I suppose I should have posted a new entry when I arrived home a week ago, but, as you can imagine, things have been busy. I did spend a day in Amsterdam on my way back and stayed with a friend. I saw Anne Frank's House, the National Art Museum, and took a canal boat tour. It is a very beautiful city--it was nice to finally be outside the airport.

My flight from Nairobi to Amsterdam was a bit crowded, but the second flight from Amsterdam to Atlanta was fantastically empty. I had a window seat and a row to myself, in addition to the personal TV screen on the seat in front of me. It was a very nice flight. An, yes, my brother made me eggnog to have. Wow--it tasted even better than in my dream.

Since coming home I have stayed busy with several activities:

1. Hanging out with family

2. Searching, in vain, for jobs in Lexington

3. Searching, in vain, for apartments in Lexington

4. Eating anything I can smother in cream cheese

I will write a bit more of an update later--perhaps after I find a job.

Thank you all! 

I am finally managing to do something I have been wanting to do for a long time--go into the operating room. Not as the patient or the doctor, but just an observer.

Tomorrow morning, 9ish, they tell me. I opted out of the amputation they had scheduled and am going in instead for a bowel case. My surgeon resident friend assures me it will be an interesting case, so I am looking forward to it. And not just because I get to walk around in my pajamas (which happen to be old scrubs) and  finally wear my official Tenwek name tag. I have been teaching a very interesting course on biology to my 7th graders and have been fascinated by the human body.

I am hoping I manage to recognize a few things in there. We'll see. I promise to just tell you about it--I am not going to pull a missionary doctor stunt and take a bunch of pictures to post. :)

Happy Memorial Day!

Today the first of many families/people left Tenwek for the US.
By August, five of the seven missionary families living here will have left for a year (at least)-long furlough. (Of course, there will be more coming back from the US to make up for that.)

But this afternoon, right after church, the exodus began.  One of the families is just going home for a few weeks for a family wedding, but there were two others leaving for an undetermined amount of time. (Both are hoping to return, but are not sure when.)

Most of them flying out tonight, so please keep them in your prayers, especially the two who are leaving more permanently.

The next group will be another family and me, heading out Thursday morning. A week or so after that, another family takes off. There will be a few months of relative stability before two more families leave later in the summer.

We have planned a pretend-everything -is-normal-and-no-one- is-missing party tonight to cheer ourselves up. We'll see if it works.

Have a happy Sunday! Hope your weather is as nice there as it is here. 

This will likely be one of last entries from Kenya.

     We finished school a week ago today and have been testing this week. I leave Tenwek in a week and fly to the US a few days after that. I obviously am having mixed feelings about leaving--I am looking forward to seeing friend and family, but will miss this community so much. This is truly the best teaching job--I cannot imagine finding a job I enjoy more than this one. Not to mention the perfect weather, interesting culture, beautiful countryside out my front door. 

    We have had several end-of-the-year events in the last week. Last Thursday, we had our annual Fine Art Festival. The kids did a number of different pieces--piano, poetry, scripture, etc. After the program, we had refreshments while people walked around and saw the art displays the kids had set up. A very nice night, all in all.

    Sunday night, we had a good-bye bbq for all the families who are leaving soon--there are four family units leaving in the next week. The kids stayed with some visitors, so it was a nice time with just the adults.

    And this week, I have been giving standardized test to five of my students. It's been a strange week--it's been school, but not really. We finished that yesterday morning and now I just have to pack--and get rid of a bunch of things I have accumulated, but don't want to take back with me, including some food.

    I've already had two dreams (I am not sure I would categorize them as nightmares) about leaving, then realizing I have left things behind. I am not sure what that means, other than my worries about packing up. 

    I am leaving most of my clothes (at least what I have here), but have several bags worth of things I have bought and want to take back with me. The parents bought me a gorgeous  painting (by Peter Mwangi, a Kenyan artist) as a goodbye gift, but it is canvas and can just be taken off the frame and rolled into a tube. I have several vases and carvings I have bought that do weigh quite a bit and am planning on buying quite a bit of tea in Nairobi before I leave, so I have to have room for that, too.

    One of my goals when I return home is to move into some place I really like and stay there for at least two years. Since graduating from high school, I have moved 13 times, including two international moves and not including my upcoming moves to GA, then onto Kentucky in late summer. I am ready to NOT move for a while.

    Now that testing is over, we are planning to have a field day next week. Other than that, I am just packing.

    I would appreciate your prayer for the next week or so--for me and for my students. Transitions are alway difficult and international moves are some of the most difficult.

    Thank you all for your support and prayer for the last two years. I will post again , I hope, before I leave.  

