First 24 hours.

Apparently, most people who come to Kenya, and arrive as late as we did, tend to sleep in until 4 pm.  I was awake at 10 (yes, in the morning!) and Branden was fast asleep so I went on a fam tour of the neighborhood.  The lane we came in on last night was dark and deserted, but now it was lined with people using charcoal cookers making omelettes, porridge, chipatas and other things.  Don't ask about the other things.  I noticed the office front door was open on my return and went in to meet Susan, the receptionist.  What a wealth of information!  She has family in Rwanda and Uganda.  We talked!

Then I met David B who has been here since July 2.  He offered to take to get a SIM card for my phone.  The airtel card was a good deal costing only about 75 cents with $5 worth of airtime that would allow me to call Canada for about 3 cents a minute!  I don't know why we pay as much as we do in Canada, unless we are subsiding the telecom here.  We took the SIM card to David's office to cut it down to fit the SDmicro slot in my phone.  He's done it several times including his own.  Well, it didn't work.  I tried the London SIM and it recognized that and the iPhone SIM worked fine as well.  So it was back to the shop for some advice.  The "no -working" SIM worked in the agent's Nokia though, so no refund. Back to the office to troubleshoot on the Internet, but no luck.  In the end, I went and bought a safari.com SIM card for $36 and about $3 of air time.  It's working finally but all that nonsense took until 4 pm.  I should have slept!

In the evening we walked a kilometer to the Fairview Hotel with some of the staff for supper.  Along came a couple of other people from the University of the Fraser Valley!  Calen, who bunked in with us to get some rest before a 3 am flight back to Canada.  A student who was here with a research team studying urban agriculture and sustainability.  He liked our approach.  His team was just on there way to visit Westgate Mall the day of the attack by el-Shabab and ordered out of Nairobi by the Canadian university authorities.  So he went to Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.  Now he was finally returning home.  The other person, Sherry, is the daughter of Gary and Marg Foreman, missionaries we met years ago.  Gary passed away about 15 years ago but was one of the influencial men in my life who encouraged me to pursue missions.  Imagine meeting his daughter who is now an instructor at UFV who was on contract with Save the Children to research and write a child-friendly version of the charter of rights for children in East Africa.  She had just come out of the dusty Sudan and was also heading home.  What an interesting dinner table discussion we had.  Well, it was well after dark, so the staff would not allow us to walk back in the dark as it can be quite dangerous.  It seemed like a wasted day, but in the end, very interesting.  With the phone working, I was able to contact Bishop Stephen who was actually involved in a conference and unable to meet us til Saturday afternoon.  So ends our first 24 hours in Kenya.  Oh, it also makes me feel real good when people we meet assume Branden is my son!