The Advent that took off without us

It’s December 14. This Saturday is the first day we have been home with leisure time in about a month, and we finally put up our Christmas tree and hung the stockings. I feel immense personal relief about finally getting into the Spirit of Advent. For our entire married life, Paul and I have diligently made time to mark the beginning of the Advent season by transforming whatever home we lived in, moving out of ordinary time, and marking the start of a new Christian year. We have always lit our Advent candles each night and read a story with the kids. It is a mark of how slammed we have been that we could not uphold our deeply-held Advent values this year in our new home in Nairobi. But as of tonight, my personal pain has been relieved. We have decorated and put up lights. So on to a description of the many distractions and diversions over the past three weeks: good and important and delightful events.

MCC Kenya Team retreat

Charles, Sharon and Nelly

Early on Tuesday morning November 26, our MCC team converged at the SGR (Small Gauge Rail) Terminal in Nairobi for our 8 am train to Mombasa. Our team of 21 included 11 staff members and 10 dependent kids, traveling out for a 3 night stay at the beach for our annual MCC team retreat.

The train ride itself was quite smooth. Most of our team had reserved seats in an older car, with rows of benches facing each other. It was quite delightful to enjoy 6 hours with my colleagues, laughing and sharing stories, munching on snacks, and watching
the Kenyan scenery drift by. Our 4 young adult volunteers somehow got stuck in one of the newer cars with traditional rows of seats all facing one way. The seats were more comfortable, but it wasn't as easy to socialize. The train left promptly from every station, and was kept very clean by a small army of housekeeping staff. At first, I thought they were sweeping and mopping excessively, but by hour 4, I could see that they had to work hard to keep ahead of the spilled juice and crumbs.

Sharon, Nelly, Mary and I at the beach

We arrived in blazing hot Mombasa and found the coaster bus taking us to our cottage rentals in Diani beach. We had to settle for simpler accommodation this time because of budget constraints, and the Dora Cottages had some issues. But at least there was a nice little pool, which all the kids really enjoyed trying out as often as possible. Most of us took a late afternoon stroll down to the beach and along the surf – two of our volunteers experienced the ocean for the very first time in their lives!

On our second day of retreat, we enjoyed some time to share a biblical reflection and to sing together. Then we left our cottages to spend the day at a nice hotel nearby with a private beach. 

Hotel water polo with the MCC team

Those of us who were swimmers enjoyed the private beach, getting into the ocean and really having a refreshing time bobbing up and down in the waves (it was not possible to snorkel unfortunately). Then some of our team hopped into the big hotel swimming pool, where staff facilitated a big game of water polo. Most of the guests playing were the young adult kids of our staff, including 5 20+ year olds and David, Paul and I. It was a lot of fun to have someone else create the game and to just enjoy playing. We had the hotel buffet lunch and then spent the afternoon relaxing, napping, ocean swimming again. A few people splurged for camel rides and the opportunity to take a jet ski out on the water.

Sarah and Nelly on camelback

On our second day, we woke early again for a whole day excursion down to the south edge of Kenya’s coast, right where it meets Tanzania. We all boarded a dhow boat (run by a motor) and first headed out to look for dolphins. It took a while, but we did eventually find a pod leaping out of the water and doing dolphin things. We were not alone though, with at least 6 other watercraft carrying tourists, who joined us to chase the dolphins around. The whole scene had a bit of a Mad Max feel to it like we were all a bunch of pirates, and I felt a bit sorry for the dolphins.

Ladies in hats

Our next stop was the Kisite-Mpunguti Marine National Park. This was what our family had been really looking forward to: a chance to snorkel again and see some interesting fish. Just a handful of other team members were strong enough swimmers to go out over the deeper coral. Others tried out snorkeling with individual help from a guide. And most of our team stayed on the sand island in the center of the coral atoll. Over the 90 minutes we spent in the water, the tide rose and the island basically vanished, which was pretty interesting to the new swimmers! 

