New Vehicle, New Caleb, New House, New Experiences

By Sara:

We have all sorts of stuff to update you on this week.  Actually, we probably can't even tell you everything - it will take a while to catch you up.

First of all, we had a very new experience while staying at the guest house in Nairobi.  They had a tennis court that guests were allowed to use (we didn't figure this out until the last day and a half there, but we enjoyed it while we could).  We never thought we'd be playing tennis in Africa (or jogging around a tennis court)!

We also were successful in getting a new used vehicle!  Here it is, a Toyota Surf.  We're very happy with it so far.  The funny thing is that since it was imported from Japan, the direction screen is all in Japanese.  And we have a Japanese lady's voice talking to us when we start up the vehicle!

We were also able to pick Caleb up from our friend from World Renew who lives in Nairobi.  The first thing he did when he saw us was mark our car's tire as his own.

We haven't been able to let him roam freely since we picked him up, but so far he seems a lot calmer than he was before.  He enjoys being petted more and is a little less jumpy.  This is the video that some people requested of his reunion with Anthony (when we initially got out of the car, he took a few seconds to remember who we were, but then he was really happy, and enjoyed being petted by Anthony).

When we got to Nakuru, we weren't able to move into our house right away, but the guest house there graciously let us keep Caleb outside our room.  We feel very safe at the guest house anyway, but we were especially safe with this scary guard dog right outside our door.

We also had a new experience while stuck in a traffic jam in Nakuru.  Some young street kids were begging on the sides of the road and jumped on the sideboard of our car and the car behind us to demand money.  It made us very uncomfortable because we didn't want them to be riding on the outside of our vehicle for any reason and we didn't think we should give them money, but they wouldn't get off until we ignored them for quite a while.  We really don't know what the right response is in that kind of situation.

Monday night, we were excited to finally be able to move into our house (you can see it above)!  Even though we don't have internet yet (we had to go elsewhere to do email and work on this blog post), we are starting to feel like we're living in our own house.  We have been very busy for the past few days, making sure the house was cleaned, getting furniture and food, fixing curtains, unpacking everything that we brought with us, and on and on.  We also have to drive 40 minutes from our house on the Bible College campus to Nakuru if we need to buy certain things or go to the bank or use the internet.  We're looking forward to the day when we have everything we need at home and can get on to our work and be a bit more relaxed.

We've got lots and lots of pictures to share with you here.  Keep in mind that we're still unpacking, so it will look even better in a couple of days.  But we already have a single guest bed, so we're ready for at least one person to visit us!

The staff at the Bible College have been really helpful in getting us settled in.  They've provided a bunch of the furniture for the house, helped with cleaning, getting materials to build a fence around, finding a plumber and electrician to do repairs, and much more.  We'll introduce you to them in a later post.

Here's a tiny chameleon that greeted us in the bush outside our door when we moved in:

And, what you've all maybe been waiting for, the pictures of the house.  Here is our bedroom.  Note the quilt on the bed (made by my mom!), which we actually need at night.  We even bought a blanket in addition to it.  In fact, it was 61 in our room yesterday morning.  Very different from Soroti where we didn't always even need a sheet and slept with a fan blowing on us every night.

Then, the first guest room that will be ready, with a single bed.

Another guest room which will someday have a double bed in it.

Our bathroom - we got a shower head put in which heats the water as it goes through so we can have hot showers (much more important here than it was in Soroti!). 

The toilet is in a separate room, which we think is kind of nice.

Our living room.

The dining room.

And the kitchen.

We really appreciate the pantry attached to the kitchen.  Having all those shelves is really nice.

So there is a bit of our life these days.  We hope to have internet hooked up at our house this weekend, but we don't know how good it will be.  There are very few options for the area where we live and we're hoping the one that Anthony found (after days of research and asking around) is at least decent.