Happy Halloween! 2006

Esther's First Halloween; she had a great time. She caught on really fast, went right up and yelled out 'trick or treat' then showed everybody what she got. Max went mostly on his own with his buddies. It was all in the 'expat compound', there's about 8 condo-like houses there and about 5 homes participated.

What's been happening

Hi all, just a quick note to tell you why I've been silent on the blog lately. I am now O-ficially a gub'ment employee! I started work (finally) at the CDC field station about three weeks ago. I'm going to build their Intranet, maybe their Internet and Extranet sites too. Plus do some graphic design stuff. It's going well; happy to be working again. Plus NOW I finally have access to speedy internet services, at last!

Kayla conceived and organized a retreat for the 700 employees at the field station. It was this past Friday. Everyone had a great time; it will be an annual event now.

We have officially been granted leave in January so looks like we’ll make a home visit in January!!! Maybe to New York but for sure Atlanta. Of course we are going in the coldest month of the year; coming from the tropics. Hard to believe we’ve been here for NINE months already. The down side is we’ll be coming all that way for only two weeks total, dang. Can’t hardly get over jet lag in two weeks!

Bits:

• An Avocado bigger than your two fists put together costs around $.25 USD
• A gallon of gas costs about $4.34 USD
• I haven’t seen canned tuna in the stores for five weeks
• QUEEN Esther is definitely two years old now. That sweet-always-happy little girl is doing the lie on the floor and have a crying tantrum thing for 20 minutes at 6:30am because she can’t have potato chips for breakfast. Then she gets up and it’s like nothing ever happened. Happy again…
• Max is asking questions like “dad, why do you REALLY need to put gas in the car? What does it REALLY do, anyway?” …cool. He’s learning to read at school and he can write his own name now, readable too!
• The new generator is awesome, thank you embassy.

New Esther

Watch the video

Young Generation Orphanage Commercial

Watch the video

Bob Maxfield and I created this short video to help people get a sense of what the orphanage was like....

Putting Up Bed Nets At The Orphanage

There was a big donation of bed nets so a bunch of us decided to spend Saturday afternoon at the YGC Orphanage hanging them.

Kids...

The kids helped Esther learn how to carry her baby in the traditional Kenyan way which is to wrap a cloth around you and pop your baby on your back.

POWER!

Well we heard we were gonna get a generator about a month ago. The embassy sent it. I was expecting a sort of file cabinet sized thing but wow, this thing is enormous! Guys have been working for a week to install it. They even had to pour it's own concrete pad to contain this monster. It is huge! It could power a four story building I think. Why so big?? Ah, your tax dollars at work! Whatever... It will be good to have during the rainy seasons. Anytime a drop of rain falls the power goes. Might be an hour, might be half day. Hope it's not going to be too loud when it cranks up....