Sweetwaters, Swimming, and A Room of One’s Own?

David is the great animal lover of the family. Here he is saying goodbye to Bella before we departed for vacation.




As paradoxical as this might sound, I am starting this blog entry from a luxury TENT. And if you find the concept of a luxury tent hard to grasp, you might find it even more oxymoronic that I am freezing my A…err fingers off despite the fact that I am sitting exactly on the equator in July!

Actually I am with Rebecca, her parents (Papa Dave and Grandma Jean), Oren and David at Sweet Waters, a resort Safari lodge located in Northern Kenya. The rooms are tents, but extremely well appointed tents, underneath thatch roofs. They form a semi-circle around a watering hole on a game reserve with Mount Kenya as a backdrop. It is called Sweet Waters, and at the risk of sounding like an advertisement from the Kenya Office of Tourism, I would have to say it is quite amazing.

We have taken several safari drives in the park over the past two days and have seen many gazelle including Impala, Grant’s and Thompson’s Gazelle, Oryx, Hartebeast, and Waterbuck. We also aw several Black and White Rhinos, Elephants, Zebras, Giraffes, numerous birds, baboons, etc, many of these right outside our tent at the watering hole.

For ‘Burundians’ like Rebecca and I, the experience of arriving in Nairobi is like culture shock. Kenya is so developed compared to Burundi! There is evidently enough of a wealthy urban class to support many large luxurious malls with absolutely anything you could want (bowling alley, movie theatre, kids’ activities, food court and shops), all designed so beautifully and tastefully, that they could compete with malls anywhere..

There are also many things for kids to do, things that I associate with being in the US, like large indoor playgrounds in malls, air houses for bouncing, and waterslide parks. Also, because Kenya was an English colony, the official languages are Swahili and English, and everyone speaks English here.


So how did we get here? Rebecca and I finished off all our last business on Monday. We basically had one day to tie up all the loose ends for two weeks off. Needless to say, many minor crises came up and we were not able to even start packing before Tuesday morning to be ready for our noon flight.

Among the problems we were still in the process of solving was finding housing for our arriving MCC ‘SALT’ workers. Last week I had mentioned the challenge of finding housing for 3 westerners to live with host families in Bujumbura. We had looked extensively, and over the weekend several places we thought would work out fell through. On Monday evening we went to visit the last family we hoped would be able to invite one of the SALTers to stay. We had not met the family before, a mother with three adult children (college age), but we were delighted with the house and the charm of all of them. We talked extensively about the concept MCC has for placement with host families—that we do not want to ‘rent a room’ but rather place a person in a situation as a ‘family member.’

The family seemed amenable to this, and talked about their experience hosting another young woman from Sweden the year before. The daughter of the family seemed particularly interested in the young woman we were bringing in and asked many pertinent questions. Rebecca and I were delighted to have found such a wonderful placement, and right next door to one of our other workers’ host families.

Usually in Burundi one saves the difficult business for the end of a conversation, and I have had many meetings with partners where a quip as we were walking out the door was really the entire reason we had been asked over for a conversation. So I am used to that. Sure enough there was one small catch to this living situation that they let us know about after a full hour of conversation and discussions of logistics, etc.

The mother said to me, as we were leaving (Rebecca was actually outside the door taking a cell phone call) --that she wanted to be sure that the girl we invited would be comfortable staying in her daughter’s room with her daughter and sharing a full size bed with her.

I wish I could have captured on video my effort to stifle any display of shock or disbelief. Perhaps you have had to stifle a sneeze in a public place, and tried to disguise the fact that you even were sneezing…that is kinda how I imagine I looked.

I know it is a cultural thing, but most Americans I know are used to having at least some completely personal space. I am also aware that for most of the rest of this world, that is a huge luxury. Rebecca and I went home, prayed about it, then talked with Jodi about the whole meeting (she had actually gone with us). We decided it would probably be best to lay it all out for the SALTer who we had in mind for the placement and let her decide. We really did think this was a very good situation in all other respects.

Long story short, the day we left, our SALTer wrote back and said she would be willing to give it a try. We will need to be checking in frequently on this situation, but I am optimistic that God will bless this placement especially because of the sacrifice being made by both the family and our worker for the coming year.

With that settled we were free to pack and leave for vacation on Tuesday. Jodi drove Rebecca, Grandma Jean, David, Oren and I to the airport and we got on the plane and took the short flight to Nairobi from Bujumbura without incident. We arrived about an hour ahead of Papa Dave, who was coming to join us for our sojourn in Kenya.

After much planning by email, we had settled on spending the first two days in Nairobi, then 2 days up north in Sweetwaters for a safari, then a week at the beach near Mombasa at a place called Turtle Bay Beach Club. For the most part, this trip was made possible by the grandparents’ frequent flyer miles, and their great generosity prompted by this special rendezvous with their rarely-seen missionary-kid grandchildren. (This is not a trip that could be done on an MCC vacation allowance, but we are very grateful!)

Our first two days in Nairobi were spent at the Methodist guest house. (The Mennonite guest house was full.) I would say ‘guest house’ is a pretty broad term as this was a four story building with about 100 rooms, a restaurant and gift shop. It also had, much to the delight of Rebecca and I, a full size swimming pool for lap swimming! We both love to swim, but it is so hard to get away with two kids to do so. We took full advantage of having the grandparents with us to swim as much as possible in the afternoons we were there.

I could do an aside here on the ‘blessedness’ of swimming. I have to say, there is really nothing quite like the feeling one has right after a long hard swim in a pool. It is interesting, I already have an association with Methodists and swimming, as the swim coach in Poughkeepsie, NY (Ron Terwilliger) is a member of the United Methodist Church where Rebecca and I served. (I swam 'religiously' every Tuesday and Thursday morning the last 2 years I was in Poughkeepsie at the pool he managed.) Anyway, those swims at the Methodist Guest House were every bit as satisfying as a day on safari or at a resort on the beach for me. I should add though that while the equator runs right through Kenya, Nairobi is at an altitude of about 6000 feet, so the water was freezing even in this season!!

Besides swimming, we also went to a mall where Oren could do some kid friendly things that are not possible to do in Burundi. I mentioned the indoor playground and airhouse. He also got to drive an electric car and eat several bowls and cones of ice cream while he was there.

As I complete the blog, we are currently at our next destination, Turtle Bay Beach Club, which I will describe in more detail next week.

One thing I will add as a postscript is the awareness I have on this trip of the disparity between rich and poor in Kenya. We drove out of the highly-developed consumer-friendly areas of Nairobi, crossed the Ring Road, as if we were leaving town, and then were shocked to see low-income housing and slums stretching out for miles. Deep poverty is evident in the countryside as we drove up north, and as we’ve driven along the coast. As we drove to this resort, virtually all the houses we saw were poorly constructed of sticks, mud and thatch. It’s a little hard to relax in luxury with this awareness. There’s a lot of development here, but development for whom? This has led to a phenomenally high crime rate, with frequent muggings and robberies especially in Nairobi, which means we need to be careful about where we go.

This is becoming more and more the story in other countries as well. In Burundi, the day before we left we received a notification from the US embassy that crimes by armed bandits against expatriates are rapidly on the rise. This is due, to some extent, to the fact that a great many former rebels (now demobilized with the signing of the Arusha Peace Accords) find themselves going from a 14-year career as fighters, to being unemployed and unskilled on the street in Bujumbura. Banditry is sadly the peace dividend we are gleaning, at least in the short run.