Sights of September

Doug is teaching one of our project managers to ride. She is thrilled at the challenge and to be the first woman in an entire community who would do it.  

We're still doing more project introduction meetings. At the beginning I give a speech...

Then Doug takes his turn before we turn it over to our project manager to do the bulk of the talking in Maa.

These three grandpas came to check out what was happening in our new project of training community groups.

We took an overnight to Mosiro where the elephants are.  The road was often a track in the grass, but after 3 hours we arrived.  We went to connect with 12 community groups. To everyone in Najile, this is "the interior" where everyone is less exposed, more traditional, just a bit more wild.  It didn't seem that drastically different to us. We stayed with a couple of these kids who begged to take a picture with us. 

We looked and looked. We saw footprints (look close in the picture),  mounds of poo, and tons of uprooted and broken trees, but we never caught site of the elephants... next time.

A gorgeous day in the Rift. This is our favorite view spot half-way up the escarpment on our drive into Ngong town. We often stop for a break and look back down to spot the tiny roof of our house and look at the clouds on Suswa.

This was the same spectacular day. We saw the Ngong Hills cloud roll and knew that the town (up near the top of this ridge would be cold and drizzly.

The same ridge, but nearly cloudless...

Also this month, we got a call from our bosses telling us that next time we came into Nairobi we were getting a new car. We went from 2-door to 4-doo so it seems huge and luxurious. The shock system in the 2001 Pajero IO  (left) must be in such good shape compared to our Pajero jr (right). We were astounded at the smoothness in the ride. We felt pretty lucky! We've named it Olashumpai which is the Maa term for Doug and I. It means white person/someone with a higher standard of living. It seemed to fit completely.

This month we've started to get tomatoes from our 6 plants. We've been eating kale for a while now. Peppers are coming, potatoes are close, chard has been regular eating and more on the way...

This past week we had two different board trainings for our partners. This is our trainer, a wise woman of 69 who travels around training all of MCC's partner organizations on how to be good organizations. It is often thankless work since it requires so much repetition, but we know it is invaluable and the people are always grateful and feel enlightened on things they've never known- like the responsibilities of a board, the secretary, etc. They work on mission statements and strategic plans and learn how to use policy to keep corruption from sneaking in.

This is an exercise where the board members draw their community now and their vision for the community in 10 years.

The newly elected board of one of our partners after their first retreat style training.