Kenya, August 30

Going to a foreign country always changes my perspective on my life and the world in which I live. Kenya, although not the poorest of African nations, struggles with the same issues as its neighbors. They are the issues we hear of so much but cannot fully understand: poverty, corruption, AIDS and other diseases, and injustice.

Nairobi is home to the largest African slum, Kibera, where one million people live without clean water, toilets, electricity, or indoor plumbing. Rainwater and urine intermingle in streams cutting through dirt roads. Many don’t have enough to eat. Many are sick. The problems faced in Kibera are also faced in the rest of Kenya, Africa, and the world.

Sixty percent of Kenyan women will be sexually assaulted at some point in their lives. All Kenyans deal daily with corrupt police seeking bribes. The allegations that Kenya’s recent election violence was the result of a corrupt government’s plan for ethnic cleansing exemplifies this issue.

Losing hope is easy when staring in the face of such enormous problems. However, I didn’t leave Kenya with a sense of despair, but rather I felt encouraged by the work of those fighting for change.

Daryll and Verna’s work at Africa Nazarene University is educating and empowering young people to make a difference in their world. Daryll’s theology and education training is bringing new teachers and pastors into communities throughout Kenya, and Verna’s health classes are educating students about the realities of AIDS and other diseases. Her preventative education is enabling Kenyan men and women to make more responsible choices, therefore creating safer communities.

The work of Compassion International, through sponsorship money, built a school, church, and clinic for 250 village children who previously had no access to any of these services.

International Justice Mission is providing safe havens and free legal services to sexually assaulted women and children and people abused by a corrupt legal system. They are giving a voice to those who formerly had none.

Jaakko, a pastor in a Mombasa slum, has opened a growing church and school. He is praying to open a place for orphans. In addition to their own three daughters, he and his wife have opened their home to four orphans and needy children. Somehow nine people live in Jaakko’s home that could be no more than 250 square feet and lacks a bathroom and a kitchen.

Musili, another pastor the same age as me and Dave, has already overseen the building of a church, hospital, and school in his community.

People all over Kenya are fighting against the poverty and injustice, and I would encourage each of you to search for ways to make a difference in your community or one that touches your heart. God is at work everywhere, and He wants your participation.

Kenya, August 25

Last time I wrote we were on our way to Mombasa, on the coast of Kenya, for the weekend. We arrived on Saturday afternoon, and we left Mombasa on Sunday evening.

Mombasa has beautiful beaches lining the Indian Ocean, and we spent the first day there swimming. After dinner in the evening, Dave and I went to the patio where a live band was playing. The band was fun and entertaining.

The church we visited on Sunday morning was pastored by a man named Jaakko, a good friend of Daryll and Verna’s. The church, named Word of Life, doubled as a school and was located in the center of a slum. After Pastor Jaakko graduated ANU, he felt God calling him to build a church in Mombasa. The church/school was initially built with mud and grass, like many of the buildings in the poor areas of Kenya (which is an awful lot of them), but the building soon deteriorated.

The members and school children began praying for the money to build a new building, but no money came. Instead, El Nino came. The heavy rains basically destroyed the building, leaving the people to wonder why God wasn’t answering their prayers.

Shortly after El Nino, Dave felt compelled to send a donation to Daryll and Verna’s ministry, which they sent to Jaakko. Along with Dave’s donation and others, the church’s prayers were answered and they were able to begin building a new church building.

However, they eventually ran out of water to mix cement, and construction on the church had to stop. They began instead digging a hole for a latrine, and they were surprised to hit water after they started digging. Again God had answered their prayer.

Today the school has around 250 students, and it also sleeps several orphans at night. They are praying that the student body will continue to grow and more people will come to know God.

The church had about fifty people attending, and the first hour was spent in song. The crowd was small compared to many American churches, and the only instruments were a pair of bongo drums and a tambourine, yet the church worship was louder than many congregations in America even with our high-tech sound equipment.

Daryll preached the sermon, and then Daryll, Verna, and Pastor Jaakko performed a baby dedication. The entire service lasted about 2 ½ hours.

