Dear Friends,
Thank you for your prayers. So much has happened in the past week that I thought I should write to keep you up to date. As I mentioned in my last note, I arrived Wednesday morning around 7:30am with all my bags. >From the airport I was taken to the AIM guest house where we would be leaving from to come here. I repacked my stuff to bring one bag down here for ABO. We ate lunch and I had enough time to write a short email letting you know I arrived. All of the new missionaries, 17 adults and 7 kids, loaded up our stuff on a bus and headed from Nairobi to Machakos. The drive was just over an hour and we arrived mid afternoon and settled in. We are staying at Scott Theological College. There is a picture of the dorm facility on my website: http://calebklay.wordpress.com/pictures/ Currently only half of the dorm contains student and we are using the other half. Our meetings started that evening with introductions and the that sort of thing. Thursday and Friday were general “getting to know Africa stuff” which was interesting for me to watch others who had never been here before.
Saturday we went for a hike up the mountain behind the campus. This was a lot of fun. We were able to interact with a lot of kids and some adults. There are a number of pictures from this trip on my site. Sunday we went to the local AIC (Africa Inland Church) next door to the campus. Most of us went to the English service since it was earlier and the Swahili/English service was having an ordination. Our service was about an hour and a half which is pretty short compared to the other which started at 10:30 and was still going strong when we finished lunch at 1:30.
This week we have mostly been talking about African world view and culture. We had a guest speaker who is a Kenyan who lived in the UK for three years. He is very intelligent and has a lot of incite and knowledge about who people think and how your world view affects your entire life. It has been very interesting and helpful.
This is starting to get long and I think that I have summed up most of the weeks main activities. Hopefully the pictures will help give you a better picture of at least this small area of Kenya.
By the way, we actually have pretty good Internet access here. The best times are after 10pm to before 7am local time. Usually I get on between 5 and 6 am and it is pretty fast. I have even used google talk and talked to my parents and that worked very well. I can also IM with google talk. Early in the morning here is evening on the previous day in the US and it works quite well.
Well I’ll stop for now. If you’d like to here from me on google talk send me an email and we can get connected.
Praises:
- All my bags arrived safely
- Orientation is gong well
- We have good Internet access part of the day
Prayer requests:
- I will start to pick up Swahili
- Continued health and strength
- Two of the missionaries have been sick for a few days and recovery has been slow
In His Service,
Caleb
