Since the last time I updated my blog…

1. I celebrated a typical Kenyan birthday. This birthday was complete with cake, singing, and having my face covered with frosting. Only in Africa would the concierge of your hotel come to your room at midnight, stick their fingers in your cake, and spread frosting all over your face.

2. I have had two marriage proposals. One, was a man at an open market trying to get me to buy a bowl that I had no use for. When he realized he wasn’t going to get a sale he asked me if I was married and said that he had always needed a wife with my color skin. Hmmm. The next day—equally as flattering—someone we met at dinner found out that in the US there is no such thing as dowries. He decided it was a way better deal to have an American wife.

3. I ate crocodile meat and ostrich meatballs. We haven’t been spending very much money on this trip. However, we spent one night at the ultimate tourist destination is Kenya, Carnivores. This restaurant is basically a meat buffet with every kind of meat you can imagine. The boys definitely ate their fill. I tried almost everything but couldn’t bring myself to eat chicken gizzards.

4. I came really close to being hit by a bus. Being a pedestrian in a country with little to no conception of street lanes and developing infrastructure is dangerous. Very dangerous!

5. I went on a mini-safari. The locals tell us that a real safari lasts at least one week. We had a hard time justifying spending a week on safari on a “business as missions” trip. We did, however, go to Lake Nekuru National Park and saw zebras, giraffes, hyenas, flamingoes, rhinos, and a bunch of other animals. No lions… Maybe next time :)

6. I almost started crying at a grocery store when I discovered they had gluten free bread. I really wish this was a joke. My diet to this point has consisted of five food groups: Nuts, peanut-butter, meat, dried fruit (thanks Auntie Carol for stocking me up) and fries (or chips, as they call them here). Since we’ve been mainly working with an EI business that is a bakery, I eat a lot less than the rest of my group. Needless to say, gluten-free bread is going to be an incredible addition to these food groups!

7. Got one more stamp and visa in my passport!

It has been really hard to find enough time to update this blog. In Kenya, we had internet in our rooms all the time but paid by the minute. Our accommodations in South Africa do not have internet but we are walking distance from a CRM owned house called Pangani which has free internet. We just don’t have very much time to go over there!

Our last few days in Kenya were really fun. After two weeks together our team is feeling a lot more comfortable with each other. We also started to hit the point where it is okay to disagree, or want to do things differently. This week should be pretty exciting. As I eluded to in my short list above we did some tourist things on the weekend. After we get to North America I’ll post pictures from some of our adventures at the National Park and from Carnivores.

We also got to walk through the slums that we drove through early in our trip. I am so thankful for the opportunity to do that. It was such an awful experience the first time through. One of our team leaders, Chris, met a guy who lived in Kibera who invited us to walk through with him the next day. We took him up on it. On foot, people were much less offended by our presence there. On the contrary, the children were thrilled that we were there. They all smiled and yelled to us in a sing-song voice “How-are-you, How are-you?”. They probably don’t know what that means but they were ecstatic to see us. They came up and shook our hands and waved. We walked around four miles through metal houses with garbage everywhere and sewage flowing right beneath the walkways. Our host, Richard, lives there with four kids in a room (about the size of mine in the US) and no electricity or running water.

I wish I had something really insightful or challenging to tell you about the experience. It was one of the hardest, scariest things I’ve ever done and I hope it changes my life. I’ve been praying that it will be something that I will remember frequently. Some memories, that you don’t think impact you when they actually happen, come back years later when you hear or smell something familiar or are touched in a certain way. I hope our walk through Kibera is like that. Maybe it will be when I’m choosing a place to live, or just to keep things in perspective in my daily life. It definitely challenged me to erase my mental list of “Things I didn’t know I loved about home”…Or at least made me think about it less.

The funny thing about our time in Kenya was it was easy, at points, to forget we were in the developing world. We were having such intense business meetings with men in suits and ties, eating cheeseburgers and fries, and staying in an upper-class neighborhood. Every once in awhile though we were brought back to reality when we would show up at a construction site with twenty men wearing no shirts or shoes making cement, or have a donkey walk across the “freeway”.

After spending a grueling three hours waiting in lines and battling inefficient systems in the wee hours of the morning in the Jomo Kenyatta airport in Kenya landing in South Africa was like entering a different world. We made it through missing only one of our team members (who showed up in Johannesburg twelve hours later). It was so nice to be around stop signs! We are staying near a CRM division called Nieu Communities at a place called Pangani in Pretoria North. It is a community living situation committed to spiritual leadership development and almost a monastic approach to spiritual disciplines.

The leader of Enterprise International, Colin, and his family are also staying at Pangani. Because of this, we hit the ground running straight from the airport. We have spent the last three days familiarizing ourselves with the history of the nearby township, Soshanguve, CRM’s work there, and the apartheid era that still has a devastating hold on the people here.

The bulk of our work here will be with a bakery that EI has already started. The township, Soshanguve was established during the apartheid era when black people were forced out of the towns. Even today, post-apartheid nearly all the residents that are employed take taxis into the nearby city, Pretoria, with all of the industry in the area. We started doing the 6 AM bakery runs in the morning and I have had more hands-on Anthropology and Business experience in the past two days than my entire time at Vanguard. Today, we divided up some of the areas that are currently “rough patches” at the bakery.

The company that I am currently interning for, EI (or Enterprise International), is under the greater ministry of CRM (Church Resource Ministries). It has been incredible to be here because we have seen the holistic picture of what business as mission looks like. Because CRM is such an established ministry the businesses that we start have a very apparent impact as we see needs in the townships.

I am running out of time now, we are having a taco night at our guest house, but I will keep working on updates! We are working a lot this week but I have definitely had an opportunity to learn about Apartheid, Pretoria, and some of the other dynamics of ministry here and will definitely update you soon! Love you all!