After church, we went to Pastor Jaakko’s house for lunch. His wife had just a baby two weeks earlier. This made the total family members (and orphaned children) living in the house nine. The lunch she served was rice and beans.

The dichotomy between the beautiful coastline resorts and the nearby slums was hard to see. I find it hard to comprehend how there can be people in this world with so little and so much coexisting so closely.

Today we had another opportunity to visit the Kenya office of the International Justice Mission (IJM). IJM is a non-profit organization that helps bring justice to the oppressed. The first story we had the opportunity to hear today was from one of the employees at IJM.

When he was a bank teller, his bank got robbed. He was working during the bank robbery, and he was arrested by the police and charged with the crime. Of course he was innocent, but this did not stop the police from torturing him day after day for five days. They would move him from police station to police station so his family could not find him. After five days the police realized he was not the robber, but they needed to cover their abuse and locked him in jail. He was in jail for nearly three years when IJM came to his rescue. With their team of lawyers and case workers, they were able to get enough evidence to get the man out of prison. Since then, he has been working with IJM to bring the justice he received to others.

After spending the morning with the IJM Kenya office, Dave and I had the opportunity to visit a victim of sexual abuse currently awaiting trial. IJM is fighting to get the victim’s perpetrators behind bars. If you want to learn more about IJM’s work, visit their website.

Kenya, August 22

It’s been another lovely day in Kenya. Uncle Daryll and Aunt Verna picked us up at our hotel this morning in time to take us to the Elephant Orphanage. The roads in Kenya are very bumpy, and the traffic is pretty crazy. It seems to take us forever to get anywhere. Fortunately, Uncle Daryll is a great chauffeur, and he has gotten us everywhere safely.

The Elephant Orphanage is a non-profit organization that takes in baby elephants who have lost their mothers and raises them until they are old enough to go out into the wild on their own (about ten years). The keepers act as a family for the elephants, and as such, the commitment to the elephant orphanage is rather long.

Elephants live to be about sixty. They have six sets of teeth, and when they lose their last set, they starve to death. This is considered a natural death for an elephant. When fully grown, they are twelve to fourteen feet tall and between five and seven tons. The oldest elephant currently in the orphanage is twenty-four months.

After leaving the elephant orphanage, Uncle Daryll and Aunt Verna took us to African Nazarene University, the place where they work. African Nazarene University is a Christian university in Nairobi. Uncle Daryll is a professor of theology and education, and Aunt Verna teaches health. The university seems to be a thriving learning community. While we were visiting, a conference called Africa Ablaze with seminars for young people was going on. We sat in briefly on a seminar for AIDS/HIV education, a very important topic in sub-Saharan Africa.

Our next stop was the Giraffe Center where we got the opportunity to feed giraffes. Dave especially enjoyed this visit. I found having a giraffe suck on my hand a little strange, but they are really pretty animals, and I really enjoyed seeing them up-close. Their tongues are coarse and long, and they didn’t appreciate being petted unless you were feeding them. If they didn’t want you close to them, they would try to head-butt you. I had a near miss with that, as did Dave and Aunt Verna.

Our last stop for the day was a cool restaurant called Rangers near the Safari Walk. We enjoyed good food and good conversation before heading back to the hotel for the night. We leave early tomorrow morning for Mombasa, a town along the coast.

Kenya, August 21

I’ve started blogging again since Dave and I are overseas in Kenya right now. We arrived in Kenya after a long (although on time) flight. We left Denver on Monday morning, had connections in Minneapolis and Amsterdam, and arrived in Kenya on Tuesday evening.

Our reason for coming to Kenya is primarily to visit Dave’s Aunt Verna and Uncle Daryll. Verna is Dave’s mom’s sister. They picked us up from the airport on Tuesday, and I can’t tell you how welcome their faces were along with the opportunity to not deal with a cab driver at the airport.

We started our trip to Kenya yesterday with a visit to the Safari Walk and Animal Orphanage in Nairobi. There were a lot of different animals for us to see, and we had a great opportunity to pet a cheetah, and Dave got to hold a baby lion! We saw a lot of other animals, including a baby giraffe, leopards, and monkeys.

