We figured the best place to keep the journals until the library is finished was at the Ouko’s house. Later that evening when we arrived home and unpacked them, we opened them to read what the children had written. The stories were extraordinary, candid and revealing. Girls wrote about the lack of respect they feel from their parents and about how they are not considered important enough to educate. They wrote that they suffer a lot and are forced to follow traditions that create hardship for them.   Children wrote about their friendships and their dreams for the future. We couldn’t stop reading them.

Meanwhile, the mural project continued in the courtyard and the canvas was becoming colorful. The children were almost done using the fabric markers but we decided to wait until Monday to paint the canvas with the acrylic paints we had brought because they take 6-8 hours to dry. While the mural was being stored, I asked a small group of students if they would like me to read them a story. The response was an overwhelming “yes!” I had brought three hardcover books with me so I began walking to a clearing and next thing I knew, a few children had found a chair for me and several hundred (yes, hundred!) children gathered around me for story-time. Talk about needing to project my voice! Zac came to sit on my lap and decided that he would provide sound effects for the first story which was “Click Clack Moo, Cows that Type.” The book is about a bunch of farm animals that get hold of a typewriter and send messages to their farmer. At the end of every few pages there is a spot where you can make a “moo” sound like a cow, which Zac did and sent roars of laughter through the crowd of children. It was hilarious and Zac loved his new role as entertainer!

Because Swahili and Luo are spoken most frequently in this part of the country, I’m not sure how much of the story the children really understood, but they loved the pictures and they begged for both of the other two books. I was told that it is very unusual for parents to read to their children but after this experience I would tell you that, if you came here to work and did nothing but bring books and read out loud, you would contribute a lot of joy to this community. Of course more educated Kenyans, especially those in the city who live more modern life-styles do read to their kids and Winnie’s children who are 6 and 8 are reading many of the same books that my children read. Sadly though, this is a small percentage of the population.

After story-time had finished, the headmaster announced our plans for the next day, Saturday. We invited the students to come at 9am to play sports and to learn how to play American baseball. They were ecstatic! Everyone cheered and clapped and smiled.   We all headed home, eager to get some rest so that we could keep up with all 500 kids the next day.

When we got home it was dark but dinner had been prepared by Auntie Helen and the local ladies who had come to visit. The kids begged me to make apple pie for everyone and all the ladies thought it would be fun so everyone pitched in. We made the entire thing by hand and had to pilfer every apple we could find, even the ones Lillian had brought in the car from Nairobi. We cut the flour, butter, vinegar and sugar together for the crust; we used cashews (grown locally) for the crumble topping which we chopped by hand and mixed with raw sugar (also grown just down the road), cinnamon, butter and flour; and we peeled, cored and sliced thirty five apples and tossed them with lemon juice. We put it all together just in time for the electricity to go out so the oven didn’t work! Hakuna matata – we just put it aside and an hour or two later we were able to pop it in the oven to cook. Although desert is not often eaten after a Kenyan meal, everyone loved the pie (newly named “apple crumbly” by Kris and Nikki).

While we were waiting for the electricity to turn on, I realized it was Shabbat so I dug for my candles in my suitcase and asked Susan and Mama if they would mind if we lit the candles and sang our Sabbath prayers with everyone. Twenty years ago when I lived with the Oukos, they admitted that I was the first Jew they had ever known. They are Christians and very open and receptive to learning and sharing in the traditions of others. I was honored that they took me to church with them and I remember the experience so clearly. It was a hot Sunday morning and we sat in an open-sided tent on narrow wooden benches. The singing and clapping were hearty and throughout the service, congregants stood up and shouted that they had been saved. It was a fabulous experience. Christianity has brought many good things to Kenya. The church has provided education, food and healthcare. Winnie Ouko expressed that she thinks it helps those in poverty have hope of salvation. I am grateful for the teachings against polygamy that have encouraged men to take only one wife. This country needs all the help it can get to curb the extraordinary birth rate of 4.5%, the fastest in the world and I can’t help but believe that a one-wife system is better for reducing the spread of disease and poverty.

