the picture

I just posted is WAY too big. Smaller next time. They won't let me remove it!! I love my silly dog, but that picture is out of control. At least I figured out how to do it!

Stanley told me tonight that there is internet access in the next little town over (about 30 minutes away), Machakos, so I might be able to post at least once or twice while we are in Masii -- otherwise I will post before and after we go, from Nairobi. Here's a link to the weather in Machakos http://wwwa.accuweather.com/world-index-forecast.asp?partner=accuweather&locCode=AFRKEKE003MACHAKOS&metric=0

a little better

We had our pre-trip Kenyan dinner tonight at Stanley and Rose's house. Very delicious meat stew with vegetables, little packets of fried dough with meat inside, a very good tomato salad, and several other delicious dishes. We also picked up several bags each of toiletries that the staff at Hope University in Fullerton collected for the children and since we are all taking two suitcases, we are each filling one with these extra things for the kids. Rose and Stanley are delightful people, very happy and joyous, and are an inspiration. They are truly an example of the difference one or two people can make and they have reached out to many people in southern California and Arizona. Tumaini now has sponsors for over 500 children. Here's the website for anyone who is interested in what they are doing. www.tumainiinternational.org

When Bill and I got home, the moon was coming up. It was full, and it occurred to me that the next time I see it full will be in Masai Mara on safari...pretty cool.

I built my rock tower (my Ebenezer stone) today. (4-6-07 -- I finally took a picture and added it to the blog -- see above)

I still feel like time is going faster and faster but I did make a little progress today. Once I get to the airport, there will be no watch, no worries and I will be in the moment.

Tomorrow is April!!

confusion

I have had the most awful week. Much confusion everywhere. My lists keep getting longer instead of shorter. The time is slipping away.

At home we are having the laundry room redone (the laundry room?). People take for granted the ability to do laundry at home. Due to very old plumbing in this old house of ours, wash water frequently overflows in places you would rather not know about, making doing wash at home virtually impossible. After nearly 5 years of laundromat visits and waiting for the promised sewer line -- I have given up and we are installing a "grey line" to put the wash water into a sump in the ground where it will water a lovely tree. This will improve our quality of life enormously. But in the meantime, everything is torn up, decisions about the floor and paint need to be made and a new washer and dryer must be bought.

All of this added on to travel preparations, the training I am doing for work, gardening, cooking and doctor appointments. It goes on and on. I am feeling as if I am swirling in a drain trying to grab the edge of the sink and my hands keep slipping off.

Things are starting to get lost. I can't find the accessories for my camera. I think I left them at work but I don't know. I still haven't been able to figure out how to post pictures to this blog.

I need to get a grip.

Maybe tomorrow.

rock towers

I got a letter from one of the children I sponsor today. Ntenya is 14, lives with her grandparents and has lost both her mother and father. Sometimes in the excitement of the process of getting ready to leave, I forget why we are going and who we are going to see. It was hard to lose my parents when I was nearly 50, imagine what it would be like at 10 or 12, and to see everyone around you losing their parents too, maybe even having to nurse them through the end. We can't even imagine what they have been through.

On another less somber note, my flowers are starting to bloom and I think I am going to miss the best part of the spring show. Ranunculus are beautiful, I don't know why I never planted them before. I also planted cucumbers, tomatoes and squash this past weekend, and some zinnia seeds in six packs. I hope we don't have any cold snaps to set them back....

I am going to build a rock tower (idea compliments of my old school friend Claudia) to mark the occasion of this trip. Anybody remember Ebenezer stones?

I took a drive with my Weimaraner Athena tonight to get the car washed (there she is taking a nap - her favorite evening activity, her after-dinner-pre-bedtime cookie nap). She loves going anywhere with me and is happiest when she can see me or my sister anywhere near her. A closed door is a challenge.

We take so much for granted. Life is good.

suitcase anxiety dream

I bought suitcases a couple of weeks ago - the whiz-bang spinner kind. The next morning before I woke up, I found myself in a hotel room trying to pack. My friend who was with me kept pointing at the clock saying "it's 10:45, it's 10:45!" and I knew the plane was leaving at 11:00! I kept trying to pack, and I couldn't get everything in, then I couldn't get the suitcase closed. This went on and on until I woke up laughing....

my gear is here!

Two weeks ago I spent hours on the web researching and buying my "stuff" for this trip. Monday and Tuesday it all came. First was the new Bible I bought with LARGE print -- what a wonder. My only concession to being 58. Turned out it weighs too much to take on the trip, so I will suffer along with the next best thing I can find...Next was the bird book I got for Kenya and Tanzania. It is amaaazinng...I had forgotten what tropical diversity is like. There are literally hundreds of species of birds in the area. I will be lucky if I see even a few of them -- well, my life list should grow at least a little. We will be in the Kenyan Highlands, and the weather has been wet, so I am hopeful to see many wonderful things. I already have some pretty funky bizarre birds on my life list from the time we were in Chile and Peru, including Andean Condors, several species of penguins, a solid green hummingbird the size of a small robin from Bolivia and the pato corta corriente, a duck which runs on the surface of rocky rushing streams, so this should be fun to see what else I can see - ostriches? that would be very cool. I also got a self inflating sleeping mat -- bad hips. I am an extremely cranky person if I don't sleep well. Ask my family. I have been in too many horrible motels with hard beds. This is just self protection. But the most beautiful thing I got is my new digital camera -- I haven't had a good camera since the Peace Corps Nikons and all the lenses etc we had were stolen from our house in the 1980's. It is simple, mostly just point and shoot, I got a big memory chip and rechargeable batteries and I am already playing with it -- the 5x zoom is the best part! I have been taking and erasing pictures for two days. The first set of batteries is nearly dead and I haven't even downloaded a picture yet!

