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| I took a handwritten journal over many of the Kenya trip events, and have compiled a final draft of the 50-page journal (that, if printed out, comes to around 33 pages typed). It's really really long, so except to come back if you plan on reading the entire thing. It took a long time to finally get hammered out, so I wouldn't be surprised if it necessitated bookmarking and checking back later!
Journal Entries of the March 2008 Kenya trip with Building Bridges Ministry. | | |
| Important News about the Africa Trip!
We had a last-minute meeting about the Kenya trip on Tuesday night, where the leader made the tough call to swap out the destination -- changing it from Kenya (now too embroiled in nonsense) to Nigeria instead. He and another admin had planned to go to Nigeria later on after the Kenya excursion but opted to swap them out and go to Kenya after they settle down more. Nigeria is the most populated country in Africa, and is in need of water wells to be drilled, which we will be doing. There is no change in cost, but will require us to leave two days earlier than planned, so that the outgoing flight will be cheaper, to compensate for costs of an otherwise unnecessary local in-country flight by planes that do not normally fly on weekends. The leaders have both been there multiple times, and know all the stops and many many of the locals. I spoke with a fellow newbie who took a similar trip in 2000 to Nigeria with them (Building Bridges Ministry) and she said it was amazing and loads of fun. The water wells we will be drilling will give access to about 5,000 people per day that were otherwise without a clean source of water and had to dip from dirty open wells or directly from rivers.
http://www.buildingbridgesministry.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Nigeria_sm02.gif
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria
Part of the trip will involve rummaging through deep-woods jungle area to visit villages and speak with/encourage locals. We are advised to wear khakis instead of jeans, for in case we were to somehow get them wet (such as wading across a stream) jeans take excessively longer to dry out. The ladies will be required to wear either capris or below-the-knee dresses due to local dress customs and having to wade through water on occasion. Many of the villages have never heard of Christ at all, and worship idols they make out of sticks and keep in their huts or front yard. One part will involve us traveling by native-fashioned canoes down a stretch of river (and thus having to travel back up the same way) but I think locals will be doing the navigation and rowing if any. Of the people going are at least 5 or 6 adult males (incl. me =P, two of which are age 40+), at least two high school gals (one of which has been to Africa before), and one or two women. We will be drilling water wells with man-powered equipment into soil that is largely sand and fairly pliable, then leaving the equipment with the locals to drill their own after we show them how to do it. They will also get a water tower (not much taller than a common american house's chimney) that will provide great water pressure for the thousands of villagers who will trek to the well for fresh clean ground water each day.
The weather is expected to be borderline sweltering tropical, comparable to Texas in mid-summer, but humid since it's on the coast. It is currently in the low 90's. We'll have plenty of purified bottled water, and you can bet I'll be keeping my hair tied up most of the time. I have read that taking garlic pills will keep insects at bay without smelling like garlic to humans, but we are advised to take plenty of pump-spray repellent. You can go to this link while we're gone and see how hot it is while we're there.
http://weather.yahoo.com/forecast/NIXX0012.html
There will be cell phone reception nearly everywhere we go while we're there, with periodic shady spots, and opportunities to charge batteries and electronics where we will be staying (concrete/cinder-block houses). Although I can make international cell calls from my phone to outside the USA at no greater usage cost that a normal call, mine won't work with any of the towers once we're outside of the US. I plan on taking my GPS device.
I told the leader about my tremor issues, to see if I could avoid doing anything that required much brute strength else I might scarcely be able to stand up much less walk the distances needed (but I am good with walking/hiking normally) and he said I could film the experience (although I am still wary of that because of my unsteadiness =P) with a camera they always bring along. Washing will involve dipping water from a bucket and pouring it over oneself, in an enclosed area. We're advised to keep a few rolls of TP with us, although I have experience using leaves when out in the brush before (although I am not certain which leaves in Africa would be advisable!). The food will be chicken-rice-beans everywhere we go. I am a rice fiend, so it all sounds good to me.