At this point, Lillian, her children, Francis, Andrew and Charlie had all arrived from Nairobi. The house was teeming with people. All of us gathered to stand around the table and our family offered words of thanks to everyone for their generosity and for making out visit so joyous. We then sang “Shabbat is here” and welcomed every person by name! It was the longest version of “Shabbat is here” that we have ever sung!   We then lit the candles and sang the blessings. We shared a little bit about how our Sabbath is similar to the Christian Sabbath and how it is different and Zachary, Gussie and Isabel explained why we celebrate Shabbat. Then, we blessed all the children in the room, a prayer that the Oukos recognized for it is used in the Christian faith as well. It was one of the best Shabbat celebrations we have ever had.

The next day was sports day and the entire extended family joined us at Menara School to help organize the games. In fact, we couldn’t have done it without them. Ned, Gussie, Izzy, Susan and I organized baseball and pickle. Ken, Bob, Francis, Charlie and Andrew organized soccer; and Winnie, Kris, Lillian and Nikki organized dodge ball. All 500 kids and all the teachers participated, even the headmaster.   We brought bats, a hundred training baseballs, whiffle balls, several dozen soccer balls, and dodge balls, and with just these few items, we were able to transform an ordinary day into a dream. These kids don’t have proper balls. They make balls from scraps of cardboard and paper which they try to tape or tie together. Having real balls to play with and new games to learn was a total treat.

Ned did an amazing job teaching the kids the basics of catching, throwing and tagging. Each of us engaged over a hundred kids in a full-fledged game of pickle and we all worked up a huge sweat.   I loved teaching the kids to say, “you….’re OUT!” with thumb and arm motion included. It provoked tons of laughter.   Bob, Francis, Ken, Charlie and Andrew challenged their group to a soccer match and they were trounced, five to nothing! Dodge ball was a huge hit with the little kids. We had to force the children to take a water break but clearly, it didn’t faze them that they were running for hours in 95 degree heat.

By about 1:30, everyone was exhausted so after some singing and dancing to celebrate the day, we all went back to the house for lunch. After lunch, Mama asked us to visit an orphanage which is home to children of Aids victims and those whose parents have deserted them.   Gussie, Izzy, Nikki, Susan, Kris, Winnie and Mama Ouko piled into the van and made the hour-long drive to the orphanage. We were greeted by the orphanage director and some of his staff who escorted us into his office to sign the visitors’ book. Then we had a tour of the garden and kitchen, saw the bunk room, and met the children who sang for us. The orphanage is clean and the children have clothes and shoes. On the wall of the kitchen is the intended menu for the week. There are 6 items on the entire menu and this week, they ran out of corn meal so the children were only given a meal a day. Mama knew of the hunger and had loaded our car with sacks of corn meal, sugar and other staples.   As I later confirmed but had always suspected, Mama can often be found helping those in need with donations of food and money. She always seems to know who is suffering and how she can bring relief. She and her children pooled together a donation to which we contributed and she insisted that we hand the envelope to the director. The needs here are endless and the contrast between what we have and how close others are to hunger is striking.

Life Lesson #8: Remember to live in gratitude, for it is just luck that separates one human’s condition from another’s.

Sunday was our day of rest, and we needed it! The morning began with yoga. Winnie and Susan were really eager to practice together and Winnie had brought her matt and blocks from Nairobi so that we could give it a try. She’s done it once or twice and was really curious. I used a light piece of cloth as a matt and we tried to find a place for our practice. Our first attempt had us eaten by biting ants. That was a no go, so we moved to the cement courtyard in front of the chicken coop and tried to shade ourselves with the side of the building. It was so much fun and it felt so good to stretch.