After leaving the Safari Walk & Animal Orphanage, we went back to the compound where Uncle Daryll and Aunt Verna live for dinner. Aunt Verna fixed some delicious spaghetti and meatballs.

Today we got the great opportunity to travel outside Nairobi to visit a child we sponsor through Compassion International. Compassion is a Christian organization through which you can pledge a monthly donation to sponsor a child. Your sponsorship provides the child with school, worship, health care, and food. If you want more information on Compassion, you can check out their website.

The trip to visit our child was fantastic. We got the opportunity to see her school, church, playground, and home. We also got to meet her family, and since she lives in a small village, we were definitely the center of attention. Her family lives in a small group of huts; one is used for the living room and parents bedroom; the next is used for the kitchen; and the final hut is where the children sleep. Our child is one of seven children. The huts in which the people live do not have electricity or running water. They are made of mud and straw. It is so easy to forget how fortunate we are in the United States with how much we have.

I Wish This Were an April Fools Joke

I’ve withheld this blog post until the end of our time in Italy because I really wanted to give the Italians a fair shake. After spending a month in Italy, I certainly cannot call myself an expert on Italian customs or culture, but I feel I have enough information to merit a blog post about what we experienced while we were here.

Rather than begin by making the judgments for you, I will simply tell you five of the countless incidents that happened to us while we were in Italy and let you form your opinion on your own. Chronologically, I will begin in Rome.

1. As you have read in our previous blog post, we had terrible troubles getting a lost suitcase back from Alitalia after we arrived in Rome. Our hotel didn’t provide much help, not telling us until we spoke to a manager three days after arriving that Alitalia frequently loses luggage and that no promise of the luggage arriving is worth believing.

However, this is not the only misinformation our hotel gave us. On Friday afternoon, we had asked a man working the reception/concierge desk if FedEx was open on the weekend. He assured us they were and that mailing to the U.S. was a piece of cake. The hotel had a scale that they could measure the weight of what we wanted to mail, they would tell us the price, and FedEx would come to pick it up.

The manager happened to walk by while the receptionist was telling us this, and questioned whether or not FedEx was really open on the weekend.

“Yes,” the receptionist assured us and his manager. “FedEx is definitely open tomorrow.”

Believing this was the case, we headed out for the day and intended to mail some of our souvenirs the next day. The next day, Saturday, we found out that FedEx is not open on the weekend. It was a bit of a problem for us since we were going to be leaving Rome
Monday and wouldn’t have much time to deal with FedEx at that point.

As we were leaving the hotel on Saturday, we noticed that the same receptionist was working, and we decided to let him know FedEx was not open on the weekend. When Dave told him this, the receptionist completely denied ever having a conversation with us about FedEx and began to argue vehemently with Dave over it.

Since we could not go to FedEx over the weekend, we set out to do it before our plane on Monday. Our intention was to have the hotel hold our bags while we took a taxi to FedEx. We were going to close out our bill at the hotel, but didn’t have enough cash on hand to pay for a tour we had taken during our stay.

We explained to the receptionist that we would go to an ATM while we were at FedEx and get enough cash to pay. Our luggage was still at the hotel, so clearly we would come back to get our luggage and pay at that point.

The receptionist was very insistent that we pay for our tour immediately and told us we needed to find an ATM close-by. I explained to her we were in a hurry because we had thought we could go to FedEx over the weekend and didn’t find out until Saturday we
couldn’t.

“Who told you that? FedEx is never open on the weekend,” she retorted.
“A receptionist here told us that,” I said.
“No. I don’t believe you. No one here would have told you that.”
“Well, yes, someone did tell us that here or we would have gone this weekend. But now we have to go today and we don’t have much time before our flight. Our luggage is all here. We obviously can’t leave Rome without paying.”
“No, no one told you that here. I don’t believe you, and you need to find an ATM around here to go to. You are not allowed to go to FedEx without paying for the tour.”

Dave set out to find an ATM near the hotel to no avail. When he returned, he told the receptionist we were going to go to FedEx and would find an ATM there. She just nodded her head.

