lunch at the shamba

4/28/07 -- afternoon

We walked a couple of hundred yards down a little road to the Mutunga family farm still occupied by Stanley's mother, Grace Kanini (Kanini means "little" or "tiny" -- she is probably less than 5 feet tall), a couple of sisters, and various children. His older brother Francis, seen at the far end of the picture above, is a retired fruit wholesaler and now lives in a little house next to his mother's place. It is a beautiful farm, well tended, with all the crops seen frequently and some that I haven't seen before -- maize, cowpeas, pumpkin, papaya, mango, banana, and a huge patch of sweet potatoes.

We were seated ceremoniously under a pleasant sun shelter with chairs and low tables. Water was brought around to wash our hands (a nice Kenyan custom we saw in many places). The meal was a chicken stew, with potatoes and other vegetables, along with fresh homemade chapatis (the Kenyan equivalent of a flour tortilla -- delicious). We enjoyed a relaxed lunch with the family dog and a few chickens scratching around and afterwards, one of the nephews, Sebastian, brought around sodas in bottles (such as orange and grape Fanta, and Coke - it's everywhere!). After lunch, we walked around the farm, enjoying the nice day and the beautiful blue sky full of clouds. Kerry, Paul and Mike were investigating the small one room school house that the family used when the children (10 of them!) were young...Paul headed in first and the other two followed, when Paul suddenly backed up into them and yelled "Get out! Get out!" -- there was a hive of wasps! they ran for it -- fortunately no one was stung.

As we were getting ready to leave, we all gathered for prayer -- Stanley asked his brother Francis to pray. Now Francis had not said more than a few words the whole time we were there, but my goodness could the man pray! We were protected from all kinds of evil, he rained blessings on us, called down angels to stand around us, and bound Satan away from us (always a good thing...) -- afterwards, we were laughing that NOTHING bad could happen to us now! And truly, nothing did. We had adventures, but all was well.

As we were leaving, we walked back out to the road, and Joseph followed in the bus. As he was turning to get back onto the road he got stuck again -- this time because the rear tires were not touching the ground as he went over a bump. Kerry and Norm jumped on the back bumper for ballast and hung on and jumped up and down. As they did, the bus tires caught suddenly and the bus shot forward. They all swung out from the back of the bus but no one fell off. Everyone was scrambling for their cameras, but nobody caught the moment -- the picture above was taken as they were all jumping down and grateful that no one was hurt.

We decided to walk past the area where the local people were fixing their road -- we didn't want to have another incident. Watching everyone join together to solve a community problem was exciting, however, as there were no County Road Crews coming around to fix the road!

The rest of the day was spent relaxing -- we had had it!

Tomorrow is church at one of the churches Stanley used to preach at near Masii.