Thanks so much all of you who wrote me an Easter greeting. I hope you had a great Easter! Today is Easter Monday and although the DTS School had classes today, we in the OATS (Organic Agricultural Training School) were given the day off so I thought I should take advantage of this slower day to post a long overdue blog. In this blog I will share the activities of this Easter weekend with you.
My Easter weekend started on Thursday evening at the base. I was actually in Nairobi that day with Antonia as we had to get an extension to our visitors’ visas that were about to expire. We managed to accomplish this in 5 hours and so decided to escape to the Java House to reward ourselves with some good North American food. I was enjoying a mango yogourt smoothie and a curried chicken dinner thinking that this would be my one meal of the day. As we were nearing the end of the meal we received a text from one of our classmates reminding us that there was going to be a special event that night for Easter so we all had extra work duties that afternoon. We gobbled down the last of our food and quickly headed back to the base to our work duty.
We had a wonderful chicken dinner that night with music playing softly in the background. When everyone was finished eating we moved to another section of the dining hall for a beautiful Easter service where communion was served. It was really a nice start to the weekend and I was stuffed for the first time since arriving here. I had only had chicken about 3 times since arriving in Kenya and then I had it twice in one day!
On Friday we went on outreach to do some bio-intensive farming with a group of Mamma’s in a near-by community. Their garden was situated on a sloped plot of land so we turned over the soil in 10 garden beds that are 5 ft by 120 ft. each, and then dug deep trenches around them and raised the beds as high as we could so that they would not be flooded by the rain waters. We showed them how to plant kale, onions and spinach that day and let them do most of the planting. We then covered the beds with dried grass to form a mulch layer over them. There were about 8 Mamma’s farming with us from the group of 13 that are working together on this plot of land and many children from the surrounding community also joined in the excitement. On the section of land beside us there was a Dad trying to teach his 9 year old boy how to plough the field with 2 oxen and a single furrow plough. It was cute watching him try to control the oxen and the plough – no easy feat I tell you!
On Saturday morning Casey, Rebecca and I headed off for Nairobi in the base’s car with Fred as our driver. Casey is a DTS student (Descipleship Training School) from Atlanta Georgia and Rebecca is a DTS student from Lethbridge, Alberta. We went to the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust – an elephant orphanage in Nairobi National Park which is the only one of its kind in Africa. They take in baby elephants that have been orphaned by poachers, disease or starvation and parent them with humans until they can be placed in a herd with other elephants. The elephants live in a nursery for 2 – 5 years with surrogate parents that live with them 24 /7. The trainers even sleep with the elephants every night and if they have to leave them for a few minutes they arrange for someone else to replace them. Apparently the babies cry quite loudly when their trainers leave their presence.
They feed about 20 baby elephants with bottles between 11:00 A.M. and noon each day and this is the only time you are allowed to see the elephants as they do not want them to become too comfortable with humans. Their mandate is to rehabilitate the elephants and release them back into the wild. They brought them out in groups of 10 and told us their age, life story, gave us a health update and told us a bit about each of their personalities. I was able to pat a number of them as they paraded around in front of the crowd. Their skins are very leathery and the older ones were covered in dirt that they had thrown up on themselves. The elephants had very distinct personalities. Some of them were doing silly things to get attention while others were hiding behind their trainers because they were shy. One curious elephant headed into the crowd of onlookers because there was a woman in the crowd with an injured leg that was wrapped in a bandage and he wanted to check the bandage out. Another woman was on crutches and one of the other elephants kept trying to take one of her crutches from her. Luckily no one’s foot was stepped on because even as babies they are mighty heavy. The youngest elephant was 2 months old and had two blankets wrapped around her belly to protect her lungs from pneumonia. This would apparently be a death sentence to an elephant.
Aww that is so neat that you got to see the baby elephants! I loved hearing about this.
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