Merry Christmas! (etc.)

We’ll start this blog with some thoughts from Kevin, then shift to Jackie for a description of the weekend and the ending. I (Kevin) started to make an effort at the end of last week to get to know the pastors of the church that we’ve been going to, just to see if they needed help with any administrative or technology tasks. This has opened up a lot of windows in terms of getting to know them and also really helping them out in this short period of time. I was able to show them a few tricks for their new projector and am now in the process of coming up with an excel template with which they can track revenues and expenditures (would you believe they track all this with notepaper and a pen still?) From these new relationships have come some other opportunities as well:

Last Thursday I attended a day of the junior youth camp that is going on in the area (about a half hour motorbike ride away). This was pretty incredible – 100 kids packed into a room with backless benches, really engaged with what the speakers had to say and also in awe of the talents of their peers during the presentations hour! They are so welcoming to visitors as well, I felt like a visiting president or something! They wanted me to speak to the kids (through an interpreter), so it’s a good thing I kind of prepared something the morning of… I should mention another first that Jackie missed in her last post – my first motorbike accident. Pastor Patrick and I had a bit of a spill on the way there, which resulted in a scraped up arm and some bruises for me, not really much of anything for him. I think my pride was hurt more than anything. Luckily, Allie was able to bandage me up in the operating room and I was back on the bike come Sunday (what a cool way to see the countryside!).

Maybe more than anything, I’m learning from these pastors the art of forming relationships. If they tell me to meet them at 10 about accomplishing a task, what they really mean is “show up at 10:30 or 11, we’ll hang out and talk for an hour, then maybe get around to what we intended to get around to”. This doesn’t do much for their ability to take administrative steps or accomplish extra tasks during the week, but it reflects the Kenyan culture of “let’s take care of “us” before taking care of “that”. They also spread themselves very thing during the week and on the weekends by visiting a great number of people, attending weddings, and supporting their pastoral peers in various settings. Again – very refreshing.

I (Jackie) can hardly believe we are entering our last week of work here in Kapsowar! I do want to say “Merry Christmas” to you all now, while I can still remember the yummy smell of stuffing and feel the dead weight in my stomach of too many desserts after our Christmas celebration on Saturday. We had a full holiday meal for 14 at Christina’s and, since only photos can capture the “Charlie-Brown”-ness of our decorative efforts, I will let them speak for themselves. We also ended up sharing a bunch of Allie and Dave’s as well as our wedding pictures with the gang that was there, and then finished the night with Chevy’s Chase’s “National Lampoon Christmas Vacation.” By 11:30pm or so, as the movie was ending, I had to admit it really DID feel like Christmas. Although we will definitely miss our families over Christmas, we’ve grown very close with the national docs and nurses, Mama Brian and the other ex-pat missionaries that we spent the day and night with. The process of getting the décor and meal to happen also left us with that exhausted-yet-satisfied feeling that comes with a big family gathering. It was really nice.

And….amid the festivities…..I began to look just a TAD more Kenyan (other than the fact that I'm still really white - it's me on the right, by the way...). ☺ Again, the picture will speak for itself. All I can say is that Mama Brian has the speediest fingers I’ve ever seen! She did my whole head, including the extensions, in under three hours. (During that time I was happily making tree ornaments out of pipe-cleaners, pinecones popsicle sticks and buttons, and eating a lot of the popcorn that we were supposed to string up around the tree.)

Now, for Sunday: The morning’s church service was lots of fun. We went to the English service (which usually starts within about 15 minutes of it’s official 9:30am start time), and there Kevin played Blessed Be Your Name on the guitar while Crystal and I sang. One does feel a BIT hypocritical singing words about blessing God’s name not only “when the sun’s shining down on me” but also “on the road marked with suffering,” when daily living here seems like suffering compared to my life. Anyway, then I also sang alone (Honour, Honour) in both the English and Kiswahili service. (For comparison, the Kiswahili service officially starts at 11, but it doesn’t really get going until about noon and then continues until 1:40 or so.) I received an unusual compliment after the English service from Pastor Patrick: “She has a voice that could bring a snake out of it’s hole!” (Mama Brian explained that I should be very pleased with this high praise. Ahem….so now I’m the unofficial snake-charmer-lady.)

One thing that I’m still getting used to at all the services we’ve been to is the way each song starts. Someone leading at the front (usually a different person for each song) just begins, and then someone near the keyboard hits the rhythm button so a drum beat starts playing. Then this pianist person guesses wildly at which key we’re in and eventually lands on one that’s close, usually requiring that the congregation change to match the keyboard (sometimes after several pit-stops in other keys). It’s crazy-distracting for me, but everyone here is cool with it – so I’m learning not to get attached to the key we start a song in. There’s no such thing as being given a starting note or an introduction – each song always starts with a solo voice and then key-guessing. Anyways, it’s most definitely different from home! ☺

Later on Sunday, we did another beautiful Kapsowar-area hike. It took about 4 hours, but we hiked to a ridge across the valley that is beside Kapsowar. Hiking along that ridge, you could get a beautiful view of the Kerio Valley on the other side, which is a finger of the Great Rift Valley that extends from Kenya all the way up into Israel. You could see for miles, and it was really neat to see little pockets of rain falling on various parts of the valley (very beautiful).

I think that should be good for now – we’ll probably post one more later this week and then another with some closing thoughts from Nairobi on Saturday or Sunday. We might be able to make one last post on December 23rd from Nairobi after our safari as well…



Hugs and love to you all!
-Jackie and Kevin