On our way out the door, Dave requested they call for a taxi to pick us up at a designated time when we got back. Taxis to and from the airport are regulated by the government to charge 40 euros one way, but we knew we wouldn’t get that price. Since arriving in Italy, we have heard every manner of excuse from taxi drivers.

The meter is high because:
- night driving
- we start the meter the moment the hotel calls no matter where we are
- heavy luggage
- I had to drive all the way to the airport to pick you up.
- Now that I have dropped you off, I will have to drive back to the airport to pick someone else up.
- I have to pay a fee to use the road.
- This is outside the zone.

The list could go on, but it isn’t exactly the point. Dave asked the receptionist how much a taxi to the airport would cost us (knowing the government regulated price).

“Ninety euros, at least,” she told us. Translated, that’s $135. The airport was 30 minutes from our hotel.

“I won’t pay ninety euros for a taxi,” Dave responded. “I won’t pay above fifty.”

Miraculously, we got her to get us a cab for 50 euros.

2. We arrived in Naples, our second stop. We left the airport to get in the taxi line. The line was converging in the center between two exits, and we got in the line nearest the exit we had just left from.

After waiting fifteen minutes or so, we got to where our line met the other line. At this point, a woman started to tell us we were in the wrong line and we needed to get to the back of the line she was in. We tried to explain there were two lines and indicated to the long line that had formed behind us.

She continued to insist loudly we get to the back of the line and started to point out to the other people around her how we were cutting in line. It was very confusing to us since there was clearly other people who had been in our line now in the center line and people behind us. For whatever reason, she was picking out us to choose to say we were cutting. We had to battle our way into the center line.

3. We were outside the duomo in Milan when Dave noticed a slushy stand. He ordered a slushy, but the man only filled it a little over ¾. Dave asked if he could fill it all the way, but the man didn’t seem to understand. When words don’t work, gestures are usually universal, so Dave pointed to the slushy machine and put his cup near it.

The man hit Dave’s hand (hard), and told him no. Dave isn’t one to back down, and he insisted his cup be filled all the way before he paid for it. After all, who wants to pay 3 euros ($4.50) for a slushy if it isn’t full?

4. I was standing in line at the train station to buy tickets to Bergamo. The line was rather long, and two twenty-something girls were ahead of me in line. For whatever reason, they decided to leave the line. About five minutes later, the girls returned. Without even looking at me, one of the girls literally pushed me out of the way to get back in line. I wasn’t sure quite what to do, and thought maybe this was protocol in Italy. To be fair, I don’t think these girls were Italians.

When I reached the front of the line, I waved Dave over to pay for the tickets. The woman behind me got rather upset.

“You cannot get two tickets. Only one.”
“Well, he’s my husband,” I told her. “We are buying the same ticket. We pay together.”
“You cannot do that.”
“Well, we have to do that. We are together.”

She was already upset at me because I wouldn’t let her buy her ticket before me. She was in a hurry to catch her train, but our train left at the same time as hers. We proceeded to buy the ticket while she gesticulated and spoke rapidly to the people she was with about us. While we were waiting for the woman working to issue our ticket, the woman standing behind us began to slap Dave’s arm.

“Hurry up!”
“We are going as fast as we can,” I told her.
“No, you aren’t.”
“I’m sorry, but we are.”
“No, you aren’t. I’m going to miss my train.”
“I already told you our train leaves at the same time as yours.”
The conversation ended there as we got our tickets issued and left the line.

5. We had our hotel issue tickets to Florence for us so we didn’t have to fight the line at the train station. When we arrived at the station, we couldn’t figure out where our train was leaving from. The train wasn’t listed on the board. Dave waited with our luggage while I went to find where our train left from.

I didn’t want to cut in line at the ticket stand to ask, and I couldn’t find any other personnel to ask either. I noticed a short ticket line; there was only one girl in line. So I stood behind her and waited. As I was waiting, I noticed the next line open up. The open line was merely six steps from the line I was in, so I walked over there. As I got there, I realized the woman only did currency conversion, and I turned around to get back in line.
In the ten seconds I had been out of line, two men had gotten in the line. I remembered how you can shove your way into a line, but decided that wasn’t the best course of action. I smiled at the men and told them I had gotten out of line for a moment because I thought I could go to the next counter but she couldn’t help me. I explained I already had my ticket and just had a brief question.

