Missionary Bloopers and Monkeys!

I made my first cultural/language mistake last week.  My neighbor and friend, Elpina, invited me over to her house to learn how to make maandazi.  She is an excellent cook; everything she has made and let me taste has been so good.  I think part of that is the fact that they have spices here that I have never even heard of.  I have bought these spices and am learning to use them.  They make soups and stews taste so good.  Anyway, we made maandazi together, which to my surprise is almost exactly the same thing as Louisiana beignets.  They eat maandazi with their chai (tea) but without the powdered sugar that BJ is accustomed to putting on his.  Anyway, I was excited that it tasted so similar, and with my friend standing right there, I mentioned to BJ that they taste like beignets, just not quite as sweet.  Well, the next day, I made chimichangas.  I took a couple of them over to Elpina’s house for them to try.  Later, she told me that they really enjoyed them, that my food was “tamu sana” (very sweet).  I puzzled over chimichangas being sweet for just an instant before Pidgin came rushing back to me.  In New Guinea, in Pidgin, when something tastes good, they say that it is “swit nogut tru” (very sweet).  I realized my mistake!  I had said that her food was not as “sweet” as our food in Louisiana.  Of course, I meant sugary sweet, but “tamu” means sugary sweet, delicious, appetizing, yummy, etc, etc.  I explained to Elpina what I had meant, and luckily she knows English very well and understood the difference in the words.  We are still good friends!

I made another funny mistake, this time while shopping.  The fresh milk on the shelves at the store is always dated to expire in about two days.  So I decided to try different brands of milk to see if maybe one of them would last longer.  To my delight, I finally found one brand called Maziwa Lala that was dated to expire in two weeks!  I was very excited, and decided that would be the kind of milk I would get from now on.  I bought it and brought it home.  When our teacher came for the Swahili lesson, I opened one of the bottles of what I thought was milk.  I was about to pour it into the pan to make the tea when our teacher said, “NO!  You can’t use that to make tea!”  So then I got a lesson on the words “maziwa” and “lala”.  Yes, “maziwa” means milk, but “lala” means sleeping.  So, essentially, it is milk that has “slept” or been around a while to age!  It tastes more like yogurt, only you drink it instead of eat it with a spoon.  So do I still buy Maziwa Lala?  Yes!  I love it!  If you stir some sugar in it, it tastes really good.  I like it even better than yogurt, but I do NOT put it in my tea! 

And lastly, a really interesting thing happened the other day.  We were all sitting at our kitchen table, talking on skype with BJ's family.  BJ was holding Seth who happened to be looking over BJ’s shoulder out the window.  All of a sudden, Seth said, “Look at that doggie on top of our car!”  We whirled around to find, not a doggie, but a monkey sitting on the roof of our car right outside our window!  BJ and I went into action trying to get our hands on a camera to take a picture of it.  But with our frantic movement inside the house, the monkey leaped up onto the roof of our house and then into the trees.

We still got a picture of it in the tree, but it was not near as good as it would’ve been had the monkey still been on the roof of our car.  One of the blessings of living in Kenya; we get to see monkeys right outside our front door!

Life in Kenya

It is hard to believe that we have only been here for three and a half weeks.  Things have moved along very quickly, and that is a blessing for us.  We now have a car.  The Lord allowed BJ to find a nice, little car for the price that we had budgeted for it.

It is a Toyota Probox, a make that I had never heard of before coming here.  It just arrived in the country from Japan which is a good thing for us because that means that it has not been driven on the roads here.  Vehicles really take a beating on these roads, even the roads in Nairobi.  It is very small, but it is suiting our needs just fine and getting us around town.

Saturday is our family shopping day.  On Fridays, I sit down with my recipes and my cookbooks, and I plan my menu for the entire week.

From that, I make a grocery list.  Then Saturday, we drive to Nakumatt (a large store like Wal-mart).  Shopping is an all day thing because you end up going to a couple of different stores and then to the open market for fresh fruits and vegetables.  After the shopping is done, some Saturdays, we eat at the restaurant that is right beside the Nakumatt.  It makes the day kind of special for us.  Today we ordered meat "samosas" from the appetizer part of the menu and made a meal of them.  I absolutely love samosas!!!  They are made up of a spicy meat filling in an eggroll type wrapper. 

