The family.

 

Focus, Sarifina and Francis. A new baby is due next month!

The new house

 

Inside

 

The new house

 

For those of you who have followed this story or have contributed money, here is an update on Focus' house. (He was our guard in Tanzania). It is now finished and, at least by Tanzanian standards, is livable in. It was finished in perfect timing just before the rains start again in November. Thank you so much to everyone who contributed money, it has made a real difference to his family and he is very pleased.

New friends

 

Bethany made two new friends on the weekend. The girl on the left has Zimbabwean parents and the one in the middle, one Canadian and one Somalian parent. I love the variety of people you meet here!

Birds

 

This picture is taken on the same road as the previous one. For some reason there was tree after tree full of birds. Ibis maybe?

Weekend away

 

This weekend we went away on our church weekend. We drove about an hour out of Nairobi east along the road to Mombasa. It is amazing the difference in the landscape in just such a short time. This photo is the centre of Nairobi, but where the weekend was, was in the middle of nowhere, in what looks much more like the 'real Africa'. We even saw a herd of camels on the road..(Sorry no photo).

Bruce Crevier

 

Bruce Crevier, 21 Basketball Spin, 4 times world champion.
www.champions-forever.com

Spinning balls

 

What my little brother can do I can do too!

Spinning balls

 

Maybe Caleb has a future in ball spinning!! Not a career option I had ever thought of.

Spinning balls

 

We had a treat last night when the 4 time world record holder for spinning basket balls came to our compound. He is a Christian and was doing a mission in Kenya. He uses his ball talents for his ministry. The kids had so much fun watching him perform and spinning balls with him. he also shared a great message with them. What's more amazing to me is that he has 12 children!

'The Lizard in the Moon'

It is a little known fact to those in the West that, like you have the man in the moon in the Northern hemisphere, we have the 'lizard in the moon' in the South.

Here is a photo I took recently...

1J

 

Assembly

 

I was also interested to note how many different nationalities there are in Caleb's class. I sat drinking coffee with some of the parents before the assembly, a group that included people from Holland, Cambodia, India, Finland and Israel. After English and Swahili the biggest language group in the school seems to be Hebrew.

Assembly

 

I went to 1J's assembly yesterday, that is Caleb's class. I was very impressed by all the lights, music and acting and the confidence of the children performing to a big audience in a full size theatre. I hope they don't lose that confidence.

Juba

I have just (Friday) returned from my first trip to Juba. Juba is in the Central Equatoria region of Southern Sudan, and is the base of most of our flying in Southern Sudan (which is most of MAF Kenya's flying). We have one aircraft based there (on a rotation basis) and hope to increase this to two shortly. Unfortunately we have no permanent pilots based there at the moment, which means the pilots are on continuous rotation. Hopefully this will be resolved in the near future.

My visit was mainly a familiarisation visit, but also to help out the Base Administrator and Base Manager with some finance issues. Although it has supported the MAF Kenya flying for the last two years since it was set up, it was (until the beginning of this year) a separate MAF Programme, and was only integrated into the Kenya Programme at the beginning of 2010 - so there are teething issues still ongoing. [The Sudan Programme - like the country - has a long and chequered history; it was the first MAF Programme in Africa, but due to the unstable past we have been expelled several times].

Flying up to Juba, we crossed terrain that reminded me why MAF exists. Here are a couple of examples (you may need to zoom in on these to see them!):





I really enjoyed Juba itself; it is like a cross between Dar and Dodoma - the humidity of Dar and the undevelopedness of Dodoma. Fortunately the power was fairly stable while I was there so the air con could run all night! Which was just as well! The base has a compound with both the offices and the staff houses. So like Dodoma it was a very short commute! The green photo is of the Base Manager's house (it is not quite as nice as it looks - the houses are metal pre-fabs) and the dustier photo is of the 'business' section of the compound, with the office in the far left corner.





Pictures of Juba are a bit hard to come by, as the authorities are very sensitive about photography and so one has to be a bit careful. My photos of the town itself were quick snaps while driving to the airport, and my photos of the airport and environs all taken from inside the plane!





I will be going up to Juba fairly regularly, and hope to actually get on a flight to see some of the work we do first hand. In the meantime it is nice to know that the work is going on, and I am contributing to it from behind my computer :)