“You aren’t in line. Get behind us.”
“I just have a quick question. I was in line; I just got out for one moment.”
“You were in line. You aren’t any more. Get to the back.”
“I already have my ticket. I just have a quick question. It will take one moment.”
“Stupid, typical American. You think you can do whatever you want.”
“No, I just was here. I got out for one moment. I already have my ticket. I just need to know where my train leaves from. And everyone here cuts line. I got shoved out of a line for the train the other day.”
“Whatever. That’s America. You’re in Italy now.” He rolled his eyes in disdain.
“No, that happened to me here in Italy. Lots of people in Italy are rude.” (I was sick and tired of this by this point.)
“Whatever. No, they aren’t.”
The woman ahead of me in line walked away, so I approached the ticket counter.
“I’m on the 14:00 to Florence. Where do I go?”
“The board will say Salerno.”
“Thanks.” And I left.

I’m going to stop here, although I could continue with other incidents like the waiter who told Dave he must hate all lasagna since he didn’t like the lasagna served at their restaurant or the bystander who responded to my question to Dave of which boat in the harbor I should wait by for him with, “the only boat.” (There were probably twenty boats in the harbor.) Or the man who wouldn’t issue us a bus ticket because he was scratching his lottery ticket. Or the woman who ran my feet over with her baby stroller rather than move out of the path of where I happened to be standing. Or the girl who practically refused to make me a Nutella crepe. Or the time we waited one hour for our food to come at a restaurant while the Italians who arrived twenty minutes after us finished an entire meal: drinks, appetizer, and entrees (after an hour we finally left). The dirty looks and cold shoulders have literally been countless. I have not had a single Italian person initiate a conversation, smile in passing or step aside if we are going to collide with one another.

I hadn’t heard anything about Italians before coming to Italy, but our encounter was confirmed by several people we spoke with on the trip.
A Pakistani man living in Italy for three years told us he has come to hate the Italians because they have been so mean to him during his time here.
A Canadian woman living in Italy with her family said they are incredibly indifferent to all foreigners, but have a particular dislike for all Americans.
A Brazilian woman we met has lived in Italy for eight years. Despite that she speaks Italian and is, in fact, half-Italian, she still finds herself treated poorly by many Italians who can tell she is a foreigner. She also vouches that the Italians are not kind at all to tourists.
A Mexican woman who has been to Italy twenty-three times told us she has found the Italian culture very cold, but they are particularly prejudiced against Americans.
On our way through customs when we returned to Denver, we ended up in line next to a man who lived in Italy full-time for a while and still owns a house there. He went to far as to call the Italian people racist and xenophobic.
An Isreali woman told us she had been so discouraged by the mentality of the Italians that she had multiple times wanted to just hole up in her hotel room rather than go out and face them. “I live in a war zone,” she told us. “And if there is any place for people to have their guard up and be cold, that would be it. Yet, I have never experienced in Israel the treatment I have experienced in Italy.”

We have similar sentiments. We imagined apprehension toward us in a country like China where there is significant cultural and political tension between our two countries, but we were met with kindness. Egyptians and Moroccans are well aware of the tension that lies between America and the Arab/ Muslim world. But I have never felt more welcomed in a society than I felt there. We have heard comments everywhere we’ve gone that the people don’t particularly like the American government or policies, but these same people are able to differentiate between us and our government. In a country like Italy that shares so many political, cultural, and religious ties, we thought there would be more common ground. It’s unfortunately not the case.

Italy is a gorgeous country with an enormous amount of history, and I can completely understand why people would want to come here. My recommendation would be to go somewhere else. In addition to feeling friendless in the country, Italy is not a very clean place. Graffiti litters everything (one Burger King we ate at had graffiti from at least 2006 still on the walls and chairs of the restaurant), we have been served off dishes used by other people and not cleaned, and we’ve sat at tables with food leftover from other people on the tables, to name a few. The mafia runs the trash business in southern Italy (strange, I know), and trash is everywhere in the country. It’s unfortunate to walk down a charming street only to want to hurry through because of the smell.

