Christmas in Kenya

After a busy December working with returning secondary students and our football club, it was time to get away and celebrate Christmas. Originally I was planning on spending a few days on Zanzibar Island out in the Indian Ocean with some friends. Unfortunately, those plans fell through and I was not able to go. At the last minute I started checking on-line for some flights home because I thought it was worth a shot in the dark to see if I can spend Christmas with family, especially since my sister-in-law was due to have their 2nd child. I was amazed to find a roundtrip ticket home for $700 and I started making my plans. I was so excited until I went to the final booking and realized that the taxes brought the ticket to over $1400. Oops. That was a little too much to spend for only 5 or 6 days at home. So I had to settle for going to Nairobi and spending Christmas with some friends there.

It turned out a little more difficult than I planned. I was riding on public transportation. Only ten minutes outside of Kisumu the police pulled the van over and said they didn't think the inspection sticker was real. So now it is the 23rd of December and I was joining thousands of other people in Ahero Police Station waiting around for an inspector to come and inspect our vehicle to make sure it is safe. It wouldn't be so bad if they consistently enforced these rules throughout the year, but they never do. They just pick out a day every now and then and decide to crackdown. Christmas doesn't seem like the best time of year to do that, but maybe my perspective is a little different. It was an enjoyable three and a half hours of doing nothing, but eventually the inspector came and told us what we already knew (that our vehicle was fine). What made it worse was that it delayed my arrival into Nairobi which then coincided with rush hour in addition to a storm that knocked trees into the middle of the road! Ugh!! Eventually I arrived at my friends around 9:00 pm (I had left Kisumu at 7:00 am).

It was a good Christmas. Vance and Kathy Ficek live in Karen on a compound with their daughter Tera and her husband Tom. They have separate houses in the same compound. Kathy is the principal at West Nairobi School while Tom and Tera also teach there. They welcomed me into their family and we enjoyed the holidays together. We had a lot of time to rest, relax, read, talk, eat, etc. My Christmas gifts were all food. Things like Pasta and Sauce, M & M's, Twizzlers, Instant Mashed Potatoes, etc. Not just food, but American food and easy to cook. Perfect. Couldn't have been a better gift for me since I am still learning to cook without having a fridge to store leftovers.

We enjoyed the time together. It was nice to be around an American family for Christmas and to have a little time away from Mbita.