Muende na Mutanu's Excellent Adventure

The other week, we had our sponsor girls, Betty, Lilian, and Vivian, staying with us at the Malia Children's Home. After only a year, they looked and acted so much older, and somehow jumped two years in age. Betty, who was only 11 when we met her, was 13 going on 14 this year. As it turns out, the birthdays that they told us were just random days that Betty and Nancy had made up for the four of them. When we found out that the girls didn't actually know their real birthdays, we asked Vivian, "So you weren't actually born on January 5th?" She responded, "your birthday is the day you were born?!" The kids loved having older Kenyan girls around, and each girl took a special liking to one of the little kids. It's no surprise that spunky Faustina and Vivian were joined at the hip, and Beatrice, the sweet and quiet six-year-old, never left Betty's side. The kids were definitely sad to see the girls go when we brought them back to school the next weekend.

Betty, during our game of bananagrams.

We took a two hour matatu ride with Betty and Lilian to their school in Nakuru. After being in the very dry region of Machakos, we were so surprised to see how green and lush the Rift Valley is. Although the matatu ride was long and cramped, the beautiful scenery made it worth while. Their school, St. Mary's, was nice, although we couldn't get a good feel for it because no other kids had arrived yet. Unfortunately, we didn't have very much time to spend at the school because we wanted to make it back to Nairobi before it got dark. The matatu ride back to Nairboi was far from relaxing. Not only was it pouring rain as we sped through winding mountain roads, but our driver considered speed more important than safety. He spent most of the time in the wrong lane, trying to pass other cars. We tried not to look out the window, as we would often find huge trucks quickly approaching. It wasn't a surprise when our matatu rear-ended the car in front of us. Finally, after more than half of an hour, the two drivers came to some sort of an agreement with the help of almost all the matatu passengers. Luckily, after the minor accident, our driver was a lot more cautious.


Vivian and Lilian helping father Charles out of the ditch.