So far I have used this blog merely as a way to communicate with friends and family while I live overseas, rather than a way to comment on news/politics/current events.

However, I found this article (America's Safety Catch ) on the BBC website particularly fascinating and thought I would share. 

    I really don’t have an excuse this time for not posting for an entire month. It’s pitiful and I am well aware of that.

    I do have something of a reason, though. I was on vacation for a few days, which really doesn’t account for the entire month, but that’s my story. That and searching for a job for next year using very slow internet, redoing my resume, and trying to finish up all the end-of-the-year things teachers have to do.

    So vacation. It was fabulous. I have to admit that when I went last year down to the coast of Kenya with all the other WGM missionaries for our annual retreat, it wasn’t as great as I had anticipated. Last year, we drove the grueling sixteen hours, dropping from an elevation of close to 7,000 feet above sea level all the way down to sea level. And as the elevation dropped, the temperature rose. I remember very little about that trip other than sweating profusely while my ears popped the entire way.

    This year, however, due to the rise in gas prices, it was cheaper for us all to fly than to drive all the way, so instead of the awful drive, we had a nice, short flight. Very nice.

    And maybe I was more prepared for the heat this year, but it didn’t seem as steamy. Overall, it was a very nice retreat.

    The adults went to morning sessions with a wonderful, amazing pastor and his wife who spoke on the life of Moses, I believe. I worked with the kids again, which meant I got to go for free. This year, I was in charge of the youngest group, the 3-5 year olds. At first, I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t have my third and fourth graders, but it was really fun to work with kids that I don’t have in class. Most of them were kids I’d never taught before, so it was fun to have that interaction. I looked at a few VBS curriculums from the classroom (there are several people have left those over the years, some better than others). In the end, I used a few of their ideas, but kind of did my own thing. At the last minute, I packed some books to read and am I ever glad. We definitely needed more activities than I had planned.

    One of the books I had packed was Tikki Tikki Tembo, which is an older children’s book, originally published in the late sixties. It’s an old Chinese story about a time when the Chinese named their firstborn sons very long names and why they don’t any more. It was so much fun--the kids LOVED it. One of the families has borrowed it since then to read some more. We also read Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey, another old children’s book that I remember reading as a child, which has some fun sounds in it, too.

    We had some sudden changes in our plans because I had brought some arts and crafts for them to do, that went along with the Bible story each day. Afterwards, I realized that I had never actually planned crafts for three-year olds and had completely overestimated their motor skills, so we had some last-minute changes. By last-minute change, I mean that I made something else up off the top of my head and we ended up with some pretty funny-looking sheep drawings. I think it was learning experience for us all. :) And really, most crafts made by three-year olds look pretty funny anyway, don’t they?

    All in all, we had a really good time, despite the craft disaster, although I wished I could have been in some of the sessions.

    Afternoons were free, just hanging out around the hotel and on the beach. Very relaxing. We flew down to the coast on Friday the 11th.

    The official retreat ended on Monday, so some of us flew back to Nairobi, but most of the families went ahead and stayed through the week. I arrived back at Tenwek the next Wednesday and started teaching again the next Monday.

    As much as I enjoyed the time off, I am lucky to have a job I love going back to. It is nice to be back in the routine of school with my students. It’s hard to believe I only have three weeks of school left. I don’t think it has really hit that I am leaving. It seems like this life could just keep on going--and should.

    I was thinking about it the other night as I was getting ready for bed and ended up having a crazy dream about flying home, via Hawaii (as if that was on the way to Atlanta) and meeting my family there. But while I was there, I got a call  on my cell phone (which, miraculously, worked in Kenya and Hawaii) from a visiting doctor’s wife here at Tenwek, saying she needed help because the police picked her up and were holding her and her two boys in the Bomet jail. So I was frantically trying to call people at Tenwek to go get her out. I was also stressed because I realized on the plane that I had not actually packed up my apartment here--I had just packed what I was taking and left a whole heap of stuff for someone else to clean up. But, completely unrelated to either one of those story lines, I remember, very vividly, a scene from my dream where I was walking with my family--parents, brothers, and sister-in-law and all--through the Hawaiian Wal-Mart and explaining to mother that because I never had any eggnog at Christmastime (which is true), I really wanted some then. I suppose it might have helped all the tension I was feeling in the dream. :)

    I think that dream might have been indicative of my stress level these days. :)
Speaking of leaving, I am leaving behind an empty classroom. Well, not entirely empty--there will be 12 kids here to teach, but, as of right now, there is no teacher for next year. So if you, or someone you, are interested in a teaching job in Kenya next fall, please email me for more details. I am working on some sort of job description and will probably put it in a separate post, but it would be working primarily with a multi-age classroom of elementary school age kids, as well as teaching separate classes of younger and older students at times.

