Quit Monkeying Around!

Hello, hello, hello! I’m not sure why I wrote that three times. I guess I just wanted it to be enthusiastic. I know I say it so much, but I want you to know that I genuinely miss all of you back home and love you very much. I am not homesick right now, but I still think of and miss my friends in America a ton! That will never change. I thought about America a lot on September 11 in disbelief that it has been seven years since the awful tragedy. I wish I could have been there to see how the fallen heroes were honored and memorialized. I cannot tell you how much more grateful I am for America after this experience of being away from it for a while. I also wanted to say that if you are writing comments on the blogs, while I do appreciate them greatly, I cannot read them as of now. I write this blog on a Word document, send it to my sister, and she puts it up for me. The computer I am using along with the dial-up internet makes it very difficult to access the website. I will definitely be reading them when I get to Nairobi, so please keep them coming! But I digress…moving on to the beautiful children of Tumaini.

The big talk among the Tumaini kids this week was the “Back–to-School” Party we were throwing for them on Friday. The children seldom get a break from their routines, so this was a welcomed interruption for them. Karlee, the Australian volunteer, really did the majority of the planning. She did an amazing job! We started the party with the class races. There are currently six classes in Tumaini: the baby class, pre-unit class, and then classes 1-4. We took a bunch of cones and all of the children out to the soccer field, and let the children take part in some friendly competition. The races started with the baby class which was complete chaos and bedlam. They were running all over the place. Each race had four teams of about six children, and the winning teams all got candy for a prize. I have never seen kids so excited over a relay race. We also gave the children a Koolaid-like drink, and they all got candy in the end just for being there. The music turned out to be a bust because the radio did not work. That was definitely a bummer. All in all, it was a happy time for the children.

However, I did leave out one minor glitch in the party. It all started when someone requested the teachers to race. We were to run to one end of the soccer field and back. It was going to be the headmaster, teacher Baraza, Hesbon, and myself. The first attempt at the race was a failure because a couple of the teachers false started. I said we should try it again, and they all agreed. We figured out the starting system, and we were out of the gates. The race finished (I shouldn’t mention here that I won), but no one was really paying attention to us. I could not figure out why, at first. They always go crazy at the end of a race. But I saw them all crowd around someone on the ground. It was Headmaster Hudson. Apparently, he had slipped on a rock and face-planted on the ground. He had some terrible cuts and bruises on his face, and sorry to be graphic, but there was blood everywhere. That kind of put a damper on the second half of the party. Needless to say, he was not at school on Saturday (yes, they do have school on Saturday). It seems that he will recover, and I believe he will be back at school on Monday.

This next experience may not seem as interesting to you as it was to me, but I absolutely loved it! On Friday evening, a few of us walked to the orphanage after school to take the children to get their heads shaved. Well, on that walk, a few of the children spotted some monkeys playing on a huge rock. A lot of the kids moved on because they see monkeys quite often, but I stayed back for a little while to watch them play. In the time I was there, nearly forty to fifty monkeys appeared and had a big party on that rock (probably a much better party than our party). There were monkeys resting, playing, rough-housing, and some babies following closely to their mothers. It blew me away. I never get to see monkeys back home. It has always been a dream of mine to own a pet monkey. Anyways, it is not really much of a story, but I just found it incredible that you can see monkeys playing just a short distance off of the “road” (it’s more of a path) here. How neat is that?

There is not a whole lot more to report on the Tumaini front. School is back in action, and everyone is back to their normal schedule. I teach English, Math, and three or four basketball classes every day. By the way, basketball has been going extremely well. The children are in love with it. I also continue to teach Sunday School. I have been busy with all of that, and I have also been helping to pick maize or corn at home with Rose—the Tumaini director. When I say picking corn, I mean to say picking each kernel off of each corn cob. There are literally thousands of corn cobs. Each evening, we bring in a bunch of corn and dump it on the floor in the sitting room. We spend the next few hours picking the kernels off the corn cobs and piling them all over the floor. I wish there was a better way to explain it. Clearly I am not a farmer, and I don’t know the word for the whole process. You will just have to see pictures. A huge highlight of the week for me was when the children came to the house for a couple of hours after school to help with the corn. It was a great time to work with them and joke around with them. We are really becoming close friends, and I love them with all of my heart. It is going to be hard to leave them in one short month.

There were several little random occurrences that happened this week that were special to me, but I think I will have to fit those in another blog at some point in the future. I want to finish by encouraging you with a verse that a great man, whose name will remain nameless out of respect for him (Jake Mcgee), shared with me this week.

Psalm 73:25-26 says, “Whom have I in heaven but You? And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You. My flesh and my heart fail; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”

Those couple of verses have spoken volumes to me over the last few days. I know I have mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: as Christians, we have to make the Lord our only desire. There have honestly been very few times in my life where my entire heart has solely desired God and nothing else. There is always something there to steal my attention from the Lord. But I have been begging Him to bring me to a stage in my life where I understand that I have no one in heaven or on earth but Him. He is answering my prayer. Being in a place that has caused me to deal with the struggles of loneliness and homesickness has taught me to remember that I must make Him my only source of satisfaction. I am slowly learning what it means to make the Lord my refuge and my sanctuary. The first couple of weeks here had pointed me to the fact that I was entirely dependent upon the Lord. As I have grown more comfortable here, it has been easy to forget that sometimes. But I am now being reminded that He is the strength of my heart always. When my flesh is weak and fails me, I must hold fast to the truth that He is my portion forever. Anytime that I feel longings for home, I pray that God would fill up those longings with Himself. I pray that we would all make God our only desire this week. I pray that the worries of this world would not have a death grip on our hearts and minds. Let us fix our eyes and our hope on Christ alone this week and forever!

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this blog. I love you all. You will be hearing from me in the near future, and I hope to hear from you as well!