. It is one that we cannot fathom, but it is the only thing they have ever known.

As we get into Bondeni my heart begins to race because we are about to meet Millisent. We step into the Hope Center at Bondeni and the “vice principal” or assistant lead teacher welcomes us. She wants to take us to every classroom and introduce us the different classes. It was so cute. They all would stand then sing a song and do a memory verse. She wanted us to go to ALL of them, but Keith talked her down to like 3 classrooms. WE finally get to Millisent’s classroom and they pull her out of class and told us we were going to go over to her house and visit with her family. I didn’t know that we were going to be able to meet her family and see where she lives, so I knew this was going to be a challenge keeping all my emotions in check.

I held her hand the whole way to her home. It’s one room, 8’ x 10’ where 6 people live. Her mom, dad, 2 sister & 1 brother. There monthly rent is $15 and then they pay an extra $3 for electricity (1 light bulb). They have 1 bed, a couch, 2 chairs, a little coffee table, 1 dresser and then they stack their other necessities to the ceiling. They use empty feed sacks as wallpaper and a sheet that hangs down to separate the room from their “bedroom” (the bed). We went in and talked with the mom and the girls. She told us that they heard we were coming, (which is funny, because we didn’t even know we were coming) and that her husband wanted to be here to meet us. However, he had to leave and try to go find work loading and unloading trucks. So, we gave the Children’s Bible to the family, a coloring book, crayons, & stickers. Millisent was excited about the crayons. We then gave the family 2 bags of food which contained, rice, beans, flour, baking fat, 4 suckers, tea, sugar, salt, special flour that has extra nutrients packed in it. Millisent’s eyes got really big when she saw the suckers! She snatched it quickly and put it in her mouth with the wrapper still on! They were SOO grateful, than we gave them their mosquito nets that the E91 students will be raising money for and set it up for the family. We prayed for them and they promised to be praying for us as well. We got a lot of pictures and I am coming home feeling very blessed by this family and blessed we got to meet them. We can’t wait to share the news with Hannah and show her the pictures of our very special family in Kenya.

Tomorrow will be a BIG day. We don’t fly out until like 10:00 pm, so we are heading out to a boarding school in the country (Joska) and see where a lot of the mosquito nets are being used. I don’t know if I will get a chance to type out another blog entry, so if not we will see you all soon. Please pray for safe travel back and that we can finish our trip getting all the last minute shots & video that we need.

Today began very early (5:30 am) so that we could head on over to the Nairobi State Game Park. We spent 6 hrs driving through the bush looking for wild animals in their natural setting. It was AWESOME!! Pat got some great shots and I tried to get some live animal video footage. We saw a ton of giraffes, zebras, gazelles, ostriches, beautiful birds, and many more. Some highlight stories from today include:

We stopped at the “Hippo pool” (which doesn’t actually have any hippos in it) and a guard caring a big gun, like big gun, walked myself, Pat , Mike & our driver for the day. John is a brother of Mary who we have talked a lot about in previous post. We were walking quickly through the bush and saw crocodiles. Now, these were rather large and a little too close for my comfort, but hey that is why the guard took us out with the gun. I asked him if he shoots the gun a lot, and he said just to scare the animals away so that they don’t hurt anyone. I appreciated the gun today.

The Baboons: There were these picnic areas around the park area that had toilets (with out toilet paper of course but it had a DOOR! WHOO!!) Anyway, there is this sign that says, beware of the baboons. Well, lets just say they got VERY close (In fact I stayed in the van and took the picture out the window because I have seen to many animal shows showing baboons not being very nice to people.)

It was a really fun day seeing God’s amazing wild animals out in their natural environment. Just on a side note: The park only has one gate, to get in. So the animals can come and go as they wish, which is very cool. We then took our driver, John out to eat and so we went to the mall and had the choice of: African, Thai, Chinese, Italian, Turkey, and others. It was a pretty eclectic group of mall food choices, not the same in the USA. No, McDonalds or any other fast food chain that you can think of. Our African driver John wanted, get ready for it….PIZZA!!! So we got him his pizza and orange fanta and he was a happy man.

