Just Another Day in Perrydise...: My day with Chris in the rural area

What a day! Chris and I left for Agape Children's Ministry at 8:00am this morning. I knew we were planning on taking some of the Agape boys who have families back to their homes for the holiday. What I didn't expect this day was getting back to home at 7:00pm. Joelle, who is one of the house parents who could speak Swahili as well as English rode with us as he knew where some of the boys lived as well as interpret to me and Chris what they were saying. Joelle is also a pastor of a church near Kisumu. What an awesome guy who loves the Lord as well as having a huge heart for these boys. Roads out from Kisumu to the rural areas are not exactly in the best of shape. Some of the roads are fine, but others, um, not so much. Chris let me know it is all political on what areas get paved and what areas get left out. If the area voted for a particular politician that won his election, they get favors. If they did not, they get nothing. Anyways, back to the dropping kids off. I'll post a few pictures of the trip. I could post 1,000 of them as all this was new to a mazungo from North Carolina. A mazungo is what the Kenyans call a white person. Nothing racial or offensive about this as they are just stating the obvious. Some of them have probably never even seen a white person. How do I describe driving in Kenya? Definitively on the offensive side. You drive as fast as you can passing people on both sides of the road. As Kenyans also drive on the left side of the road, it is definitively something that you have to get used to. You are constantly passing boda-bodas (bicycles), pikies (motorcycles), tuk-tuks (three wheeled car?), matatus (small bus that is smaller than a suburban that can hold 12 people or more) as well as petrol trucks, cars, and other various vehicles. It's like a huge game of chicken mixed with mario kart. It was a lot of fun, except avoiding the potholes the size of swimming pools. On some of the more rural paths (I don't think you can call them roads) you have to watch out for cows and goats. Wow! What a day! All the boys lived in mud huts made of a mixture of mud and dung. Their homes, which sometimes contained 8 or more people, were probably the size of my living room back home. They have no running water, no electricity, pretty much nothing except some chairs and maybe a mattress to sleep on. What a blessing it is to live in America were we take the little things like that for granted. They did have cell phones though. The cell phone is one thing that every Kenyan has. What an awesome means of communication for people that basically have nothing. You can buy a phone here for less than $20 and just buy time to put on the phone. What a novel concept, no rate plans, no taxes, no fees, no services you don't need or want, and no service contracts. I wish Verizon would offer that. Well enough of that rant, we ended up dropping 5 boys off in 5 different villages today and finally made it back after 11 hours of driving of what seemed as the entire Western Province of Kenya. One last little story, as we were driving down a very small path, we noticed we had 5 kids hanging onto the back of the Land Cruiser. 5 little hitch hikers that didn't even ask if they could ride or not!