Some Pictures and Tuesday's Story

Here are a few pictures of our first days here (mostly of Grace).  It takes a really long time to upload pictures on this Kenyan internet so I will do the rest in another blog post.  After the pictures is a report on our day yesterday.  Now we are off to the National Museum!

This was Grace when she was one week old - she has changed a lot since then (and hasn't been using the binky).

This is a better shot of Grace's vibrating seat, which she loves (thanks to Aunt Judy Hagan in Lowell!).

This is our sun-bathing beauty in the late afternoon one day last week when we trying to improve her jaundice.  She is lying on the bed we are sleeping in.

This was Mike and Kristoffer last week unpacking Grace's baby shower that we finally got from the airport.

This is Grace's cradle in Lisa's bedroom.  They have a mosquito net hung just for her.

Well yesterday we (Lisa, Mike, me and Charles) took Grace for a trip to the mall.  That is where Nakumatt is, the Super Wal-mart of Nairobi.  We drove to the underground garage, and took Grace out of the car and put her in her carriage.  Well, being the good grandmother, I started taking pictures.  A guard came up to me and said pictures were not allowed.  I almost thought he was going to ask for my camera.  There are a lot of security guards there, sometimes they check under your car before they let you on the property.  We have even seen armed military near the banks.

They are afraid of terrorists.  

Ida asked us yesterday what we thought of Nairobi.  We told her some of our impressions.  She talked about how you used to be able to walk the grounds of the US Embassy, but after the terrorist attack, how impossible it was to get on that property.  She was working for a family who had someone killed in that attack.  She told us that Kenyans do not like Arabs and do not like Muslims - they don't trust them (Lisa questions this statement given that such a large percentage of the Kenyan population is Muslim.  Perhaps that is how her tribe feels?).  I told her that a lot of Americans felt that way, and that was too bad because most Muslims are good people- just a small minority that have people afraid of terrorists.

While at the market, Lisa found some ice cube trays for us.  No one here has ice cubes.  Even in the restaurants, there was no ice.  Of course, you wouldn't want just any ice - you need to know where the water came from that made the ice.  The compound Lisa lives in has there own water filtering.  And then Lisa has bottled water (you buy it at the grocery store and it looks like what you see in offices) that they use for everything to do with drinking.

You never know what you are going to see while driving along the road.  Yesterday we saw men trying to sell puppies.  Cute little puppies they were holding.  All the vendors that sell on the road, and I mean on the road while traffic is slow, are men.  I've yet to see a woman sell on the road.  Kristoffer is going to take us a to a market place that sells native made gifts.  Lisa says he knows how to negotiate with the vendors.

Something they do have in houses here, and something we could learn from, is at their electric outlets there is a switch.  When you use the outlet you turn the switch on, and when you are not using the outlet, you turn it off.  I imagine it saves a lot electricity.