TIA...

 

Sorry it has taken so long to update you on the car situation and how the events all played out to us finally arriving back in Lichinga, but...of course things didn't go as planned. Well, after our car was supposed to be ready wednesday by noon, we were informed it would be ready at 3:00pm instead, so we took a taxi from our beach house to Mombasa city and all got out at the garage and had all our stuff put on the curb and we waited for them to bring out the car. Well, shortly, they came to tell us it would be 5:00pm before the car was done, so at about 6:00 here we are still waiting on the curb with out stuff...

 

Then shortly after 6:00pm, just as it is about to get dark, the wife of the mechanic, comes and tells us to come up to her house. She is an Indian Muslim lady(picture of her and her daughter, who took care of us) and doesn't speak the best English, but was pretty insistant we come up to her house. Well it was getting dark anyway and the curb wasn't too comfortable, so we went up to her house. Her family was so hospitable and they gave us water and snacks and the kids watched cartoons. It was getting later and later. Finally they told us the car wouldn't be done tonight, so we needed to spend the night in their apartment. A little strange, but what choice did we have. We spent the night, with the assurance the car would be ready by 5am, for us to leave very early to head back to Nairobi.

Well we wake up at 4:30am and wake up the kids, get everything packed up and at 5am, they tell us, well it will probably be little longer yet, so just stay for breakfast and it will be ready by 10am. So they make us breakfast and we chat some more and watch more cartoons. At 10am, they say well maybe after lunch, so why don't you just stay for lunch. So we eat chicken curry and rice for lunch. After lunch, they have a friend come over and give my mother in law and I henna tatoos as a gift, so we will remember them (how could we ever forget after all this).

 Then at 2pm, we find out that the car is still having problems and they are going to have to take it all apart again and start over. At this point, I was ready to cry. We were paying for an apartment in Nairobi, that we had already lost 3 days on, and we had things we needed to get done before we headed back to Mozambique. The family offered their car for us to drive around in Mombasa, so we suggested that they let us take their car back to Nairobi and then when our car was done, they could drive it to Nairobi and we would trade back there. Well they agreed. We were so thankful for all they did for us and this was just such a blessing. So, we all climb into their small(and I mean small) truck. We have 6 of us in the back seat with no air conditioning and if you have forgotten, Mombasa is extremely hot and humid. Luckily we started out late enough that the sun went down after a few hours. Kallen also started getting sick on the trip back and threw up a few times. Which is always nice in a crowded hot vehicle. Kallen also wet her pants on the trip, so Grandma had throw up, pee, and plenty of dirt on her when we arrived back at our apartment in Nairobi at 2am! But it was good to be back. Kallen continued to be sick and got so lethargic, we ended up taking her to the hospital friday morning. She underwent tons of tests, blood work, stool and urine sample, and we found she had a bacterial infection and we got her on antibiotics. But all of friday between doctor visits, tests, diagnosis, medications, we were at the hospital. Saturday, they did bring our car to Nairobi, running and looking good. We were glad to have it back. We still had to go buy a fan belt and get that put on, but should be no big deal. We thought we would do that monday, before we left. So, we had to withdraw from participating in the simply the story training, that we were originally scheduled to do, because there was no time left to get the fan belt put on. Monday, we took the car for the fan belt, they said it should take an hour at the most. Well of course, while replacing it, they found the tensioner was bad and so after spending more money on the car and another entire day carless, we are really thinking can anything else go wrong? Thankfully no, we left Kenya wednesday morning and the trip home was pretty smooth. Much better than the drive there. We drove 12-15 hour days and they were long, but we took paved roads and we had much more interesting scenery. We did however get stopped 5 x for speeding and got 3 speeding tickets. The cops in Tanzania are so frusterating. They shoot their radar guns right as you pass the speed marker and then they stop you for going anything over the limit. The speed limit was 50km an hour, kilometers, not miles, and Tim was driving, 53, 55, 60, 62, and 85(the only one truely deserved, but he didn't see the sign). But besides that, it went well. Thanks so much for all the prayers!

Despite all this, Tim was able to visit the oral Bible School near Mombasa. He really enjoyed this and it was incredible to see that some of the people attending the school, walk 12 kilometers each way to come to the school everyday. They do a week on and then a week off and during the year, each of them memorizes 210 Bible stories and learns how to observe, interpret, and apply each of them. They meet in the building below and have very little materials, but these people are committed to learning the Bible. It was exciting to see how something like this could possibly be done here in Mozambique.

Once we arrived back in Nairobi. We visited an elephant orphanage. Tim's parents had adopted a baby elephant as a gift for a friend, so we got to go in the evening and meet the baby elephant and see the other babies in the orphanage. We got to pet them, watch them being fed and play with them. The kids just loved it. It was so fun. They also got to pet rhinos.

All the baby elephants coming in from playing in the fields.

 



 This is the baby elephant they adopted. He is 6 months old, his mother was killed by poachers and then they took him here to raise and then they release them when they are old enough to be on their own. Each elephant has a worker, who cares for it, feeds it, and even sleeps with it. The blanket in the picture above, it a "surrogate mother". They bottle feed the babies through the blanket and then hang it in their rooms. The baby elephants hold on to the blanket with their trunks and even suck on them. They cover them with the blankets at night when they sleep.  

This was the youngest elephant in the orphanage at 4 months old, and his worker.