    If you are not at all interested, please pray for the search. Tenwek Hospital is also looking for a CEO for next year. We’ve had a fabulous interim CEO this year, but so far, no one has turned up. Both of those positions need prayer.

    Along the same train of thought, if you are hiring in the Lexington, KY area next year, I am also looking for a job.  Or if you are vacating a house in the Lexington area and would like to rent it out to someone. If someone approached me on either one of those scores, it would save me much time and energy. :) I realize it’s not very likely, but who knows?

    We are in the midst of trying to finish up everything in the last few weeks of school. We are also planning the annual Fine Arts Festival (a fancy name for our talent and art show), which has proved much more challenging than last year--and so far, all we’ve had to do is set a date. But we finally have a date, not in the middle of our testing week, when everyone will be here, so I am happy. I think it will not be as elaborate as last year’s festival, as most of us are also in the midst of packing up our houses and do not have the time and energy we did last year, but I am still looking forward it it.

    This has turned into a much longer post than I had planned, so I should sign off for the night. Have a great Sunday!

I am going to blame the current lack of updates on computer problems. For a while, every time I tried to load the entry editor on my blog, the browser would automatically quit on me.
Finally, I sorted out the settings issue with one of my other browsers (Flock , which I LOVE), so the problem has been solved. Flock also has an absolutely fabulous built-in photo uploader for Flickr, which makes it infinitely easier and faster to upload pictures, so I am once again in the process of posting photos from Athens. (If you are a blogger, it also has a built-in blog uploader, which works with most blog sites, other than mine, of course. I actually was tempted to switch sites when I downloaded Flock because it seemed so much easier, but I decided I really liked the site I was using.)

So, other than issues with my computer, what is happening over here?

I actuallly arrived home for lunch Thursday and tried to post without success about the adventures of the day. As many of you familiar with rural areas can imagine, we have a variety of wildlife/lifestock roaming around, but I had yet to have any wander into the schoolroom (aside from a few birds who have flown in and out.)

 However, Thursday during our science class, my students were peacefully working on their science projects (posters about a planet/celestial object of their choice), when we heard barking and squawking outside. Next thing I know, Emma (a family dog around here) ran by, chasing a very frightened rooster. Emma stopped at the door, but in ran that chicken and headed for the nearest haven it could find: on top of books on the lower shelf of one of my bookcases. Thankfully, Emma gave up the pursuit and headed off to terrorize something else, so I didn't have a feathery bloodbath on my hands--just a large bird  (crouched, strangely enough, on all my non-fiction animal books), as well as a room full of kids who no longer had any interest in astronomy.

I sent the kids outside to work in the field, grabbed the broom, and spent the last ten minutes of my school day dragging, and then shoving the dirty, petrified, and stubborn rooster out the door.

Thankfully, I have the world's best students, who gave me a standing ovation once the rooster and I were outside, and then helped clean up the bookshelf (a mess because I was pulling books off while trying to get the rooster out, not because the rooster was too frightened).

That was the highlight of the school week, I think. 

 I had another small adventure this morning--I took a matatu (local taxi) into Bomet and back. I needed a few things from the store, as well as just wanting to get off the compound for a few hours. However, unlike an American taxi, you don't get the taxi to yourself (unless you pay the matatu driver a hefty fee). You share it with as many people as can fit in the car. On the way into town, there were seven people in the 5 seater car (three in front, four in the back seat). On the way back, there were ten. Yes, ten. Four in front, four in the back seat, then two in the hatch back. Thankfully, it's a short drive. :)  It was very nice to be in town for a bit. I refilled my supply of toilet paper, batteries, as well as some juice and other things, which I needed.

Other than that, there is not much going on. Things are still very peaceful and school is continuing on normally. As we get closer and closer to the end of our books, I am constantly reminded of how little time I have left here. I can't believe the school year is almost over! It seems like it has barely begun. 

I am currently trying to find a job for next year. I am planning on moving back to KY (close to some family). I have printed out the applications for some private Christian schools and am also looking at some other options outside teaching. We'll see what turns up. :)

 I have also decided to try posting some of my favorite new recipes at the end of blog posts. So here is my new favorite dessert/snack. Be warned, though--it has gotten very mixed reviews. It seems people either love it or they hate it. I love it, but you'll have to decide for yourself.

Avocado Whip

1 avocado

1/2 c milk

1/4 cup sugar

1/4 t vanilla

Combine all in a blender and blend until smooth.

Yummy! I think it would make a really great dip for apples or something.