Then when I get home, I soak all of my fresh fruits and vegetables in water and a very mild type of bleach that they have here called Aquaguard.

 

Since I am buying for the whole week, and we eat a lot of fresh food, it usually takes me the rest of the day to get all of them cleaned, dried, and put into the fridge.

But it is worth it.  The food here tastes wonderful.  The fresh fruits and vegetables are so sweet—carrots, bell peppers, everything.  Nothing has preservatives in it either.  So, of course, that means that I have to use it up fast, but it is a lot more healthy for us that way.  All of these fruits and vegetables that you see in the picture only cost us about $6.50!  They are very cheap here compared to the States. 

BJ and I have completed our first week of language school.  We are enjoying it very much.  We have an amazing teacher named Ndelegua who is making Swahili very easy for us to understand.

Our teacher is very knowledgeable in linguistics and the building blocks of languages.  He knows English grammar very well too, and that helps.  BJ and I took Arabic in Bible college, and since Swahili has a strong Arabic influence, that is helping a lot too.  In just one week’s time, we’ve already learned a lot of the customary greetings and their responses, a whole bunch of nouns, and a long list of verbs.  We’ve also learned how to conjugate the verbs so that we can actually use them in sentences.  It is very exciting to already be able to put sentences together after just one week!  Our neighbors are helping us greatly by speaking Swahili with us so that we can use what we are learning.   We have noticed that BJ and I have different strengths and weaknesses when it comes to learning the language.  BJ seems to have a photographic memory, and this is his strong point in learning the language.  He can look at a list of nouns or verbs and conjugations, and then he remembers them very well and how to use them.  I do better with pronunciation which probably comes from knowing Pidgin.  The vowel sounds and most of the consonant sounds are exactly the same.  But when it comes to remembering how to put all the pieces together to make a sentence, I have to laugh at myself!  Yesterday, I told Elpina that I really like the food I cook!  I meant, of course, that I really like the food that she cooks!  She got a chuckle out of it.

Seth falls into bed exhausted every night!  He plays hard all day long, and by about 7:30 p.m., he begs me to put him to bed!  For the first time in his life, he has his own yard and is finally able to get real acquainted with dirt!  He comes in filthy, and I march him straight to the shower at the end of the day!  I love it though.  I love seeing the delight on his little face when he comes in showing me his newest “pets.”  The other day, he had a lizard crawling all over him!

He asked if I wanted to pet it.  Uh, no thank you!!!  Killing all the bugs that are NOT Seth’s pets is a normal, daily routine for me!  They like to come into my house, and I wage war against them!  Ah, the joys of living on the equator.  It keeps life interesting!

We have not seen much of the animal life yet here in Kenya.  You probably have to go on a safari to really get to see them.  But we have seen a mongoose or two run across our yard.  They like to terrorize Elpina’s chickens.  BJ has seen baboons on the side of the road while driving around town.  Also, I took a picture of this bird in my front yard.

These birds are very annoying because of the noise they make.  They squawk so loud, and if they happen to be close to your bedroom window in the morning, well, you can forget about getting anymore sleep!

A Trip to the Maasai Market

Things are going well on this side of the ocean.  Swahili classes are our main priority and focus.  It seems that our lives revolve around those classes every day.  But we are enjoying them.  The Lord gave us some encouragement this past Sunday at church.  Normally, the Madory’s church that we’ve been going to is totally in English, except that they sing one or two of the songs in Swahili.  But this past Sunday, they had a national missionary in to speak.  He is a Kenyan man who is a missionary to neighboring Tanzania.  He taught the Sunday School hour in Swahili.  BJ and I were trying to catch words here and there that we understood.  We were encouraged that we understood about 15% of the words, but much of the context was lost on us.  