Winnie is a true soul mate. She is a glorious friend, and even though we haven’t seen each other for over 12 years. She and I spent my year in Kenya exploring each other’s cultures and basically growing up together. Soon thereafter, Winnie came to visit me in the States and she eventually enrolled at Cornel business school in Ithaca, New York. I just can’t express the joy I have in seeing her. I don’t know what it is, but when I am with Winnie and her family, everything is easy. We laugh all day long and ease into deep conversations. Even though I had never met her husband Francis, he felt like an old friend the minute we met and her children feel like my own.   When I am with Winnie it feels like I’m transported back to a magical place where everything just unwinds the way it should and where obstacles that would otherwise be annoying or disconcerting become fodder for laughter and an opportunity to reconnect with the joy that comes from flexibility. Perhaps this is the true meaning of yoga. Flexibility is a positive life-force. I must remember to practice it.

After yoga and breakfast, Ned and I decided to visit the local market with Mama Ouko. She drove us the 7 Kilometers to the market and we walked through the stalls of produce, dried grains, smoked fish, housewares and women selling fried foods to buy some fresh peas, pineapples and lemons. There were thousands of people in the market and it was fun to get a taste of the local life. This isn’t a clean orderly market like you might find on Rue Claire in Paris or in Sienna, Italy. It is muddy and chaotic; there are chickens walking around and children sitting in random spots playing with sticks. The produce, fish and beans in one stall looks very much like the produce, fish and beans in all the others. As you might imagine given the education system doesn’t reward innovation, product differentiation isn’t a well-developed marketing technique here. After our tour, Ned and I decided to walk back the 7km to the farm along the main road.   I imagine that the locals must have been wondering who we were and where in the world we were walking.

It brought back memories of twenty years ago when I would set out on my jog along the same road (it wasn’t paved then). I would wear my lycra pants and my running shoes and carry my Taser for protection, and by the time I was through with my run, I would have a dozen local children running with me in bare-feet, barely breathing hard while I was panting and sweating and feeling utterly out of shape.

Monday morning we rose early to tackle our next set of projects at Menara School. Our plan was to do a tie-dye project with the 70+ children in Class 4. We also had to finish painting the mural with Class 7, hand out the printed pictures to Class 8 and help them affix them to their journals as well as finish their journals, and introduce the All about Me posters to Class 6. We also had plans to visit Class 3 and to play a story-telling game with hand puppets and to organize a smaller mural project for them.

Gussie, Isabel, Nikki, Kris and Susan took charge of the tie-dye project. We hoped with this project to have fun with the kids and to provide each of the 70+ children with a new shirt.   We had no idea how many children would be in the school, but had we known, we would have brought 500 shirts.   We brought 108 and used 70, so the remainder will be used by the headmaster in the future to reward children for academic achievement.

First, our crew lined up all the teacher desks under the veranda outside the school. They covered each desk with a plastic tarp and set out all the dyes we had brought. Then they entered Class 4 and demonstrated how to rubber band the shirts to create the desired pattern. Gussie, Isabel, Nikki and Kris worked with children individually to help them band their shirts and then small groups of children came out to the tables to dye them. We had brought hundreds of pairs of latex gloves for the kids to use while dyeing and to our amazement, rather than throwing the gloves away when they were done, the children brought a bucket and water and began to wash and hang to dry each pair of gloves for later use. Nothing is wasted here. It is a wake-up call to experience the feeling of preserving rather than disposing. Very little is considered trash.

The kids loved the tie-dye! After squirting their shirts with dye, Susan and the girls placed each shirt on a plastic tarp to set for 6 hours. Meanwhile, Class 8 was hard at work finishing their journals and Class 7 had finished painting the mural.   I entered Class 6 and got the kids started on their posters and handed out art supplies so they could draw and decorate them. Everyone was hard at work!

We left the school to go home for lunch, planning to return in an hour so that we could finish our projects and visit with Class 3 who had been eagerly waiting their turn for a project. However, just as we sat down to lunch we felt the wind shift and a huge storm blow in. Nikki noticed it first and insisted that she call Joseph the driver to take her back to the school to un-tape the mural from the water tank and take it inside so that it wouldn’t be ruined in the rain. She got there just in the “NIK” of time! The rain came down sideways, as I might imagine would happen in a flash flood, and it rained for several hours.

