Collateral Impact

We had a wonderful evening debriefing with Megan Steele Friday night and it was so great to hear her report on the Kiang’ombe feeding / preschool program.  In short, things are going remarkably well and the children and community are deeply grateful for the huge impact they are seeing.  Megan is putting together some inspiring [...]

Ameena thoughts

Ian laughs every time he sees the picture of this little girl.  We wondered tonight what she might have been thinking when this picture was taken.  Do you think she was thinking, “Go away, I don’t want your help”?  I can’t imagine that she was.  I imagine that she was wondering what this white person [...]

Ameena

Today we celebrate one wonderful year of having Ameena in our lives.   What a full year this last one has been.  Being pregnant while living in Africa was interesting.  I felt healthy, but had more physical symptoms than with any of my other children.  Crazy high blood sugar that I monitored much less than I [...]

This is what I think about, sometimes.

This is what I think about (inside my head, not generally out loud like other people I know *cough, cough* LUCY). Patterns, and pretty fabrics and the endless combination possibilites. Here is one of  the two patterns I’m going to work on next: I’m gonna make the dress on the left, but not with a flared sleeve. [...]

How can it compare?

You might notice that the number of blogs posted since our return to the States the first part of  August has been 3.  That’s about one per month.  That’s pretty pathetic. I guess it’s just really hard to compare our life here with our life in Kenya….it all seems so mundane and usual and NOT [...]

Dubai!

In our hunt to find the cheapest yet safest flight home from Kenya we happened upon a stay over in Dubai. We as in Erika Lee mentioned it, it sounded like  a fabulous idea that saved thousands even with a 2 night hotel stay over, we booked it! I didn’t know much about Dubai except [...]

Farewell continued

A farewell at the Centre usually means a tea party planned by the staff.  In the past this involved light food:  boiled eggs, biscuits, queen cakes and chai.  Ian and I decided about a month before leaving that we would like to throw the staff and residents a nice lunch for our farewell….with good food…..so [...]

A how to lesson

I’ve posted in the past about my love of kangas & how Kenyans use them to tie babies on their backs.  Because some of you asked to see what it looked like to balance the baby on the back, I took a few pictures about a week before we were due to come back home [...]

Self Portrait

I had a post on facebook a while back about Eli’s self portrait drawing done at school.  It’s a pretty accurate drawing, except for the skin color.  When I asked him why he made himself black, he corrected me saying, “Mom!  I’m not black, I’m dark brown!”  If only he had seen his class picture that [...]

A favorite

I have many favorites here in Africa.  One of them is the way mother’s carry their babes here.  Mom’s use colorful cloths of many kinds to tie their babies onto their backs.  It is colorful, cheap and easy.  It’s also a great way for babies to have wonderful physical contact with their mom starting at [...]