BJ, Seth, and I took a trip the other day to the Maasai market, which is basically a parking lot that is filled with at least a hundred vendors selling their handiwork.  I was amazed at how talented these people are.  The things they make by hand are beautiful.  Of course, most of the people they sell to are tourists, so many of them thought that we were tourists.  I had to smile as BJ did a very good job of bluffing with his limited knowledge of Swahili.  I saw the respect they had for a “mzungu” (white person) who is trying to learn their language.  We had fun and were able a buy a few things.  BJ got a beautiful Maasai blanket to wrap up in in the cool of the morning.  These “blankets” are actually their tribal trademark.  As you drive the streets of Nairobi, sometimes you will see Maasai men standing wrapped in their bright-colored cloths.   I got a “kikoi” which is a shawl type thing that the ladies wear around their shoulders for warmth and for beauty.

 The Kenyan people are a certainly a beautiful people.

Our New Home

This time as I write, I am sitting in my own home!  Yes, the Lord has graciously provided us with a quaint, little house for $500 a month in Karen, a quiet, beautiful suburb of Nairobi where almost every other house is going for way way more that that!

It was truly a miracle.  Also, every other house we looked at would have needed much work done to it. When BJ and I first walked through this one, we looked at each other in amazement that God had landed this one in our lap so to speak.  We had immediate peace that this was to be our home for the next year or two.  Our house is brand new, only built about a year ago.  Our landlord and his family live right next door to us.  They have a very large house.  We actually live in what is called their servant's quarters. 

My little house was ready for us to move right in.  No having to repair this and that, and dump a lot of money into a house that we will probably only be in for a year or two.  The house is quite small, (about 20 ft by 30 ft. with a 10ft x 10 ft chunk of it “missing” as it is the outside veranda!) but perfect for just the three of us.  It has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, the kitchen with lots of counter space and a tiny living room area.  I love it!!!  BJ says I should call it “my little house on the safari”!  I have been busy for the past week unpacking our ten boxes that we brought with us on the plane, cleaning, and of course, finally getting to cook for my little family. 

We do not yet have a car.  BJ has been shopping around town, but has not felt peace from the Lord to buy any of the ones he has seen.  It seems that the Lord is telling us to wait, so that is what we are doing for now.  Although it is difficult to get anything done in this country without transportation of your own, we’ve met a Christian man who drives a taxi, and he has been taking us wherever we need to go.  So that has been a great blessing.  Bro. Madory, the other missionary we were staying with, has also been a great help to us since we have been here. 

Seth is doing great.  The Lord knew exactly what he needed.  Our landlord has a ten-year-old son, Arvin, who lives right next door to us.  He and Seth have hit it off.  They play outside together, and Seth brings him into our house to play with his toys.  Seth has been in Arvin’s house too, and they’ve pretty much been inseparable these last few days.

Monday, we begin Swahili classes!  We will have a tutor come to our home five days a week from 9:00-12:00 in the morning to teach us the language.  We are so excited to get started!  People keep telling us (even other missionaries) that Swahili is not very difficult to learn because the pronunciations and the rules stay pretty consistent.  Our classes should only last about six months.  Our landlady and her son, Arvin, have already been teaching us some Swahili words and greetings.  Every day they teach us more words, and Arvin even went so far as to write me two lists of Swahili words on paper!  I am finding once again that it means so much to the people when you want to learn their language. 

Elpina has got me hooked on “chai”—their tea.  In Kenya, tea time twice a day is very important.  So Elpina invited me over to her house the other day and made Kenyan tea for me.  Wow, it was so good!  She boiled milk and then poured it into my cup over a Kenyan tea bag and a teaspoon of sugar.  I am not a hot tea drinker and never have enjoyed it much, but now every morning, I sit down to read my Bible with a cup of chai in hand.  I love it!  She is tickled that I got “addicted” so fast!  She is also teaching me to how to cook different Kenyan meals.  Yesterday, I watched her make “pilau” which is a lot like Louisiana’s dirty rice.  Only this had chunks of goat meat in it.  Surprisingly, that was the first time I’ve tasted goat meat, and it was pretty good.  Also, she let me taste her “samosas” (little meat pies) and they were yummy.  I have vowed to learn to make all of these Kenyan foods.  I let her and her family taste my homemade tortillas and burritos, and they enjoyed Mexican food for the first time too.