Thursday, November 13th - Headed home!

Thursday, November 13, 2008

I awoke dark and early this morning at around 4:00am. There was a horrible commotion down in the street below our room. The hotel is connected to a restaurant and it sounded like a truck pulled up and was being unloaded. They weren’t being quite about it at all! Our windows were open to the outside because our room had been painted earlier in the day and still smelled like paint thinner. We were stuck between a stink and a loud commotion. I tried to go back to sleep, thinking the truck would be done unloading fairly soon. But it was not to be. At around 5:00am there was another disturbance. There was shouting and laughing coming from the street now. Men were laughing and a woman was yelling. Her yelling turned to crying. It sounded like she was pleading with someone about something, but it was hard to tell exactly what since she was speaking in Swahili. Every once is a while some English would come out, but most of the English words she knew were profanities. It was very frustrating.

At around 6:00am the light was starting to come through the windows. The arguing and crying had died down but there was still a lot of noise. Since I could see, I decided to read for a while. Wouldn’t you know it, by 7:00, after we were already up and going, it was almost quiet! So much for a good night’s sleep at this point!

Although the shower reeked of a harsh paint thinner, the shower had wonderfully hot water! I even was able to shave with hot water out of the sink faucet for the first time since being in Africa! (I have found it strangely amusing that the handles on the sink are like ours at home with red circles with the letter H in the middle on the left side and blue circles with the letter C in the middle on the right side, yet both offer only cold water... finally one that is truthful!)

When we arrived here last night we only had a few Kenya Schillings – not enough to pay for a hotel, and because of the late hour, all the exchange places were closed. The owner was kind enough to let us check it and told us that we could pay in the morning when the banks opened up. So our fist order of business was to get out and exchange some money so we could pay our bill. At 8:30am we went to a nearby bank only to find that they didn’t have the updated exchange rate for the day yet! They asked us to come back in 30 minutes. So we decided to get some breakfast. We went down the street to the Kenya Comfort Hotel - a hotel we were familiar with from our stay there last year. They have a restaurant there and always had a good breakfast buffet. Of course we still didn’t have very much in Kenya Schillings so Russ paid for breakfast with his credit card (yes, they take Visa here)! We met and visited with one of the workers there who I met last year. He was usually on guard and in charge of opening up the computers last year, so we came to know him very well.

After breakfast I walked back down the now busier street to the Bureau de Change to get some needed Kenya Schillings, and from there back to the hotel in time to meet Charles. He arrived at about 10:00am and we visited and went over reports for about 2 hours. He agreed to come back and take us to the airport this evening around supper time. On the way he promised a stop for Pizza for supper! Yea!

It is now 12:30pm. I have another meeting this afternoon with two other men, and then we are finished. Our flight leaves Nairobi tonight at about 11:00pm and arrives in Amsterdam at 5:00am. We have a five hour layover in Amsterdam where Russ and I will split up. At 10:00am tomorrow morning Russ gets on a plane for Minneapolis and I get on another for Atlanta. It is going to be a long night, but we are both looking forward to getting home again.

Please keep all the work here in your prayers. There is so much to do, and so little time to accomplish it in. There is more to do here than can be accomplished in five weeks. We really need to have someone here full time with all that needs to be done. Pray that the Lord sends reapers into the harvest....

In His service,

Nathanael