Kenyan Hospitality

My plan was to make this post a “Jackie post”, that is, I was going to get her to put this one up herself and talk about what she has been up to. However, since she’s quite a perfectionist when it comes to writing (and most things – evidence of that being her husband :-) she will probably do that over the weekend when she has more time. My mom wants another update with more pictures so I will fill you in a bit on what we’ve been up to the last few days.

I entitled this post “Kenyan hospitality” because that’s exactly what we’ve been given over these past few days. I mentioned that on Sunday we had lunch at Mama Brian’s, but we also had dinner at Mikel’s (a nurse at the hospital) on Monday night and then dinner at Edna’s (Christina and Drew’s house help) and dessert at Shaloma’s (hospital adminstrator) last night! So we went from having almost no Kenyan food the first week of being here to having three in 4 nights. The food, although it’s really good, doesn’t compare to the hospitality that comes along with it. People here are so gracious and willing to serve, it really is quite wonderful. The staples are “ugali” (kind of a more-firm version of cream of wheat), beans and potatoes in some form, rice, sometimes meat and sometimes chapati (my favourite).



I’d say the most interesting meal was at Edna’s, who lives about a 15-minute walk into the countryside. There we wazungu are quite a novelty to the kids. Drew and I had a blast telling them we were monsters and then chasing them through the hillside and in between the huts! Drew even made on little boy cry, but they loved it and kept coming back for more (in fact I ran into two of them on my hike today, who walked with me for about 10 minutes along the trail).







Edna had two little huts – one as a dining room and one as a kitchen and bedroom. THAT felt like a true Kenyan rural experience! Interestingly enough it is quite common for the host to not even eat with his or her guests; in fact, Edna butchered a chicken and made us this meal for 6pm and didn’t eat with us. Instead she ended up eating the same food with her family three hours later. It was quite bizarre, but she checked in on us regularly and was very happy to have us over. The picture I've included with this blog is of us and Edna's family.

Another thing that is interesting and quite sad about the culture here is the role of men in the family and the household. Typically it’s the wife that does all the cooking and household chores and raising the children. Traditionally, that left men to do the hunting and be the warriors. However, with technology, the global village, availability of food, etc. that role is no longer really needed. In general the men have not stepped up their role within the family and they seem to float along on any whim they might have (I am definitely generalizing here). It is commonplace for men to sleep around, take a second wife, turn to alcohol, and generally not really be there for their families. Some evidence of this is the fact that Edna's husband was not present for dinner - the man in the photo is actually her brother-in-law. I was fascinated with my conversation with Mama Brian today who said she thinks that women should improve on the support they give to their husbands so that they won’t “want” to leave their families. I, however, think it would be an excellent ministry to be geared at developing Godly men with a sense of purpose. You would really have to commit to a community for a long time to get this off the ground, however, since the culture of the men is so ingrained…

At any rate, Jackie has been on surgery with Dr. Drew this week and has had some interesting cases. One was a man who fell out of a tree, or off of a rock (he couldn’t really remember…) four days prior. He came in complaining of blood in his urine, which turned out to be a bladder rupture. When they opened him up, his bladder actually kind of exploded all over Jackie and Drew (some mixture of blood and urine). Another case involved a circumcision gone VERY badly in one of the surrounding villages. The men who took this boy in had waited all day to do so and just didn’t grasp the seriousness of the matter. This was an indication of the larger problem of some very sketchy, almost barbaric rituals going on in these extremely rural areas - it does make for some interesting medical cases, though!

I have spent the majority of my week working on the job site (Tuesday and Wednesday) and really trying to build relationships with many of the locals. Today (Thursday) was just that – I took a long walk in the morning to find a remote place to read my bible and ended up striking up random conversations with many people from the area. After this hike I had chai SIX times at various houses with different people, learned to make CHAPATI (definitely going to make use of that skill) and learned a lot about Kenya, the area, traditions, etc. It was actually an amazing day, although it doesn’t sound like much. I was also able to meet with the patron of the children’s home to figure out how we can be of assistance to them going forward. I really wish we were going to be around on December 22 when they’re having a big Christmas program with all of those kids!

That about sums up the last couple of days! We are continuing to have an incredible time here, I can’t tell you how great it is to be able to do this together. On a side note – can you believe Christmas is only three weeks away? I can’t decide what I’m more upset about, the fact that it might not even feel like Christmas is going to happen or the fact that I miss the entire egg nog season… Mom, can you pick some up and stick them in the freezer for me? Hope all is well back home, and as always – your thoughts and prayers are very much appreciated.

Final thought - for some reason I haven't been able to get a reliable internet connection to be able to do another full skype call with the grade 8 class. Thanks goes out to Mr. Aalbers and Mr. Devries for having the patience to keep trying, and for those of you that logged into MSN last night to chat a bit!

Blessings,

Kevin and Jackie