When we left our house Easter Morning at 8 am to go to the airport in Lubbock, we knew it would be about 24 hours of travel. After forty-three hours of exhausting travel, we arrived at the guesthouse in Nairobi at 11 am on Tuesday morning. Whew! We were delayed in Lubbock for two hours and Dallas for 3.5, which made us miss our connection in London. So, we had a 10-hour layover in London. We arrived at the gate to catch our rescheduled flight to Kenya with what we had been told was plenty of time (an hour early) only to be informed that it was three minutes before boarding closed, that the plane had already boarded and we were the last people to get on! I couldn’t believe we almost missed our flight to Kenya after we had been at the airport so long. Who has ever heard of a flight boarding 1.5 hours early?? As you can imagine, we got to sit on the plane for an hour for our 8 pm departure. All of our flights went well and our girls slept for about half of each of them (excluding Clara, of course). Upon arrival in Kenya, we learned that none of our bags made it with us. Thankfully, our Samaritan’s Purse driver was still waiting on us when we exited the airport after a two hour wait.
Leaving the airport there was a lot of celebrating in our car as we left and saw a herd of giraffe and several Cape buffalo in the adjacent Nairobi National Park. Aside from that unexpected discovery, we quickly found out that six years had made Nairobi traffic massively worse. Our driver decided to take a short cut and at one point we got stuck in mud. Once we got out, we drove about six feet and promptly got stuck again. A large truck tried to pass us in the mud but ended up sliding into us and getting stuck as well. A trip that without traffic takes thirty minutes had become a two and a half hour ordeal.
We checked into the guesthouse where we were to stay and dropped off our luggage. Just a short jet-lagged hour later (our flights were delayed, but our brief window to shop was not!), we were heading to the grocery store to shop for four to five weeks worth of groceries. Because of the recent attacks in Kenya, we were not allowed to go to our usual Wal-Mart sized grocery stores and American sized malls to get our supplies so we instead shopped at the equivalent of the corner grocery store. There is nothing in the world like jet-lagged grocery shopping with four kids in a foreign country. I’ll let you use your imagination as to how that experience went! We went back to the guesthouse and relaxed anticipating our drive to Tenwek the next morning. The one blessing to approaching two and half days without much sleep was that everyone crashed that night—no jet lag terror like it had been with AnneMarie in 2008!
The next morning we received a call from the airport saying that 14 of our bags had arrived and asking us to come get them. John left for the airport at 9 am and didn’t return until 1 pm (recall the bad traffic). Because we still needed to go to the butcher and the green grocer, it would be too late in the day for us to go to Tenwek so we stayed another night in Nairobi. We went to our favorite restaurant that serves Indian, American and Chinese food. While the food is good, it is the attendant at the playground watching our kids that makes it the best!
The next morning we received another call from the airport saying our remaining two bags had come and for us to come get them. We decided to let them bring them to Bomet (nearest town to Tenwek) so we could get on the road ourselves. We left about 11 am. The road to Tenwek is paved the entire way, which is a HUGE improvement since we left in 2009. We saw several large troops of baboons along the way along with zebras and gazelles. We arrived at Tenwek around 4:30 pm and started unpacking and settling in!
We have now been here four days and are beginning to feel settled. Everything feels and smells so familiar. The girls have loved the freedom of roaming and exploring all day and they come in quite exhausted at night! The full time missionaries are away on retreat right now so the compound is rather quiet right now. The best change since we left is a new UV water filtration system. No more boiling and filtering water! We have to haul our drinking water 100 yards across the compound (uphill, both ways, really!), but it is well worth it.
Our travel here was exhausting, trying, and plagued with incident after incident. Throughout it all, we could feel God’s hand and your prayers in our travel. With so many delays and unexpected events meltdowns and tantrums are to be expected. But not once did our children (or us!) lose our cool. In fact, attitudes could not have been better.
As we have shared with some, the timing with Easter was not coincidental. We left Lubbock having just celebrated Good Friday with our church—a reminder of the suffering of Christ and his victory there. So with every trial we faced, we were reminded that each of them paled in comparison with that Christ endured on the cross. And with that, we are spurred on to share this great love to the many around us who need the love of Christ on Calvary.
We appreciate all of your prayers as we continue to experience life at Tenwek!
