I dont feel like coming up with a title for this one. Just read it. :-P

Soooo last you heard it was Sunday. Give me a minute while I think about what I did on Sunday.
Well first I went to church. Actually, first I sat on the couch in the living/dining room for a full hour writing in my journal while I waited for everyone else to be ready, then we went to church.

I was supposed to speak to the kids before they split into their Sunday school groups, but since we were almost 2 hours late, and everyone else was apparently only 1.5 hours late, we missed the time when they’re together. So I ended up talking to just the little kids, which was bad because if I had to pick one group it would have been better for slightly older kids to hear, but whatever I made the best of it.
Today the senior pastor asked me to speak to the young adults class on Sunday…and even though I’d already told someone else that I didn’t want to, I couldn’t think of a good excuse on the spot to give to the pastor. So once again his reason was not that anyone thought I had any good word from God to talk to these people about, he told me he wants me to talk to them so they can hear someone from another country speak. Awesome. I’m so valuable as a fun new toy…it doesn’t matter what I do, I just need to stand there and look…white. He seems to think my telling them “I want to be a doctor and that entails being in school for a long time” will inspire mid-20s girls to not abandon their life goals and marry the wrong person just to be married sooner, and that man will abandon them and their kids in a few years. I wouldn’t put that much weight on my influence….

Anyway…There was a pastor visiting from Uganda (I miss Heidi) and he was quite funny. He was reeeally short, and just had really funny mannerisms, and couldn’t decide whether he would speak in English or Swahili (which he learned from Tanzania, cuz most Ugandans don’t speak Swahili) He wanted a DVD player to play a CD so he could sing for us, because he’s made a CD, but there wasn’t one ready. So he started preaching, going back and forth between English and Swahili, until the senior pastor got up and asked another pastor to come up. The visiting guy, David, goes “why, does he have a DVD player?” Pastor says “no, to interpret for you” Haha. Because half the congregation doesn’t know English. He mostly preached in English and had the translation in Swahili, which he chose over Kikuyu, the local language, because he wanted to know what the interpreter was saying. Apparently one day he was being translated and the translator had a big problem with the congregation and used that opportunity to give a message about his issues with the church instead of translating David’s message. Afterwards people were angry and he was confused until he found out why. :-P
Every now and then he’d correct the translation. “no, what I said was…” or, he’d start talking in Swahili, and the other pastor would translate to English. It was like a circus. :-P He was speaking about "where your treasure is, there your heart will be" At the end he told everyone that if they came up and promised to help pastor fix the car that I told you about, with the clutch problem, that he guaranteed God would give them whatever they had been asking God for, this was the reason they weren’t getting it- because they weren’t putting their treasure in God’s work aka the pastor.
Now…I’m all for the idea of the church coming together to help the pastor fix his car, and blessing the pastor…but for someone to say “I know my God, and I guarantee” that God will do anything you want…that is a bold statement, and one I don’t agree with much. We don’t know God’s will. God has reasons completely beyond our understanding for moving or not moving. God could be waiting for one of 20000 other reasons before he does what someone’s been praying for. Maybe what they’re praying for isn’t even in God’s will and he is planning on never doing that thing. We just don’t know, and THAT is faith. “God I want this, but if you don’t want me to have it now, or not ever, then that’s really want I want, so do what you want” is so much better than “Lets make a deal. I’ll give money to the pastor, and since I’ve proved myself to you, now prove yourself to me”. Meh.

Theeeeeen I came home and had lunch, and decided it was time to do some laundry.
I hate laundry.
I have always hated laundry.
I especially hate it when I have to hand-wash things and my forearm muscles get exhausted from wringing things out so many times, and no matter how many times I rinse things out I can’t seem to get the soap out of them, and I can’t really rinse them as many times as I’d like because the water in the house cut out for a day so it had to be carried in buckets into the house from the tank outside…..so I think my clothes are clean…there is definitely enough soap still in them that they at least smell clean. :-P The sweatshirts take at least 48 hours to dry in this cold dampness, so I had to be careful to save one sweatshirt and not wear it until laundry time so it would be clean at least until the other 2 dried.

at one point I left the last thing, a pair of jeans, soaking to give my hands a break and called my various mothers for mothers day. One of the girls said she wanted to help so I allowed her to go wring out those jeans. It took about 30 seconds but it was nice not to have to do that myself. :-P
Then we were playing around outside, and I was teaching some of the kids how to do cartwheels, which was highly amusing…even spotted a couple of back walkovers…and by “spotted”, I mean, I did all the work and they just let me throw their legs over their heads. Oh well. :-P

Then I STILL don’t know why, but MammaAlice came outside running and laughing (and she is a big lady) and we were all like …what? So we followed her, running. (the kids ALWAYS want to run now…every evening they’re like “Daniela, are you running today!?” ) anyway. Someone said she was going to the store so 6 or 7 of us decided to follow her. It was pretty dusky outside but I just followed the crowd of kids and we got THE funniest looks from people on the street…to see a mzungu running through the streets of the tiny little town with a group of kids…it even made me laugh. So somewhere we lost MammaAlice and it was just the kids, we would up at Pastor’s house but he wasn’t home so we said hi to his daughter and ran back. I don’t know what possessed us to do it, but it was funny. When we got back I changed into my usual running attire and actually ran for 20 minutes like usual, with my usual companions. Then we ate dinner and went to bed, I guess.

Oh, AND, in between writing the Saturday blog post and actually posting it, the water went back on. So I only had one day of bucket showering before I was blessed again with an overhead stream.

Today there were basically NO patients (actually, there were like 5 but they were all really quick in-and-out “I just need my blood pressure checked” sort of things) and we were all bored out of our minds all day. I think I spent the ENTIRE day playing free cell on the old desktop computer they have. Is it bad that I don’t even remember if I did anything else all day? Maybe a few games of solitaire. Anyway. The computer has a good stock of worship music and sermons that came from I don’t know where, and the pastor turned on a sermon in the morning and it just went through the playlist…so I heard like 6 sermons today all by the same guy. Which was actually nice, because I really liked the pastor and it felt like home to hear an American accent and all these American cultural allusions…I kept thinking “I don’t know why these Kenyans have this pastor on here, they probably miss half the illustrations and all the jokes because they’re so cultural”. But for me it was good.

The lack of wood stove in the house has allowed me to spend a lot more time out and about in the house hanging out with the kids, helping them do whatever little things they’re doing, and being more accessible…I can tell they’re more comfortable and familiar with me even after 2 days of it, and I like that a lot. Only downside is it’s colder now that the stove isn’t pumping heat into the rest of the house along with the smoke. I think I’ll take being cold over lung cancer though. Slightly colder than comfortable doesn’t cause damage, smoking KILLS. :-P