It was definitely lovely to snorkel again, but there were tons of boats and guests out there doing the same thing. It really hit home how spoiled we have been, getting to do our own incredible snorkeling days in Djibouti with no guide or boat or crowds, just walking out into the water and spending hours hovering over the coral drop off right off shore. I think the coral in Kenya looked quite challenged, and I hope there are other spots on the marine park where they don’t take tourists, in order to keep the reef healthier…

View from the lunch table

The third part of the tour involved a stop on Wasini Island for the “Taste of Swahili” lunch. On the way, our boat staff kept us all alert and cheerful by playing drums on some empty water jugs and singing famous Swahili songs. They even egged us on to get up and dance – not an easy task on a moving boat with the swell getting higher in the afternoon. When we arrived at Wasini Island, the trip felt a lot like mass-produced tourism. Each of us had a whole small grilled fish (rabbitfish, which is easy to catch) – mine tasted great, but David’s tasted like it had spent a long time in the freezer. There were a few sides included, but the restaurant wanted to charge extra for everything else from drinks to any extra interesting seafood. It was quite a crowded restaurant as well, though the view into the little bay was picturesque.

David and Paul on the beach

Finally, we made our way back to the mainland, and walked to the site of the Shimoni caves, which give that port town their name. Apparently, these natural caves were used by the Omani empire 500 years ago when they were trading slaves from East Africa to Arabia and India. We walked down into them, and experienced how incredibly stifling hot and humid they were, with all the moist ocean air stuck down underground. Men were kept for up to three weeks down in those caves, before they were finally marched through a tunnel that led directly to the sea to board ships. Our guide explained that the captives were fed dates, since no cooking was allowed in the caves, making people very thirsty. They had only a saline well for water. Many died of suffocation and disease. It was a pretty horrible place and a reminder of past empires and evils that we don’t even think about these days.

David and the tide pools

Finally we ended our all-day tour and returned to our cottages. We found the electricity out for the second night in a row – making life a little challenging when there was no light or water. Anyway, we survived on candlelight. It was actually Thanksgiving evening, and so Paul and I shared a little about our American traditions for the holiday. We were all able to share something we were thankful about and then called it a night.

We had a slow morning on Friday. David and I took an early walk down to have a look in the tidepools. It’s always nice to spend time with him, watching him observe things in the water. Finally, we made our way back to Mombasa and onto the return train journey to Nairobi. Everyone was tired and quiet for a while, napping and resting. But towards the end of our journey, our group livened up again, getting ready for the final leg home. 

GSL volunteers Debora, Menzi, Mary and Hijal 
Rebecca and Paul

That turned out to be more of a mission than we were planning for. Torrential rains had been falling in Nairobi since early evening, and even when we arrived, it was pouring. And then picture 3000+ train passengers all arriving at the station looking for their taxis, in a crowded parking lot in the dark in the rain! Many roads through the city were flooded and dangerous. We made it home 2 ½ hours after arriving in Nairobi, but some of our team didn’t get home till after 1 am. So, for anyone considering the SGR – it works excellently, but think through your final leg home very carefully!

 

Choir concerts and Kempens visiting

German community choir @ Museum

On Saturday morning, we took just a little more time to sleep, before calling our dear friends, the Kempens, to come over for breakfast. They had come to Nairobi while we were away, and were staying in the guest cottage next door, run by our neighbors. It was so nice to see them again and start to catch up after almost 6 months.

We left them before noon to head out to the first of our two choir concerts that day. This one was held at the Nairobi National Museum as part of a Christmas fair. It took us a while to get the whole choir there, but finally we found a little spot in the shade and set up in a tight crescent. It’s such a fun choir to sing with, and even with a lot of noise around, we really enjoyed ourselves singing and sharing our music with the crowd there.

