Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

At Hotel Southern Blue, Russ and I are sharing a double room. It is a small room with two single beds and a small bathroom. The bathroom has a shower with “on demand” hot water – which offered me my first hot shower of this trip. Even though it is a bit small, it is a nice and comfortable room. The cost is about $30 a night and that includes a free breakfast with fruit, eggs however you like them, juice, coffee or tea, and just about anything else you might want. What’s more, the people here are great. They are extremely welcoming and helpful.

This morning Charles brought several pastors by who were in town early for the conference. One of them was Pastor Yumba from the Congo, Pastor Simon from Mombasa was also there as well as Pastor Charles from Nyahururu, and his son who serves another congregation even further to the north. It was a very good meeting, as I had the chance to find out about the work in the Congo and the Mombasa stations. Our plan is to be able to visit the Mombasa churches at the end of the week.

Originally, we had planned to visit one or more of the local Nairobi congregations in the morning, but we had a number of pastors who had to come to Nairobi early because of travel schedules. So those visits were cancelled. It was also not possible to do this in the afternoon because Charles needed to be available to pick people up when they arrived in town, and that was to happen throughout the day. So we had the afternoon free. This was a wonderful thing for me because I received some much needed time to prepare my presentations for the conference tomorrow. It also gave me some time to get to the cyber café to do some e-mail (for the first time since arriving in Africa) and printing of papers for conference. I worked on a couple of presentations, not knowing exactly how many papers we were going to need. Late in the day, when people should have arrived, I began to be concerned that one of the groups from Tanzania was not going to make it.

In the evening, after getting things ready for the conference, Charles picked us up to head to the airport to meet Bruce Naumann whose plane was to arrive at 7:40. We arrived at around 9:00, and found Bruce waiting for us. Thankfully he hadn’t been waiting there very long. It was great to see him (along with all his luggage). We had the chance to visit with him and fill him in on the events of the past few days and the plans for the coming few days, got him settled in, and all went to bed, in preparation for the start of the conference tomorrow.

Then, at about 1:30 in the morning I received a phone call from Charles, telling me that a few more men had arrived. Even if it was the middle of the night, I was glad that they had made it safely and looked forward to seeing them all in the morning.

In His service,

Nathanael