As for the rest of this day, we pretty much have hung out with the Pruitt’s (Our wonderful CMF host) talking ministry/computer issues and as I am typing this Pat and Mike are helping them get email set up and quicker speeds on their computer. Which will hopefully make their life a little easier. We also had dinner tonight at Java House and it was a delightful evening.

Today was our easy/play day. Tomorrow will be church in the slums, which I am so excited about worshiping in a completely different culture but knowing that we are worshiping the same GOD. That is SO powerful. Monday will be another day in the slums, taking a few nets to the children and bring the stories back home. Tuesday will be last minute needs & then we fly out later on that evening. That’s just the “Kenya Schedule” for the next few days. I have learned that there is American Schedule & there is Kenya Schedule. American Schedule is when you arrive at the time when your meeting is set. Kenya Schedule begins whenever, could be 30 min or hours later. So we will still be posting up dates to the blog. Sorry we haven’t emailed everyone; it’s just that internet is SO slow here (2K on average), so this is the best way to communicate to you all.

(written by Pat)

Today was the day that we did the main thing we came here for: introduce the Nairobi team to their new software. If this is news to you, I’ll explain. The ministry that was started here in 2000 has grown from 50 to well over 2,000 kids. Each child is sponsored by someone in the US, who pays for him or her to go to school, eat a good meal (this is a big deal here!), a uniform (they may only have an outfit or two), Christian teaching, a social worker to look after the needs of the family, etc. As you can imagine it can be difficult to maintain records of all of these kids, where they come from, birthdays, who their sponsor is, whether they’ve paid this month, etc. So CMF had a web database written to manage all of this information. Up until now all of this information was kept in multiple spreadsheets and databases and they had problems with info being duplicated and everyone having the current info. The downside to a web database in Kenya is the whole “web” part. Internet access in SLOW. You might remember the days of 56K dial-up speeds. Well, they would LOVE to have that fast. They routinely have something like 2-4K. It might go faster and then slow to a stop for several minutes at a time. Every few minutes someone will remind us that fast fiber optic cable internet connections are coming! It’s become the inside joke. They guess six months, but it could just as easily be two years.

Anyway, Mike and I held a training this morning on the new software for a couple dozen social workers and IT staff. These are mostly very basic computer users. So Mike and I did our best to keep things simple and stopped to allow them to ask questions. It was quickly obvious that the biggest questions centered on roles and procedures and not the technology tools we were presenting.

This team has been very successful with a simple, solid, and biblical ministry model. It has lead to tremendous growth. They are now at a crossroads to continuing that growth. Just like the talented leadership at a church plant has to adapt when their small church grows into a megachurch, this team will have to adapt to the different needs of a growing ministry. They have several new team members that they need to plug into these new needs.

After lunch we held a smaller training/meeting with the CMF missionaries and the Kenyan IT director. We laid out a plan for them to play around with the web database for a couple of weeks until the head of CMF’s Urban Poor ministries visits. At that point they can talk intelligently about what policies and procedures to adopt. Then two weeks after that the CMF staff person who uses the web database all day long is coming to work with them on ironing out some of the kinks.

Since we finished a little early in the afternoon and the Maasai Market was still open we went with our host family, the Pruitts, to shop. This was Mike’s introduction to heavy-handed sales tactics of those at the market. For instance, one thing Katie bought they told us was 90 and half an hour later I got it from them for 42. I didn’t buy anything. Everything that looked good I already had. Katie was a bit overwhelmed and is too soft to get a good deal.

Tomorrow was supposed to be another training day, but we decided we don’t need it. So someone is taking us to the Nairobi Game Park tomorrow at 6am. I’ve never been there and I’m looking forward to seeing how it compares to the wild and open Maasai Mara.

Pat