Choir @ Shamba

We dashed back home and picked up David and the Kempens and then headed back out to the second concert at a farm to table restaurant called Shamba. IT was our first time visiting this charming outdoor/indoor venue, with a big farm shop, lots of outdoor tables, and then a barn turned into a restaurant. That’s where we sang, amidst the clinking of tableware and the hiss of the espresso machine and the hubbub of waitstaff swirling around us. 😉 Again, we had a delightful time, singing with this unusual choir. And perhaps that counted as the official beginning of Advent for us, as most of our repertoire were Christmas carols in various languages from Luo and Igbo to Swedish and German. Some of the most fun to sing were in Swahili and Zulu, and we felt good about giving the gathered customers a memorable afternoon. We even had a couple of friends come out specially to see the choir perform.

Kempens at our home

Afterward, we stayed and enjoyed a very delicious dinner with the Kempens and had a longer time to talk and share together. Sadly, the dinner did not sit well with me overnight and I was really struggling to keep myself together to attend church in the morning. We all went though, because Paul and I were supposed to host the Menno Hymn Sing Carols at 2 pm afterward. By midday, I realized I would not manage to stay upright and sing anything. My friend Lori graciously offered to take my place as the lead soprano, joining Paul in hosting. They all had a great time, honoring First Advent with about 8 other community Mennos.  I headed home to try to sleep, with the teens in tow to chill out. Thankfully, I was better by evening, thanks to some meds, so we were able to play a fun game of Hot Seat with the Kempens.

Monday was a normal work day for Paul and I, but we met up with our friends again in the evening. And on Tuesday, their son joined David to follow him around for a day of school at Rosslyn, a very interesting experience for someone who has done all his education by home school.

Auditions for the School Musical

 This is an update from Paul. We have been hoping to find ways to connect with Roslyn as parents and at the beginning of the school year were asked how we might contribute. Rebecca mentioned my former career as a dancer and choreographer and 2 weeks ago I was shoulder-tapped to help with dance auditions for the musical (High School Musical). I said I was willing and the director asked me to set the long dance phrase from the finale "We're All in this Together". I was fortunately able to get it off of YouTube, then for two afternoons set it on 4 large groups of dancers (about 60) and evaluated all of them. It was actually quite a bit of fun for me. David will be in the ensemble of this musical so I am looking forward to possibly helping out in future rehearsals. (Here is a link to one of the audition runthroughs)

 Team Strategic Planning / Thanksgiving and other Team events

Charles sharing his imagination exercise

MCC is beginning work on a new strategic plan for 2026. Overall, it looks like we will maintain the same four strategic directions as we had in the past 5 year plan (COVID robbed us of some momentum on some very good directions, so MCC boards decided to work longer on the same ones, rather than changing gears). These are

1. Capacity building of partners to meet the needs of vulnerable, and displaced people;

2. Integrating peacebuilding into all our relief and development work

3. Caring for creation and addressing climate change

4. Strengthening relationships with Anabaptist church partners in North America and around the world, especially young people.

MCC leaders really want to hear from each of our teams to inform the specifics of what that will look like in each of our different contexts. So, Paul and I decided to host a special gathering of our whole team at our house, to get out of the office and think together in a new space. 

The occasion also doubled as a housewarming party and a belated celebration of Thanksgiving. In between our thinking and discussion exercises, we enjoyed a cowboy line dance, a break for a full turkey dinner, more thinking and then a pumpkin pie to celebrate this quarter’s birthdays. 

We had fun singing the Kenyan version of the Happy Birthday song, which involves a lot of extra verses about the joy of cutting the cake which is, in fact, not ugali or tripe, but real actual cake that we love. 

Later this past week, Charles invited the team over for a Christmas holiday party. He also went all out, even baking a ham. We introduced our team members to some strange American traditions like the "White elephant gift exchange." (stealing gift version). They thought it was hilarious and really enjoyed themselves. 

