Playdates, Planting and Piano

 

We love these purple blossom trees--this is one we see at church

We did a bit of socializing this week. It turns out the founder of the organization that I am working with lives just down the street from us, so he brought his 2 little children and came over for a visit. His kids are still quite young, but it was still fun for Malachi to have someone play the switch with him. He has been asking me to connect so he can play with his new little friend again. I can see he misses being with friends. And we also met up with a girl who has just moved here from Canada (her dad is Kenyan). We will see if anything more comes from these encounters.

flower at church

Our visit to Mathare this time consisted of visiting an older school. We went to help in their little garden they have going, but the children were in class until 6, so we ended up working with the organization there to do all the planting. To maximize space they plant in these terraced structures they call cones.

Apparently you can plant a lot of plants in that space. It was interesting for me to actually work on one of them, because I created a training for this community that includes "cone gardens". The soil was really fine and packed in. So it wasn't easy to plant. They used a machete to soften the soil in really hard places, otherwise we used sticks. I occasionally use a dibber stick at home to create the holes to plant in, but my soil is much softer. I ended up with a blister and a new callous in the palm of my hand. 

We planted "spinach" (I'm pretty sure is was Swiss chard--even in the store Swiss chard is labelled spinach), kale that looked more like cabbage to me, and managu--a plant in the nightshade family that they eat here. If those plants turn out to be cabbage (they weren't labelled and were just donated to the organization to plant), they will probably be too close to grow properly.

A couple of kids did join us and wanted to talk to Malachi. They don't usually see mzugu kids there. Malachi is really treated like a celebrity, but he is too shy. He just does not know what to do with that kind of attention. They want us to come back next week to see their debates.

Things are getting intense here for me. There is so much to do and a paper I am writing and now classes have started. I am taking 2 classes in addition to my internship. It feels like I don't have time for things like sleep. Hopefully I figure out a way to juggle everything. It will be a lot better once I get the report done, but it is slow going for me.

Today Elizabeth played the piano for church. They have asked her to do that while we are here. But they didn't tell her what hymns they wanted her to play until an hour before church, so she was only able to play one. Next week is the primary presentation, so she has been working on those songs. Malachi is also playing a couple of the songs. She practiced with the primary today, but it seemed they weren't told she would and they have a different way of singing the songs--one child stands in front and sings the first line and then all the children join and sing that line again. They aren't used to having an intro...so we'll see how it goes on Sunday.  I am sure I will enjoy it.