This recap is hard to start because I have to go back to a very different mindset than I am in right now. I will say by way of explanation that I am currently sitting in my in-laws' house in Fallston, Maryland, on a pleasant Thursday evening. David and I arrived here on Saturday and have been here for the last week doing some college visits and some driving practice so he can take his driver's license test this week. Rebecca is still in Kenya and will come early next week. We staggered our visits by a week so I could be here early with David, and she will take an extra week here at the end of the summer. While I am not going to focus on the current setting, I will mention that David took his driver's test today and passed, which is a relief since rescheduling during a short summer visit would have been a big pain.
But the interesting things in the month of June happened before we left, at least thus far. School finished at the end of May, David did his exams, and was off when the month began. Rosslyn has activities in the first week of June, including some special trips. David was invited to go to France with about 40 other students who studied French this year. I remember my own high school trip with about 10 other students, and I was trying to imagine the logistics and stress on the chaperones that would accompany this group. But I talked to several of them, and they were very excited about going.
We did have some concern about the flight on Emirates going through Dubai during the brief lull in fighting in Iran. In the past month, there had been missiles that hit a runway in Dubai, which led to extensive delays for people travelling. We were praying that there would not be any problems for the French trip on their layover to and from Paris. Actually, they spent the first day of their trip in Brussels, then took a bus to Paris. The travel to and from France was, fortunately, without incident.
While David was on his adventure, Rebecca and I were preparing for some adventure of our own. My brother Jonathan and his wife Emma had planned to come to Kenya since Christmas, and we set aside 10 days at the beginning of June for them. David was going to be in France, and we had some ideas for a Kenya vacation with them while David was gone. It was actually exciting for me to see Jonathan here because Jonathan was in middle school in Kenya in the 1980s when my dad worked her for a few years. I had spent a semester with them when I was starting my junior year in college. So we had some shared memories of Kenya from that time. Jonathan had not been back since.
Nairobi is a completely different city from the 1980s, with a massive amount of growth. But I had vague memories of where our house was in Runda Estates, not far from where Rebecca and I are living now. I was keen to show the road and gate to Jonathan to confirm that this was the place where we lived. Unfortunately, almost all houses in Nairobi are behind walls, so one cannot really look inside. We did a drive-by on the day we dropped off David for France. Jonathan confirmed that the gate and wall were in the geographically right place, but he remembered that the 'wall' in the 80s was a tall hedge. Now the place looks more like a fortress. He also confirmed that Nairobi was virtually unrecognisable from his childhood.
Fortunately, we had more than a house visit planned for our vacation, and the next day we took a flight to the coast to spend a week in Lamu, an archipelago of islands just off the Kenyan coast. Lamu is a bit like Zanzibar, where our family has been many times, in that it has an older Swahili vibe. It is a largely Islamic community, with the architecture influenced heavily by Oman, which
was a protectorate of it and Zanzibar in the 19th century. The whole Kenya/Tanzania coast has a Swahili feel, but we often go to the more western resorts in Watamu when we vacation there as a family. But with Jon and Emma visiting, we thought it might be nice to do a more adult vacation and enjoy a more cultural experience.
When you land in Lamu, you get off the plane and get onto a boat. Most of the island resorts are accessed by boat. We had made a booking on Shela Island at a hotel called Jua (Sun) house. Porters helped us get our bags from the plane onto a boat, and it took about 40 minutes to get to the dock at Sheila Island, where more porters carried the bags another half kilometer to our hotel.
Shela town has the old Swahili feel with roads the size of pathways. I was really worried we would never be able to find our way back out to the beach, but one becomes quite adept very quickly. Our hotel was charming and featured a rooftop venue where we could see the whole town and the ocean as well. The downside was that our rooms were a five and six-story walk-up. (reminds me of when I lived in Manhattan in the East Village ;-) We had our breakfast on this rooftop and featured fresh fruit juices, Swahili pastries, and fruits. We had about 4 full days during our time there and did something interesting each day.
One thing we missed out on was snorkelling. We were told on arrival that this being the rainy season meant the snorkelling area was quite silty and not good to visit, so we had to forgo that. Actually, our first day was rainy, and I worried that we might have bad weather the whole time. But, in fact, every day after that was beautiful and sunny.
On our first day, we took a walk through the town and found our way out to the beach. We took a long walk on the beach and found some interesting houses, including one that was modelled after an old fort. The beaches were vast and generally not too crowded. Generally, looking out from shore, you saw other nearby islands and not the open sea. We had dinner at a well-known restaurant on Shela Island (Peponi) and learned how to find our way from the main docks and commercial area down the crisscrossing narrow alleys back to our hotel.
On our second day, we took a tour of the old city, which dates to the 18th century. We took a boat to one of the docks, where we were met by a guide who took us around. The architecture was beautiful and fascinating, and steeped in traditional practices of Islamic culture, as well as practical considerations on how to keep cool. Houses were generally square, surrounding a large central courtyard. There were high ceilings and pools on the ground floor. Walls were over a foot thick, and rooms were generally small with small windows. Heavy darkwood furniture and cushions were typical, as well as places to wash feet on entering. Walking barefoot on cool stone floors was a part of the ritual of entering the houses we visited. The town is on the UN list of historic preservation sites. We returned to the hotel in the afternoon.
