Village Happenings

Last village news before I start talking about travels!

As I mentioned earlier, the last few days in the village were just crazy. On top of chicken house and planting, we also moved! Plus since Rachel isn't coming back, we had a few fun going away things as well.

First off...the move! Although we loved our little house, it was time to move. I'm not sure how well I explained things within the organization before, but basically there were two organizations in two separate villages. Amanda, who is half of the time in Nairobi and half in Canada is the director of the Tumaini part in the village of Eshibanze. Since she is not in the village all of the time, she decided to partner with another local organization in Khalaba. Khalaba is the village where our house is and it is one the project site of the local organization. Unfortunately, there have been some problems with this local organization and with the local director. I am trying to set up some systems of accountability for donations received through Amanda and it was just not working with the other organization. As a result, most of our volunteers efforts have been focused on the Tumaini side in Eshibanze. SO...we decided to rent a house in Eshibanze. The eventual goal is to buy a piece of land there and build our own house in Eshibanze. For now, our new house is a mud house with two bedrooms and a main room. How does one move furniture in Kenya......by motorbike! Yikes... we had two sets of bunk beds, all our kitchen stuff, all our bags and us. It took 3 motorbikes only two trips each to move all that stuff!! It was insane!

We even brought our little puppy over by motorbike. This little guy's name is Maximus. We found him with 3 other puppies and they were not in a good state. We tried to take care of them, but 3 puppies died and only Maximus survived. He has since become our little pet and we feed him our leftovers and even made him a little house.

Look how cute he is! He is way bigger now. I wonder how big he will be when I get back from this trip!

Nakupenda Maximus! (I love Maximus)

I have an awful lot of pictures of Maximus now. Our first orphan sponsorship case.

And now...some more fun events! Here is a picture from St. Patty's day. We decided to bring Rose into town for a nice meal as a thank you and a good bye party for Rachel. It was a great day. Rose was pretty excited about ordering chicken, something you don't eat very often in the village.

Here...as a special last creative art project we did Paper Mache. I think they may have liked the balloons even more than the paper mache.

And finally, before we left, we invited all the teachers over to the head teacher's house for a little going away party. It was pretty fun, I even tried my hand at making chapati. I have no idea how they get them to be so round...mine were ....unique shapes?

So much food! We were really full after.

Best part of the party was that it turned into a spontaneous dance party. Everyone laughed at me attempting to dance like a lua. Lua is the tribe that most of the people in the village are from. Many of the tribes have traditional music and dancing styles.

And here....is Rachel's very last night in the village. We had ugali, meat and sukuma wiki, traditional kenyan food. I think she is gonna miss the village very much!

Posting this has really made me look forward to heading back. I'm excited to get into village life again and see how things went while I was gone..... I love Kenya!