Hakuna matata is a swahili phrase that means "no worries".
I spent this past month in the mountains of Kenya, in a town called Kinagop with Pastor Stephen and his 18 children, 14 of which are adopted. Pastor Stephen and Jane have been adopting children for the past several years. Most of these young kids have lost parents to AIDS, but have not for some reason gotten AIDS as children.
All of the kids our AIDS free, but come from very troubled families.
Pastor Stephen and Jane opened the home which they have named
"Rehoboth", after Genesis 26:22, which says: And he removed from thence, and dug another well; and for that they strove not: and he called the name of it Rehoboth; and he said, For now the LORD hath made room for us, and we shall be fruitful in the land. Kenya was quite different then anything we have experienced. Many cultural differences and also very different climate from the past 8 months traveling through Central America and Asia. It was very much needed cool weather, and lots of rain.
The guys and I would spend the morning helping Pastor Stephen and kids dig water trenches to irrigate the crops. We also split wood and did what ever we could do to just help around the home. When the kids were home after school was out we did a VBS and taught the kids songs,memory verses, bible stories, and played many games, and watched a bunch of disney movies with them.
Culturally different things that I have experienced in Kenya and observations:
the roads are extremely bad
the kids help with everything and do a lot of chores to keep from mischief (they do more work than most grown ups back home-seriously) the kids are hard workers and they are always joyful doing it!
When you have to go to the restroom you say ,"I have to go somwhere"
They drink sheep head soup (self explanatory)
"take tea" all day long
women don't eat with the men (but our girls did)
you should have some songs prepared to sing when you go to church every sunday
they don't bath as often as Americans (neither does Christin on my team)
Kenyans celebrate with slaughtering a sheep as we did before we left. The pastors 15 year old son
did it, along with the help of the other boys none of them older than 12. Its just like when we celerate Christmas with a turkey or ham, except they buy a sheep and they slaughter it themselves. None of it gets wasted, they use every part of it.
they eat every part of the sheep as well, intestines,stomach, the head in the soup along with the hoofs.
they call restaraunts hotels
I am sure their are more that I forgot, but these are few that stuck out to me as I wrote this.
(The field of future potatoes that will feed the children and be sold to buy any other needs for the home)
you can check out Pastor Stephens website at www.belovedke.org
check out my facebook page as well to see more pics from my Kenya album
