Kenya Tuesday 6/14/10

The day started out with a trip to Sister Nickolas’s school. This school is past the Novitiate down roads that get smaller and smaller until we were on a trail that was big enough for the car. Sister Nickolas is running a school for those children that are back in the country. It is a day school with housing for physically disabled children. The intent is to give them an education and assimilate them into regular life. It seems as if they are not educated if they stay in the village. This is a really primitive school with a couple of buildings (basically walls roof and openings for doors and windows). She has 118 children (10 are disabled and live there full time) from Baby School (3 years old) to about 7. The children had never seen someone that was white and we were mobbed. They all wanted to shake our hands and welcome us to their school. One little girl kept coming back to Yvonne again and again to touch Yvonne. It was a moving experience. We were taken through the classrooms and the teachers talked about what they were doing. It is interesting that respect and dignity are as important as math.

We left there to do a tourist thing. Sister Pauline took us to see how the soap stone carvings are made. She first took us to the area where the figurines were being sold. We got to walk through several shops and look at some gorgeous carvings. I would have loved to bring some of this home but they were too big.

We then went on some really rough road to one of the quarries. A quarry is a cut in the ground where men are breaking out the rock and then all around the cut are workers who are cutting the rock into good chunks (with wood saws and machetes). When we walked out into the quarry the manager of the quarry came out and wanted us to pay to take pictures of the workers. It is really helpful to have both a Kenyan driver and Sister Pauline to step in-between ourselves and the Kenyans who believe that all Americans are rich (and we are compared to Kenyans). After some negotiations we were allowed into the quarry. Once we were in they were very excited to show us how the stones were selected, what kind of stones were the best and which stones were too hard to cut and carve.

We went back to the area where the carvings were being displayed and bought a few small figurines. The negotiations were interesting. We would have paid the price because the price was so low but Sister Pauline would not let us do that and she bargained (for four pieces we paid 650 Kenyan Shillings which equals about $14.00 US and that meant that they had made their quota for the day).

Then back to Asumbi for dinner with Retired Bishop Collin Davis. He started the evening telling me that I must be having a terrible trip and he knew just what it would take to make it better. He left the room and returned with two Kenyan beers. He was sure that the Sisters had not thought to offer me a beer in the whole trip and so we sat on the veranda and drank beer and listened to him tell stories of living in Kenya. He was first assigned to the Masi as a priest and it was there he spent the early portion of his time. What a different perspective (and really a perspective of a British priest coming into the country to do good work) that the perspective of Sister Pauline who has spent time teaching in the Masi region. It was a lovely evening and then we were back to the guest house for a rest.