October 15th 8:56 am (UTC +1:00)

I hope I’m not overwhelming anyone with updates. Several people have expressed that they like hearing from me every day, but I don’t want to discourage anyone from reading because they don’t have time to go through it all. I’m hoping that I can get down to every other day or even once every couple days, we’ll have to see, I might just keep bombarding you every day and I apologize to those who don’t have the time to try and keep up with it all. I have more of yesterday to share about, I had a pretty good day yesterday like I said. It was so hot I had to change like three times though. It’s like a hot Ohio summer day right now, and walking to market, while not that far, is a pretty strenuous endeavor. I went back later to get the bread I wanted, around 1pm, the clouds had passed so the sun was beating down mercilessly. Abu and Peter Mahr (apparently it’s Mahr not Maher like I thought, still sounds like Mayor regardless) went to town. Peter is one of the Doctors. Anyway he went along because he wanted to get some bread and to find some cucumbers, the Mahrs are vegetarians… that could be interesting during the dry season when produce becomes scarce. Anyway, we walked all the way over to Kamakwie 2 which is where the baker is located only to find out that he hadn’t started baking the bread yet even though he promised it would be done 1. Oh well, they have a boy, really a teen, who delivers bread around, you don’t even have to pay any extra, and so he brought me the bread here. It was nice and warm and very good, I love bread, so even if it hadn’t been good it would have been good anyway. The Ashers have two kittens, patches and snowball, and they are two trouble making animals. There was supposed to be a third one who was king of mean and I wanted to name it Hunter, because that’s what they have them for, to hunt the rats, but he hasn’t been around so Tom guesses it made someone a light meal (cat is a meat source for the Africans here, but not dogs. So dogs are everywhere) Anyway, they kept finding a way off the back porch even though it’s screened off. So Abu and I had to try repair the screen, which was interesting, I kept getting cut by the screen because it’s not very good and shreds pretty easy. Abu wasn’t a very good helper because he kept letting it slack as I was stapling so I would get to where he was holding and find the screen was in the wrong position so I could staple it anywhere. On top of that we had very few staples to work with. So I got a little bit frustrated with him, the screen, the cats and the fact that I had to stop and wipe the sweat off my glasses every 30 seconds. Anyway, we got done, there are still two hole I’m thinking they can get out for now, if they grow any they should be ok, but the things are so scrawny. Between all the goats, chickens, sheep, dogs and cats I’ve seen here I haven’t seen one animal that looks fat, let alone healthy at all. Getting that done I read some to try and relax before having to go teach. Teaching went well, though it’s pretty discouraging to be teaching elementary math to people who are supposed to be ready to go to the university next year. I like the kids and I’m hoping to improve them as much as possible even if it’s not enough to make the university hopefully they will be able to pass something to their kids and build up the people that way. Sadly, one kid John will not likely pass anything on even after I’m done teaching him. The poor kid couldn’t tell me if 12 or 100 was the larger number. I asked him if I had 100 coins and you took 12 would I have any left, and he couldn’t answer that. It’s really sad how little they have after all this time. It doesn’t help that some grades at the primary school have 70-100 kids, how do you work with that many. I would love to bring a whole team of teachers over here just to work on teaching the teachers they have here. After teaching I came home and did a lot of reading and thinking about how I’m going to handle this teaching, because I have so much work ahead of me and I want to be as prepared for it as I can to make the most of my opportunity here. After that, I got to watch a movie last night, The Perfect Storm. The Ashers have a tv with a dvd player in it, or should I say had… During a certain part in the movie a man gets hooked in the hand and pulled into the ocean, this startled Tom so much he swore, and almost immediately the dvd burnt out. We joked that God was expressing His disappointment with Tom, but it was really eerie. Anyway, we finished watching it in a laptop they have here. Then it was bed time. I think I really might be writing a novel, haha. Anyway, I will be posting again tonight about today if anything interesting does happen, but then I should be able to just post at night about that day, and not the day before. I continue to wish you all God’s Blessings from Africa

Ryan Brooks