Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were typical days of work at the hangar. Monday night we went to see The Hulk - the theater has this thing called Nzuri Monday Madness where for 6 or 7 bucks you get the movie, popcorn, Coke, and a hot dog. It was a pretty good movie! (Tonight, I think we're going to see Prince Caspian for some more Monday Madness).
Thursday morning was a really early morning...we met here at the airport at 6:30am to fly to the coast. We took a DC3 owned by Samaritan's Purse - one nice thing about having a missionary aviation division is that you can do your own flights! We made a stop in Daba, a community in a remote area of Kenya where a few missionaries have been working for years. We dropped off some supplies for them. It was exactly how I pictured Africa to be - sandy, shrubs and some trees. The people group (The Orma people) are mostly Muslims, and the missionary work there has been slow but apparently they have been seeing some promise lately. Here are a few pictures from Daba...
It was great to see the "real" side of Kenya (not the city side), even if it was for less than an hour. We continued from Daba to Malindi on the coast (I said it was in Mombasa...but I lied. The hotel was actually north of Mombasa in Malindi).
The hotel itself was incredible. I've never experienced anything quite like it - it was like something you see in travel magazines. We could see the ocean from our room. The area where we ate was bordered by the beach on one side, and the pool on the other, so either way you got a view of some kind of water. When the tide went out, we could walk out and look at the tide pools:
We had four or five sessions over the Thursday-Sunday stretch. We had worship and the COO of Samaritan's Purse taught on Leadership. We had a lot of free time in between, so I spent a lot of time down at the beach relaxing :) Of course, there were ridiculous amounts of palm trees...so I was satisfied!
Saturday morning we took a glass-bottomed boat to a coral head about few kilometers from the hotel, and for the first time in my life I went snorkeling! It was incredible. I've only ever viewed fish like that in aquariums, but suddenly they were there swimming around me (they were really tame, and would just swim around you). And the coral was beautiful. I've never experienced anything like that before.
So, needless to say, it was an incredible weekend. We arrived back at the airport yesterday afternoon and we got back to our house at around 4:30, so I had the evening to recuperate - I was pretty tired.
This week it's back at the office M-F (at least as far as I know). This weekend Peter (one of the Kenyan guy in the HR office) invited me to go to his house in Western Kenya. Many workers in Nairobi only stay here because they have a job here. Their families are "up-country" - either in Northern or Western (or even Eastern) Kenya. Peter only gets to visit his family a few times a year, and so I think I'm going to travel with him to his home! He said it's a 12-hr bus ride...ouch. Sounds like an adventure!
I'll leave you with a friendly greeting from the Kenyan coast--
1 comment:
A weekend at the coast, huh? So this is what short-term "mission trips" involve? Shouldn't you feel guilty for having FUN while you're there?
Guess what? I spent this last weekend on the coast too! I'll be writing all about it in my next blog post later today sometime. It was AMAZING... and yes, it's ok to take a break and relax a bit too. :)
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