Our computers are down and we don't know when we'll get them restored, but we have use of this visiting laptop for about ten minutes, so here goes.
Joanne has new students arriving daily, it seems, and now has a class of 60 who will begin as Form I students in January. She knows them all by name and many visit us in our home in the evening and on weekends. They enjoy using their English skills and teaching us Kiswahili phrases. They also enjoy learning American table games and chapel choruses. We have a number of Madisi student teachers helping until they return to school in January, so that has helped to break up Joanne's class into the different levels of proficiency. We have taken the more challenged learners, each of us taking classes with about twenty students. The other day during class, we heard a low, pulsating noise and looked out to see a group of very large black birds with huge bills and red baggy throats walking across the soccer field. The red sack at the throat was the source of the noise, puffing up and down somewhat like a bull frog...or bagpipe...making drumming/throbbing noise...very strange. The class was excited to know about a bird not familiar to the local American. Another day in Form II Bible Knowledge, we had a goat start to enter the classroom. I asked if she was a Form II student...the class laughed so loudly that the goat left in a hurry.
The rainy season officially began a couple of weeks ago, and we were formally initiated. We'd not experienced more than a light rain, almost misty, since coming to Idigima, so had no idea of the kind of rains we'll be living with for the next few months. We had gathered fragments of bricks from the construction areas and put in an entry pad at the front door and wrap-around patio at the back. The plan was to establish a buffer between the dirt and the floor of the house. The student helping me told me to set the brick three or four inches below the floor level to keep water from flowing into the house. I thought that would cause a lot of people to trip, walking around at night without lights as much as we do. I assured him that the gaps between the brick would allow plenty of drainage.,, We bailed and mopped about ten buckets of water out of our house after the first "real" rain. The student came by the day after our first seasonal rain, and I taught him a new English phrase, "I told ya so!" We both had a good laugh and started rearranging the brick and digging ditches around the house to direct the floods that wash over the ground during the rains. You live and learn, and everyday is an adventure with totally unpredictable events. It may be a need in the middle of the day or night that totally changes your scheduled activities, or it may be a chance meeting of someone on the road who ends up coming to your home for a Bible study. I was pulled off the street into a tea house one day by a tailor we'd spent time with a week before (Joanne showed him things on his sewing machine he didn't know how to use). He was so excited that his children were getting an education...and he considers Joanne his sewing teacher, even though she's lost her sense of timing in being able to keep a treddle machine going.
Better close this before the battery dies and you fail to receive news for another month. :-)
We covet your prayers.
God bless you all as you serve our Lord in your various responsibilities.
Gary and Joanne Grenell