I should mention that Rebecca and I went to a yoga class every morning. Yoga is not a particularly Swahili thing to do, but there were a number of quaint hotels that offered spas and other health and well-being activities. This was true on the third day as well. The highlight of this day was a sunset dhow cruise. A dhow is a kind of single-mast sailboat. It can hold quite a few people and is nice to lounge around on. The trip starts in the late afternoon and ends after sunset. On the trip, we sailed along the shoreline and through some beautiful mangrove forests with narrow channels. The sunset and other dhows sailing on the channels between the islands were very picturesque at dusk. We were served some Swahili snacks as well, en route. We finished after dark and tried to find a place to have some food, but ended up just going back to our place. This is low season as far as tourists, so there were not many people there and the town tended to close up early.
The next day, we took a long walk over the dunes toward the beach. It is one of many donkey trails, and donkeys were definitely a feature of the island and the primary means of transport for people and cargo. There was even a donkey refuge facility that Emma enjoyed visiting to feed some of the sick donkeys. On this day, though, we went on a path over the dunes and down onto a very wide beach. We were hoping to snorkel there, but found the surf to be too rough, and we ended up body surfing rather than snorkeling. It was actually amazing how deserted it was where we were swimming. It is nice that there are not tons of vendors wandering the beaches trying to sell stuff to tourists. We only occasionally met a person selling samosas or fresh coconuts that they cut open so you can drink the juice. That evening, we took a boat again out to a floating restaurant built on a kind of barge. It was really charming, although food and drinks took forever to arrive--like they were ordering them from the shore. Generally, we ordered fish curry prepared in a Swahili style. We again took a night boat ride back to our hotel.
On the last day, we took a boat ride to another famous resort called Magelis Hotel. It was a lovely place, and we enjoyed playing games while sitting on couches that overlooked the beach. It was a fitting end to our time there. We returned to Nairobi the next day, about 1 day ahead of David.
We continued to do some typical things with Jon and Emma that Jonathan would have remembered from his past. The Nairobi game park was one of them. I actually took them and hired a vehicle with an open roof for good viewing. We had a particularly good day seeing all the typical animals, as well as a large python and a lion sleeping in a tree! (Apparently, it had gotten itself stuck up there for a day.) The game park trip did succeed in jogging a lot of memories for him.
In their last 2 days, we took them down the escarpment into the rift valley. We stopped at Mt. Longonot and climbed it! This is my 4th trip to the top in a year. But I remembered climbing to the top of the crater with Jonathan in the 1980s. I was impressed that all four of us made it without too many problems. After that, we headed to Lake Naivasha and stayed in bungalows by the lake at a camp called Carnelli's. It was really nice, and there was quite a bit of game right around us, including warthogs that wandered on the grounds, not bothered by people at all. There were also hippos nearby, but kept off the property by an electric fence.
We had an amazing dinner at their restaurant that night before bed. The next day, we took a boat out to Crescent Island, a small island in the lake that has served as a movie set for some famous movies like Out of Africa. It is a fun visit because you get so close to the animals. At times, we could reach out and touch an ostrich or a giraffe (we did not do that, though), zebras were nearby, and at one point in the day, we stood by and watched about 30 hippos on shore eating some hay. It was another really great day, and ended with us driving back up the escarpment that afternoon. Naivasha was another place that Jonathan visited often when he lived here.
So that was the extent of our visit with them. They did get a number of souvenirs to take back with them, too. We are also bringing back a few things for them as well, since we will be seeing them in Dallas, where my parents are living as well.
By the time they left, I was down to my last week in Kenya before David, and I would leave. David was home from school and did not have a lot to do. Fortunately, some friends invited him to play Dungeons and Dragons, and he did some private voice lessons with our choir leader. Rebecca, I, and he also joined a family with kids whose parents were school teachers at Rosslyn to see West Side Story, which was being performed live at a local theatre. We had a great time playing Telestrations and having dinner afterwards. Hopefully, we will do more things together. He was David's chemistry teacher, and she worked with me on the musical this past semester.
I wish the last week could have been spent in the office to catch up on work after Jonathan's visit, but I actually had a field visit in Kisumu. The event was a strategic planning meeting for Kenya Mennonite Church (KMC), one of our development partners. They were workshopping their strategic 5-year plan and wanted MCC input. I went with Judith, our Health Programs Officer, who was also the facilitator for the meeting, and Nelly, our Peace Programs Officer. I copped out on the 6 hour drive and took a flight each way (about 30 mins). We had a very full 2 days of meetings and workshops. I was glad I could listen in, but was aware of office work continuing to pile up. Fortunately, Rebecca stayed behind to work there.
Work in the past 3 months has felt very overwhelming with recruiting and onboarding a new staff person, trying to complete audits, board meetings, submitting compliance docs to the NGO board, reapplying for not-for-profit status, preparing for new volunteers, managing expiring work permits, and keeping projects and disbursements up to date while many staff are on leave, to name just a few things we are doing.
We really need a break, although we have as many responsibilities as parents as we have in our jobs that we are stepping away from briefly. College visits are going to be a big part of our time here, as well as visiting family in different cities for the first time and a college student in a third place. I hope we can keep sane through it all, but at least we are able to get some really great photos (and memories0 out of all of this.
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