MCC team members available: James, Menzi, Nelly
Sarah, Mary, Hijal, Paul & Charles the host

 

 

Travel to Tanzania

Paul again (usually Rebecca write in italics and I write in regular font). We hit a major milestone with our most recent trip to Tanzania. Since our arrival in August, it has been my goal to visit every single partner (and project site) at least once before the end of 2024. It was ambitious as our partners are spread all over Kenya and Tanzania. We have been whittling away, but had missed a visit to KMT (Tanzania Mennonite Church), our TZ church partner, and OWSL, our food security partner based in Arusha. We made a plan to meet with the KMT leadership (Bishops Council and Executive Committee) while they were in Arusha attending a KMT Youth event. We planned to do the visit with our Area Director Wawa C. We really like travelling with him as he is quite easy going. 

We had to make a difficult choice to leave David on his own for 4 nights, but he was happy to be left on his own. Our neighbors the Ungers have school kids as well, so school transport was set and they are close enough to the house to get there in 30 seconds or less if necessary. 

We left on a Saturday afternoon because the church wanted us to attend a Sunday service. I actually went to the West Nairobi Men's Prison in the morning before departure which is a ministry of our church. Wawa and Rebecca picked me up and we headed to the border. I am happy to say that crossing the Kenya/TZ border, even with a car, is not really difficult and we were minimally delayed by the process and proceeded to Arusha. We had planned to have dinner with the Bishops but they were delayed in arriving so the three of us went to George's restaurant, a favorite haunt in our TZ days and enjoyed pizza, before going to the Joshua foundation (where we used to live). They have some luxury guest tents that we decided to book for this visit. 

The next day we headed to church mid-morning. Rebecca was informed the night before that they wanted her to preach (not a complete surprise). We arrived in good time, met some of the Bishops that had arrived then went to the service. I have been to the Arusha Mennonite church before. It is always a vibrant service with lots of singing and dancing. Rebecca preached and they had several special speeches by the bishops. All said, we were there close to hours, before being released for the rest of the day. Rebecca took advantage of the free evening to visit our friends the Taylors. It was a short visit but great to see them briefly. We will see them again later in the month when they are in Kenya. 

Monday morning, we had a plan to meet with our partner OWSL who have a food security/livelihood projects with the Datoga tribe in central TZ. They are a very marginalized group who have been displaced several times as commercial agriculture has taken their land. They are normally partoralist. The great thing about this visit though is that our former MCC staff Chrispin and Lucia both work there since the MCC TZ office closed in 2020. It was great to see them Chrispin told us about the history of the project and showed us many demonstration projects on the OWSL grounds. Our favorite was the stingless bee project which they have been promoting. Stingless bees make unique honeycombs that look like little pots, and the honey is very unusual in taste. Not as sweet and more floral. It was very cool to see the honey combs when Chripin opened a hive for us. They also had CA, goats, chickens, and a fish pond that were all being promoted for income generation among their beneficiaries. We stayed there until 11:00 am.

After our visit with OWSL we planned to meet with 3 members of the KMT 'baraza' (Executive Committee) at a local restaurant (Andrews) to talk about our current partnership. Bishop Kisare the Chairman, and Pastor Emmanuel Hagai (the General Secretary) were both there and we had a very fruitful conversation outlining a strategy for partnership in the coming years. It was a meeting we had been needing to have for a long time. We again finished in the afternoon and had the evening free. I took the opportunity to take a run down the road near the Joshua Foundation that I used to love. After a long day of intense meetings I really needed to de-stress.

On Tuesday, we had a slow morning, but again met with KMT midmorning, this time the Bishop's council. We greeted them and had tea, but then were invited to go and see the opening of the youth conference where they were going to gather 1000 KMT youth. We were happy to go, but were not expecting such a long drive. It took about an hour to go through small windy dirt roads in a very villagy part of Arusha. We finally arrived at a huge high school where the youth were gathering. They were behind schedule but we had a 2pm departure deadline. When the conference opened we were invited up front to greet the youth. We then had a brief but very important meeting with the Youth Executive Committee. It was important because they send MCC candidates for one year volunteer assignments all over the world. They have 2 out this year. It was important discuss any challenges they were facing in selection, etc., and for us clarify MCC expectations regarding eligibility. 

