Our Bridge to Africa

Malindi – March 17, 2009

Wow! The time is going extremely fast. We have just finished the second day of our third and final session… We have another interesting mix of people including three teachers, a professional photographer, an actor, a business owner, and a government employee. Ezra, our local organizer, has also joined us as a participant. One of our participants has a brother who lives in Hamilton, ON! I will post a picture of the group.

On Monday morning as we arrived at the church, we experienced our first heavy rain since we arrived in Kenya. The sound on the tin roof was almost deafening… Lucky for us as facilitators, it ended before the 0900 hours session start time.  The rain was welcomed by the community as it has been hot and dry and people are looking forward to the rainy season which will hopefully begin later this month. The rain that fell yesterday created a large puddle outside the back door of the church. It was gone in about 10 minutes. The ground is incredibly dry.

I will also post a picture of the land we drove through on Sunday on our way back from Watamu. It looks so bleak and hopeless. I would find it difficult to retain any optimism if I were to see it every day…

I’ll also post a photo of the village we go through and our way to work. In spite of the apparent poverty, people seem very friendly as we pass through.

Another interesting and very touching thing happened today. In this program we have the husband of one of the people who attended the first session. They are expecting a child in about five months. The husband told me that they had been discussing names and that if the baby was a girl it would be called Allison and if a boy, Peter. That was the highest of compliments…

We were also fortunate today to have Charles come back from the second program to share his experience and plans.

Once again we used the drawing exercise and once again we had some fascinating output. I’ll post a couple of them tomorrow.