jet lag

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Monday the 5th was our first full day here at our guest house in Nairobi. We didn’t get to bed that morning until about 3am, so we slept until nearly 11. The boys at a quick breakfast of whatever food we could make sense of in our stupor and then went outside to explore. We unzipped Zeke’s tent to try to rouse him but he slept hard until 11:30, when I decided to wake him. We wandered outside to find the rest of the boys and were overcome with the beauty that surrounded us. The compound, while small, feels like an oasis in the middle of this overwhelmingly busy city, full of sky scrapers, traffic jams and buses that use the sidewalks to get ahead of the rest of the vehicles that crawl at tortoise pace down the construction ridden highways. It was the dead of night when we arrived, so we were unprepared for the vast array of shades of green that awaited us in the morning. It’s breathtaking. We found our boys, with their instant friends, climbing trees, digging in the brick red dirt, throwing frisbees and shooting the breeze. Josh, Zeke and I found the back door of our temporary team leaders home and were invited in. We sat talking with them a while and then rounded up our boys around 2:00 for lunch. It was a challenge for any of us to eat, as our bodies were telling us it was 6am, but we forced some food down and let the boys head straight back outside.
We’d were blessed to have ample food available for us when we arrived. Several families from the Nairobi team provided groceries and meals for us, which freed us up to stay inside the safe walls of the compound for a couple days without needing to make a grocery run right away. The McDonald family, our teammates that we’ve been eager to join in language training for the past 6 months, came to visit and we were elated to see them! Our reunion was a long time coming, as the last time we’d seen them was September of 2019 when we stayed in a guest house in southern Missouri to test just how compatible our families are. Here’s our group picture from that trip, and a picture of Heather and I from here.

The boys were all enamored with the various bugs, reptiles and plants around the compound.

Eric took Josh grocery shopping that first afternoon while Heather and I stayed behind to make sure kids didn’t burn the compound to the ground.
The next day I took my first driving lesson with a sweet sister that was willing to sacrifice her vehicle and safety for the sake of my learning. We drove to the mall she shops at most frequently to look at a few household items I’d asked her where I could find, and to pick up a few essential groceries. The grocery store was huge and overwhelming and I found that, Sharon, the friend I was with had to complete many of my sentences for me as I shuffled along in a sleepy stupor, trying to make sense of all the new brandnames and food choices. I came away with a cart half full of groceries, but couldn’t keep a straight enough head to think through all the staples we needed in our kitchen in our temp apartment, so the groceries felt a little discombobulated with I unloaded them onto the counters at home.
The rest of the week was spent weaning ourselves off central timezone living, food and surroundings. Well, maybe weaning isn’t the right word there. We weaned ourselves off our Central time sleep cycle, but everything else was just cut off immediately. Our digestive systems were ok for the first week, but are definitely reacting to the change in diet. Yikes. On Saturday we drove 45 minutes or so to get to the other company compound just outside Nairobi where our friends that we went to FPO are living. They will be in Kenya for two years, as they are short term. Once we move to TZ, we aren’t sure if we’ll be back here before their term is over, so we are trying to get as much time with them as possible while we are here. There are 2 American families and a few Kenyan families living on that compound. Both the American families left for their stateside assignments this past week, and we likely won’t be here once they get back so it was neat to have a chance to meet them.

We spent most of Sunday up at the McDonald’s house celebrating a belated easter, complete with an easter egg hunt with American candy for the kiddos - our boys were excited but the McDonald kiddos were beside themselves with excitement. The familiar American candy was nostalgic for them after 6 months of living here.

We made it through week one without many emotional breakdowns, feeling like we were coming out the other side of jet lag and hopeful for the start of a new week full of gearing back up into homeschooling and starting language learning for Josh and me.