From the meeting we had to rush out to get Wawa to a place with internet where he could take an important call. We made it, working our way back through the complex streets. Fortunately Google Maps worked well enough. Once we dropped Wawa off, Rebecca and I went on to ECHO, an international agriculture NGO that hosts volunteers, and with whom we have had a very long relationship. We met the new director Chare M. to discuss the possibility of them hosting some MCC volunteers next year. They were very excited about the prospect and have extensive experience with volunteer placements. We might be able to have 1 or 2 come as soon as August 2025 (fingers crossed). The ECHO campus is beautiful and full of different agriculture activities. It brought back fond memories to visit it once again. 

We ate Indian food for our last night in Arusha. We had to leave very early, like 630 AM because we wanted to get to a town called Longido, close to the border. It is where our partner TEMBO is located. We knew that 3 of our one year volunteers, along with one of our Program Officers, Nelly were there because Nelly was doing a training on 'safeguarding', and the volunteers wanted a chance to see some of our other projects besides the ones they are in. Rebecca, Wawa, and I arrived mid-morning, in time to watch Nelly debrief and exercise where they had 3 groups of people either caring for, protecting, or trying to pop, some balloons. (To represent protecting children). It was great to see our volunteers get involved in the training as well. We stayed about 2 hours then we loaded up the 3 volunteers with Wawa, Rebecca, and I and we headed for the border and back to Nairobi. We again had no trouble crossing and got back to Nairobi in time to go see David at his school caroling concert. 

End of Term School Concerts

HS Choir (David in middle of back row, giggling
with the other guys)

We made it back to Nairobi with about an hour to spare before we needed to report back to David's school. David's choir was part of leading an all-school event called "Silent Night Games." The choir aspect involved a carol sing-a-long, as well as a brief Christmas choir concert. It was all held in the beautiful outdoor amphitheater on an absolutely gorgeous evening. There were amusing audience-participation events interspersed between the music, including a Christmas dress up contest and 12 days of Christmas led by voluntold soloists. 

Mr. Blue Sky

We were back at school again on Friday evening to enjoy the school band concerts. I was so impressed -- even the brand-new middle school musicians were actually in tune. And the symphonic orchestra included 65 student musicians, playing the full range of brass, wind and string instruments. They really sounded great! I don't think I was ever part of a school band that got it together as well as that. David had been invited to sing with the jazz ensemble After Hours. It was an extra little thing, but he and 3 other students led the vocals on ELO's Mr. Blue Sky from the upper balcony. 

Ethiopia vehicle finally made it to the office

As a bit of a postlude. We got an update from Ethiopia from our logistics officer Wonde. He knew we would want to know that the vehicle that we purchased there for the MCC Ethiopia program in October 2023 was finally released from customs. I would not even want to begin to recount again the saga of trying to get that car imported. The difficulty was caused by the govt. changing the law the day our car was originally entering. So despite accepting our paperwork and taking our import duty money they refused to let us (and about 8000) other vehicles enter. It was finally worked out in the last few weeks (with another hefty import fee due to currency devaluation) There would be much to complain about, but I am just really happy they finally got it!

Bonus Photos

Thanksgiving/Strategic planning lunch
stuffing, mashed potatoes, turkey, yams, etc. 

Choir concert

More choir action

Singing at the choir Xmas party, director Andrew next to Paul

Relaxing at the beach hotel

Dozing on the boat

Taste of swahili lunch

The dangers of only one big donor...

Lunch on our porch

The refreshing view of Mt. Meru in Arusha

little "pots" of honey made by stingless bees

Black & white colobus monkey crossing the golf green (one of about 12)

A round of golf with the neighbors

The amazing bouganvillea growing up the old tree outside our gate

The little Christmas tree with our cat