colors and burns

wooo. ok. been awhile. lots to write about. i'll try not to make it too long... school was good this week. challenging as always. on wednesday i came all prepared to teach a small class, and as soon as i walked in, mary asked if i would teach the babies. ooook. so i had to entertain 55 or so little kids, who speak no english and only know numbers and letters, for 3 hours using only a piece of chalk and a blackboard. talk about exhausting. i drew pictures. we did body parts. i made them dance a little. by the end my throat was aching from yelling over top of all the noise in our little tin school room. but as of thursday, i have my own class. yes! i am working with four kids - vivian, austine, lavine and david. i'm so happy to be working with such a small group, though its still incredibly challenging and frustrating. on friday i tried teaching them 8 different colors. after about 45 minutes they still thought every color was red... then we made a tie-dye butterfly craft and they loooved it. so much fun. it's amazing that although i'm only at school for 3 hours, i'm absolutely exhausted by the end. this week i got to visit another school and an orphanage in kibera. similar sort of thing as st. charles but with even less space outside for kids to play. these kids need to get out of the slums so bad. tomorrow after school i'm going to go help out at a baby clinic and make posters to raise awareness about tb. my weeks feel so busy and the weekends are a much needed break. yesterday i went out to maasailand with some friends. it was a couple hours drive from nairobi, towards the great rift valley. breathtaking scenery. terrible roads. but it was really neat. go here to read more about the maasai people: http://www.maasai-association.org/ one of their beautification traditions is to get burns. (mom, don't read this part...) so about 8 of us indulged... two of the elder men did it. they rub a stick on a piece of wood to heat it up. then press it on your arm for about 5 seconds (oooouch). then they put aloe on it, you wait until they blister up, then pop them and leave them til they heal and leave circular little scars. i know, it sounds weird. not as weird as the kids around us who were eating blood soaked meat chunks (and all the volunteers who tried it!) yuck. ha. it was so cool to spend some time with the tribe and see their little community and eat a meal with them. very intriguing people. today i went to church in the city center with irene. it was... interesting. worship was great. singing, dancing, clapping. so much fun to just let go and worship god however i wanted and not be looked at funny (ok, maybe i still got looked at funny, being the only white gal bopping around in a room of about 500..) i started crying the first song. i didn't realize how much i missed the community of other believers and being able to worship god and give praises to him for all the stuff going on. the rest of church was a lot of stuff i'd never experienced before. very charismatic. anointing. testifying. and laying on of hands - the stuff i'd only seen on tv where the pastor touches someones head and they go into convulsions and fall to the ground. and there was a huge focus on money. i don't know if it always is. or if its because these people have so little that they long to be blessed financially. 4 hours later i left my first african church experience. that's right. i said 4 hours. i don't ever wanna hear anyone complaining about how long their hour and a half service felt..
so here's some more pics from my week. enjoy!
oh, and an update on francis and james - francis called to say that james is living with the pastor of his church and to please send money. it's so hard to know if he is telling the truth and whether james is safe and if it's the right thing to do to send any money. it's hard not to be skeptical in a place with so much corruption (today we drove by a building called 'the integrity centre' - an anti-corruption agency. its such a serious problem here and across all of africa). so please continue to pray for james.