Walking Together: It's Been A While

Hey everyone,

Maxine and I are rotating who writes the blog postings and it’s my turn this week, so hopefully what I’m about to say makes sense. I’m writing this post in a WORD document because we currently do not have power.

So it has been a week since our last posting and a lot has happened. On Saturday we started out tired because we worked 12 hour days since we had been here. Personally I was hoping that we could take it easy and not work as long but the 2 other volunteers where out of town so we thought we would help the Moms out and work another long day. When we left our room in the morning, a bus was in the driveway, and a ton of local volunteers were helping out. It was such a blessing because we could finally take it easy and just play with the older kids. I think the only thing we did that day was play soccer and help with the 7:30 pm feeding. Right before we began feeding the babies, I felt sick. I told Maxine I thought I was getting sick so I went back to the room to lie down. She thought I was being a big baby and that I just didn’t want to feed. She had reason to think that because feeding is not my favorite part of being here but I actually did have a stomach virus haha. At about 1 in the morning Maxine started to feel sick as well. The next morning I was feeling better but I had a fever of 100.4 F, so I took some Advil and was fine. Maxine however was feeling worse. She had a low-grade fever that grew to 101.7F. After a full day of lying in bed we decided to go to the Kenyan hospital Sunday evening. The doctor's office's are so different here. The doctors do everything very differently. They even take your temperature under your armpit, instead of under your tongue! Anyway, the doctor told us Maxine had e coli and gave us 3 different kinds of medicine to kill the bacteria. For the next 2 days Maxine was in bed (miserable), but managed to read a lot on her Kindle which she did not have any time for previously. I was around a lot to take care of her, but also helped Wilson dig a trench, and do some other chores around Happy Life.

Tuesday afternoon Maxine started to feel better and was craving pizza. She hadn’t had much to eat the past three days so we asked the grounds keeper, Wilson, if we could get pizza anywhere. He said we could go to this resort down the road called Safari Park. At around 7:00 p.m. we, and the other 2 volunteers, Kyle and Robert, went to the resort for some pizza. Its not safe to walk around at night so we took boda boda’s, which are motorcycles, to the resort. At the resort we asked a staff member where a restaurant was and he took us. We didn't have pizza that night, but Maxine had no complaints- we ate very well. :) The restaurant turned out to be a very nice Brazilian style restaurant. We ate so many types of meat, including: camel, ostrich, crocodile, goat and chicken gizzard( I thought it was amazing and Maxine hated it). At the restaurant they had a show at 9 p.m. so we stayed and watched it. There was African dancing and acrobatics. It was so impressive; it was hard to believe their talents. After we ate we went back to Happy Life and went to sleep on a very full stomach.

On Wednesday Pastor Peter drove us to Village market, which is supposed to be the nicest mall in Nairobi. On the way there we passed the rich side of town and saw beautiful houses that were huge.

This is one of the houses on the way to Village Market

fruit trees on the way to Village Market

road on the way to Village Market

The view on the way to Village Market

The main reason for going to the mall was to get groceries that we couldn’t buy in Roysambu. When we first got there it was weird because we saw so many different ethnicities. After we got our groceries Peter took us to a really nice café where we got cold coffee. The café not only had cold coffee, it had hamburgers, fries and many other western foods. It was so strange being in this part of town. It definitely didn’t feel like a third world country. After we got back from the mall we were in our room resting when Pheobe, one of the moms, told us Abba died in the hospital. Abba was the first baby that Maxine fed. She was almost 4 months old and was just over the size of a new born. She had pneumonia and meningitis.

Today was a relaxing day. We brought out some of the toys we got from home and played with the older children. We don’t play with the older kids as much as we would like because we feel the moms need more help taking care of the infants than they do with keeping the older kids occupied. Here are some pictures of the kids today.