If you are still determined to go to Italy, at least wait until the dollar is stronger. We have been charged between $6-10 for a can of Coke, and a meal at a streetside cafe is running us around $20/person for just a main course and water. The other day I paid $15 for an ice cream cone because I didn't look at the receipt before taking a lick.

Italy isn’t all bad, of course. As you have seen from the previous blog posts and photos, we have had a marvelous time while we have been in Italy. And not all Italians are mean people. As in any culture, you cannot define a whole country by the behavior of some. Sadly, though, we can count the friendly encounters we had on our fingers. We have seen a lot of incredible sights and learned a lot. There is definitely a lot Italy has to offer, but we won’t be returning any time soon. We would rather go to a country where we feel respected and welcomed.

Milan & Florence

As I’m sure you could have guessed by the absence of a blog post, Dave and I have been keeping very busy in Italy. Tomorrow is our last day here. I can’t believe the trip is coming to an end already.

As you have seen from the photos, we had a lovely time in Milan. Milan itself is very similar to all big cities, although there is more shopping than you could imagine. We had a great time relaxing and looking in the shops, and Dave got lots of shoes! He beat me in shoe shopping, believe it or not!

The oddest thing we found about Milan was that the siesta is still taken full advantage of. The siesta is a European tradition of closing the shops in the middle of the afternoon to take a break. We didn’t feel this a lot in much of Italy, but it definitely affected our time in Milan. The most difficult part about it was finding a restaurant that was open in the middle of the afternoon. Sometimes we would get caught up in whatever we were doing and not want to eat until 3 pm. Unfortunately for us, this was not a reality. All the restaurants closed between 2:30 – 7:30, and so we were left hungry until they opened again. It’s a very different mentality from the 24-hour restaurants we have in the U.S. And we found it very interesting that Milan is the only place we really felt this play significantly into our trip since it is considered the most worldly of all the Italian cities we visited.

While in Milan, we got the opportunity to take several day trips outside the city. The first was to the small town of Bergamo. It was a fun, small town to visit.

The more memorable of the two day trips was to Lake Como. Como is in the very northern part of Italy, and we accidentally missed the stop to Como and ended up in Switzerland. We didn’t stay there long. We walked around a bit, grabbed a quick bite to eat, and headed back down to Como.

Como and Bellagio, the two towns we visited on the lake, were very enjoyable to visit because they weren’t as overrun by tourists as the other places we visited. We ended up with a perfect day to visit the lake. The weather was beautiful.

After leaving Milan, we headed to our last stop (and current location), Florence. Florence has a lot of museums to visit, and we ended up in Florence during “free week,” which means none of the museums charge to get in. This has turned out to be a blessing and a curse. It’s great not to have to pay to see anything, but the lines since everything is free are atrocious. Unfortunately, this means we haven’t gotten to see nearly as much as we would have liked to see in our limited time in Florence.

We did get to see Michelangelo’s David, and that was really incredible. The sculpture is truly a masterpiece. It’s so realistic (except that it’s 17 feet tall) that you really feel it could come to life before your eyes. Each and every part of his body from his nostrils to his toes is completely sculpted to perfection with so much attention to detail. Even Dave was completely captivated by it.

On our first day in Florence, we took a day trip to Pisa. The main attraction in Pisa is, of course, the leaning tower. It was actually really fun to see, and even more fun to walk up. You don’t anticipate it, but walking up the tower actually really messes with your sense of equilibrium. You start to feeling as if you are, well, leaning. And the view from the top is incredibly pretty.

We will be spending our last day in Italy in Siena and San Gimignano. We head back to the States on April 1.

March 20. 2008

Today was another sunny, cool day in Venice, and it was also our last full day here. We leave tomorrow for Milan on the train.

In addition to wrapping up some odds and ends, we finally went on our gondola ride today. The forty-five minute ride took us around the city’s many canals. It was a beautiful day for it, and it was relaxing and fun to look at the city from a new perspective.

Venice has been a unique and fun city to visit, and we are looking forward to our next stop in Italy. Only two more stops before we are headed back to the U.S.A.!