We waited for the rain to subside a bit but we were fighting the onset of darkness so we sloshed through the mud and returned to Menara. Imagine how dark the classrooms are when the windows are closed to prevent the rain from entering. When we arrived, we decided to start with Class 3. It was an eye-opening experience.   The minute we entered the classroom we could tell that something was off. Until this point, each class had welcomed us with enthusiasm and inquisitive eyes. This class was dead. It is also enormous with more than 70 children and I came to learn that they have had the same teacher for three years. It didn’t take Susan and me long to understand what had happened. The teacher was horrible: Uninspired, unenthusiastic, and relatively uneducated herself. As opposed to the responsiveness of Classes 1 and 2, Class 3 could barely understand English and had absolutely no idea how to tell a basic story. The headmaster later admitted that this was his “slow class.” I couldn’t help but wonder whether it was too late for these children, whether they would be so far behind that they would never catch up and whether the school had given up on them. Our lesson plan had been to have each child take a turn wearing a felt glove to which small stickers could be affixed. Our hope was that the child would then weave a story from the images on the glove and pass the glove and the story on to his neighbor. It was a total bomb. The children couldn’t even name the images let alone tell a story. Susan and I looked at each other in disbelief. Even after the headmaster explained the lesson in Swahili, the children were unable to execute a simplified version of the game. We decided to switch gears.

We pulled out a roll of canvas and affixed it with thumb tacks to the back wall of the classroom. We asked the children to name common items they would find in their village. It took some time but finally, they were able to name: a cow, a church, a house, etc. We then asked them to take turns drawing and painting these items on the canvas to create an image of their village. They worked with acrylic paints left over from the big mural and fabric markers and they enjoyed themselves. Susan and I thought to ourselves that perhaps this class was supposed to remind us how many children are left behind here. There is so much more work to do.

Nikki, Kris, Gussie and Isabel were now busy at work rinsing and hanging all the tie-dyed shirts, Class 6 was still hard at work on their posters, and Class 8 had finished their journals.   At lunch, Susan and I had discussed the possibility of spending some time this afternoon introducing the Kindles to the primary school. Our original plan had been to introduce them on Tuesday to the secondary school (grades 9-12) but we were so inspired by the primary school and the headmaster there that we thought it a good idea to pilot the Kindles with Class 8.   With help from two school boys, I collected the duffel bag of Kindles from the van and entered Class 8. I invited a group of teachers and the headmaster to join in and I proceeded to lead my very first literature class. It was phenomenal! Even though I was working with 8th graders, I chose a book at about the 4th grade reading level called “Grandma Rosa’s Bowl.” It is from a collection that I loved reading with my girls called, “Girls to the Rescue.” I specifically chose a short story with a smart girl heroine. The story is about a little girl who lives with her mother and her elderly grandmother. The mother isn’t kind to the grandmother and the girl finds a creative yet respectful way to teach the mother to be kind and sympathetic to the aging grandmother. These themes resonate well with the Luo culture here and both the teachers and the students loved the story.

There is so much to share about this experience. It was all I had hoped for. The children each had their own book which was in perfect condition. I showed them how to adjust the font, use the dictionary, discuss themes, make predications, analyze characters, compare and contrast, and find synonyms. They loved reading out-loud and every child had their hand in the air to be called upon. The headmaster and teachers had never seen a truly interactive literature class taught before and they loved experiencing how engaged the students were. The students requested that we put books about science and history on the Kindles and they asked how soon we would come again.   Even though none of these children had ever used a computer or e-book before, they caught on quickly and thoroughly enjoyed their experience.

