Yes, My Hair is Attached!

The Kenya Diaries (vol. 15)

June 30, 2006

This morning Andy and the rest of the Sacred Heart teaching staff took 92 boys to Nakuru to "The Show." We weren't sure what The Show was at first, but then we realized it was like a farm show and state fair combined. It was very quiet at the school.

Kevin was the first one up, and worked on his gorilla hide-out for a while. He built a bi-plane, a helicopter and a telescope. His gorilla hide-out is awesome! He doesn't have much to work with, just scraps and empty boxes, but his imagination seems to soar above his resources. I think he'll be a designer of sorts some day.

After doing the day's laundry, we walked to Rongai for a little action. I bought each of the kids a citrus Fanta while I checked e-mail. We are actually trying to buy a house while in Kenya. Our story really is quite amazing.

We sold our house last December, and haven't found a new house to purchase that meets our needs. We were running out of time to be out of our house, when the opportunity came up for Andy to teach chemistry in Kenya for the summer. Since Andy has his summers off, it seemed like the perfect answer to our situation. We took the profit we made on the sale of our house, and purchased our plane tickets. Andy's sister agreed to store our belongings, and here we are!

Now the truth is, we have no home to go back to, but  God seems to be opening a door. Even today I received an e-mail concerning a house that would more than meet our needs. Dear God, please keep this door open to us if it be Your perfect Will!

On our way back to the school we stopped by the rainbow playground. There were lots of children there already, and they were wild and crazy. They were making the merry-go-round go too fast for Lucia, but Kevin, Ania and Philip didn't seem to mind. The kids did not understand English.



The see-saw was great for a while, until Lucia fell off and got a mouthful of dirt and a skinned elbow.




I just finished helping Lucia up when I noticed an older girl yank Ania's ponytail. "No! No! Ouch! That hurts!" I told the girl. I guess she understood me, because she stopped. That's when Ania told me that she had been pulling her hair since we got there. Even Philip complained of getting his hair "rumpled" and "combed through" by the boys. I guess they wanted to know if it was really attached.

Ania said this: When we went to the playground, there were lots of kids there. We all played together. My hair flopped on a girl's arm when we were on the merry-go-round, and that started all the girls pulling my hair. They each pulled my hair lots of times. Finally Mama saw one girl do it, and she said, "No! No! Ouch! That hurts!" Then the girls stopped. Mama said they were just seeing if it was real.

We returned to the school with all the children following behind.










When Andy came home, he had four masks that the boys had bought for our kids. Poor Ania -- she got a witch, which she didn't like, but was never-the-less very gracious about it. Philip got Spiderman, Lucia got a green bunny, and Kevin got a tiger.









After dinner, Andy was heating up the water to do dishes when the propane tank ran out, which was much better than having it run out while cooking dinner. Needless to say, we washed dishes in cold water tonight. Note to self: One tank of propane lasts three weeks.

Today was a very good day. Thank you, Jesus, for your many blessings! Amina.