ha

I seem to be obsessed with the wonderful array of parasites I will be exposed to. I just realized that I wrote the last two entries about the same thing...

things are getting serious

I spent the last two weeks spending money -- a camera, a sleeping mat (for hard beds, you don't want to be around me if I can't sleep!), all the odds and ends you need in the way of bug repellent, etc. Finally, the day for my shots arrived. I think this actually was the thing that made me realize, that, yes, I am going to another place, a very long ways away from here. Four shots, including yellow fever, and malaria pills. As I recently mentioned to a friend, I took a parasitology class in college which gave me a healthy respect for the myriad of nasty little critters which can make you sick in tropical countries -- malaria is just one of the more well known of them. There are any number of nasty worm diseases that just make me ill thinking about them. You bet I will not be eating anything I can't peel or cook, and staying out of any bodies of water. Fortunately I have had several years of practice from the time we lived in Chile and Peru, both of which had their own set of creepy diseases -- hepatitis, sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis) -- passed by "kissing bugs", hydatid cyst disease....the last one is particularly ugly...it is a tapeworm disease that normally gets passed back and forth between sheep dogs and sheep, but if a person becomes a secondary host, huge cysts may form in any part of your body with hundreds of tapeworm heads (only heads) in them. It makes me nauseous just to think about it. I never touched a dog the whole time we were in Chile.

aaaaahhhhh!

I had the unnerving experience of realizing all of a sudden that time is ticking away -- 42 days to go before we leave! And I have a million things to do -- collect my clothes, buy supplies, get a camera, etc etc. My list is nearly a page long and of course Laureen didn't help by adding several things to it that I had forgotten. Nevertheless, it is hard for me to contain my excitement and I am afraid that I am boring people with my enthusiasm. One of the first things to do was scheduling the dreaded shots -- yellow fever, tetanus, Hep B and one more which I can't remember. We have to take malaria pills too. Unfortunately, as an undergrad biology major at UCR years ago, I took a parasitology class which made me very cautious when I travel -- there are lots of nasty buggies out there (the protozoan parasites such as malaria are just gross, not to mention the various types of worm-related diseases, schistosomiasis, leishmaniasis, etc -- just ugly stuff). I don't eat anything I can't peel or cook. Bill and I made it through three and a half years in South America and the only bad thing we (actually I) had was amoebas in Columbia -- it was enough to convince me to behave. No ice or lettuce for me...

Bill

Going to Kenya without Bill has been a hard thing to do. I agonized for a couple of weeks last September before I even asked him. I had to decide for myself that I really wanted to go. Once I did ask him, of course he said yes. We travelled all over South America together in the 70's but have not been any where since we came back from Peru in 1981. He is no longer able to do the difficult trips (like this one) due to his MS and the wheelchair, but you KNOW he will be there with me in spirit -- and I am going to take lots of pictures! It was actually much harder for me to decide to go without him than it was for him to say yes. I will miss him, we used to have a great time travelling. At least this time I will have my Pathway girls -- Laureen, Debbie, Janice, and Teri -- and watch out Nairobi, here we come!

Memory books

Laureen (left) and I (right) have been matched as "co-mentors" and are also planning to go to Kenya together. We are sure this is a "God-thing" -- listen to the circumstances. Laureen has been one of my "gold" friends for about 20 years, our kids know each other and we have been at Pathway forever. However, she and I do different things and we don't always get to spend much time together, but everytime we have time to sit down and really talk we don't have to explain anything -- we both know each other's history and we pick right up where we left off. A few months ago, after we decided to go to Kenya, we both ended up on the steering committee for the Women's Mentoring Ministry at Pathway. Long story short, after everyone had been prayed over and matched, Laureen and I were left. We just kind of looked at each other and giggled -- and just said, ok, if this is what you want, Lord, there must be a reason...Turns out that over the past few years, Laureen has been leading people in a grief recovery program and I have had a lot of interaction through my child welfare job with children who have suffered much grief and loss because of their families' dysfunction. We decided to do something along these lines for the children of Tumaini and after several brain storming sessions came up with the idea of memory books to help these children remember their parents who now have been lost to them. We will take pictures, help the children write stories about their parents and what they remember so they won't forget. Children often are able to deal with loss better than adults, but we would like to help them remember the good things about their parents. Full blown grief counseling is not practical for the one week we will be there, but we would like to leave them with something concrete. Both Laureen and I get into trouble if we don't have anything to do...