It was dusk outside when we finished. All our projects were complete and the tie-dyed shirts were decorating the courtyard draped on ropes that had been hung between trees. It was a colorful and unexpected site. We stored the mural to dry inside the first grade classroom and a lock was put on the door for safekeeping.   We went home but promised we would come again in the morning to say goodbye. Our visit was too short. We all felt that we could have stayed for months.   When we arrived at the house, Susan and I couldn’t stop talking about the Kindle project. After seeing the pilot program come to life we were more convinced than ever that we need to develop a plan to optimize the administration of the e-books. We also really need to re-adjust our thinking about appropriate content to put on the readers and how to train people to use them.   Susan committed herself to creating a program that would work.

The next day was our last in the village, we began with a farewell ceremony at the primary school where everyone offered words of thanks and appreciation and encouragement to visit again. The children danced and sang for us and, much to the horror of my daughters, I joined a group of girls to dance in front of the entire school. I think I eventually got the rhythm but at every mishap the audience clapped and laughed.

Our goodbye was really sad. We all lingered in the courtyard. Ned had really bonded with the headmaster and was engaged in conversation with him, I wrote our address for everyone so that we could correspond in the future, we tried to organize a storage area for the supplies we had left and we waved to all the children. We went home to pack up our things and have some lunch and then we headed for the secondary school to do another Kindle pilot. We decided to teach the same book there because the children are just a year older, and we weren’t sure that they were that much more advanced.

The secondary school is a bit better equipped that the primary school. To attend, children must pay fees. The school building is lighter and brighter and the children’s uniforms are not quite as tattered. Children are fed lunch. This particular secondary school is currently co-ed, however they are phasing out girls so girls in the area will have to walk miles to attend another school or simply not go. We were told that there is just not enough room at the school for girls but we got the distinct impression that the school’s headmaster was not particularly supportive of educating girls. I mentioned this new policy to Winnie and my worry about it, and she explained that she has a different view. She said that there is such an enormous problem with alcoholism and delinquency in boys throughout Kenya that she wasn’t dis-satisfied with the plan and even believes there needs to be a greater focus on educating boys. The sad truth is that education needs more funding but corruption is rampant in the Education Ministry and much of the money that the country raises for education never makes it into the local schools.

After teaching our class, which we conducted outside under a tree with about a hundred children and faculty, we headed to the airport to catch our flight to Nairobi. There, Winnie and Francis planned to meet us and take us out for a night on the town. We left the kids at the Serena Hotel (which looked pretty luxurious on this second visit-everything is relative!) with Grace, an Ouko cousin who had been with us all week in Koru, and headed out to Zen restaurant. On our way we visited Winnie and Francis’ townhouse and the old neighborhood I had lived in with them twenty years ago. The traffic in Nairobi is not to be believed. I can honestly say it is the worst in the world (LA x 5 + diesel + no catalytic converters!). Every single road is under construction and routes that used to take 10 minutes to drive 20 years ago now take more than an hour. It is almost impossible to function and the air is so polluted that it is difficult to walk. East Africa is the fastest growing area of the world and economic progress almost always translates directly into wide-spread auto ownership. This means traffic and pollution.

Zen restaurant is in the suburb of Karen (named for Karen Blixen of “Out of Africa” fame). The suburb is beautiful and the restaurant is an oasis of jasmine bushes, fountains and modern Asian décor. They serve fusion food which is delicious. The restaurant is frequented by mzungu (white people) and successful locals and it is quite the hot spot. We loved being with Francis and Winnie and the kids were so happy to hang out with Grace.

The next day we had a late breakfast and a swim before joining our guide Robert for our 4 hour journey by Land Rover to the Olpajeta Conservancy near Mount Kenya. Thus began the second phase of our adventure, our safari (which means journey in Kswahili).   To be honest, we were all worried that we would be completely bored on safari after such an exciting experience in Koru and we missed the Ouko family and all the kids. Zac was most excited to see the wildlife, but I really wasn’t sure that Ned and Zac could bear to be cooped up in a vehicle for hours on end tracking animals through the long grass.   Adventures lay ahead.