The flights/journeys in the plan include from here (WFTX) to Dallas, then Dallas to London, London to Lagos (the most populated city in Nigeria), then east to Benin City (Nigeria), and then possibly to Warri to the south. Total travel time appx 24 hours. I'm not sure which parts will be flights once we get to Africa. BBM paid to have a boat built by locals for missionary use some time ago, that took months to construct, and cost around $300.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=lagos+nigeria&ie=UTF8&t=h&om=0&ll=6.009459,4.86145&spn=4.167322,5.141602&z=8&iwloc=addr
The currency there is Nigerian Naira ("NGN") and the symbol looks like an N with two horizontal lines through it. There is presently about 117.55 Naira per $1.00 USD, making 1 Naira equal 0.8 (8/10ths) cents. There are 100 kobos in a naira.
http://www.xe.com/ucc/convert.cgi?Amount=1&From=USD&To=NGN
There was an issue of me having misplaced my passport, but I found it. It was still stuck in an image scanner I had used to scan/copy a picture of it to give to the leader for record-keeping, instead of where I usually kept it. The living room got mostly cleaned up in the process =P
A big chunk of the group that was going to go has decided to pass up Nigeria. The Mosaic bible study (that I'm a part of) had quite a number going when it was set for Kenya, but pulled out when the destination was changed. They had raised a fair sized amount of money to send their group to Kenya (by church member donations and fund raising) but instead opted to direct their funds to a feeding program in the same Kenya location that had already been ongoing (still thru BBM who doing the trip). Whereas before there was to be 20-30 people going, there are perhaps 7-9 still ob board. Even still, it should prove to be quite a good and worthwhile experience.
I plan to keep a handwritten journal throughout the journey as a bit of a keepsake and start it pretty soon. I've got to get a Hepatitis A immunization, and it is recommended I get a Yellow Fever and Cholera immunization also. Fun fun! We'll be taking Malaria pills a full week before the trip, the week during, and a week after. Apparently there is some kind of special med they will be bringing that is basically a catch-all just in case. They mentioned the name of the med to a nurse who was at one of the earlier meetings and she was like, "yeah, that'll pretty much cover anything you could get there" but I don't remember what it was called.
In addition to our regular baggage, we'll be taking along a slough of donated LifeStraws, which are drinking straws that have a super-efficient filter that you can use to drink river water or stank well water. They are designed to last from several months to a year, and are powered like a regular straw, through mouth suction. The contaminants stay within the straw's filter and can't pass through it. We won't be using them (we'll be taking here-locally bottled purified water) but will be giving them out to locals.
http://www.lifestraw.com/en/low/specs_low.asp
http://www.gizmag.com/go/4418/picture/13888/
The project leader will be making this trip his seventieth (70th) short-term mission trip, and naturally has oodles of experience going through international airport routines, issues with visas and passports, baggage weight limitations, logistics, etc. The official language of Nigeria is English, so there is not anticipated much of a language barrier. There are 4 primary religions in Nigeria, and the Islam sector seems to center largely in the norther regions. There is a sect of people who follow "Chrislam" (a funny combo of Islam-Christianity) that was founded in the city of Lagos in the 80's, the city we'll be landing in from the London flight.
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0126/p01s04-woaf.html
The trip will be appx March 10 thru 25th, with the precised dates yet to be determined due to flight planning logistics currently ongoing. This permits the high schoolers/college students to not miss any/much school due to Spring Break. I'll update once more details are known =)
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| I'm currently hooked on yet another Facebook App, this one being the Scratch-and-Win app. You get 10 credits per day starting out, to buy some flash-based scratch-off tickets. There's three kinds of tickets that cost 1 credit each, one or two that cost 2 credits apiece, and another that costs 5 each. It's basically a matter of scratching off 9 spaces that contain a number, and matching three prize amounts. I win about 4/10 of the time. You win tokens, used in the game to buy prizes. Once you buy all of a certain type of prize, your daily credit allotment goes up so you can buy more per day. I've been shying away a little from Scrabulous, considering they're doing some lawsuit thing and I'm sure if I started up a bunch more they'd pull the plug in the middle of a game =P Don't let that stop you from requesting one from me, though!
I made a little ablestmage.com blog post in objection to the Scrabulous lawsuit, expressing my angst in Scrabble-tile messages. I've also uploaded a ton of trick/glitch/oddity videos for Halo 3, at my YouTube account. I'm up to the middle of season 3 of Grey's Anatomy, so I'm catching up fairly nicely. I finally found a Firefox plugin that lets me download items one at a time that (at last!) works with Rapidshare, so I'm not hogging bandwidth all the time with multiple files and I don't have to get up every few hours to set the next batch going. I had an issue today with Vista's DEP junk, and had to disable it. Which reminds me, I need to re-enabled it. Yikes.
I've been getting fairly odd sleeping hours lately. Last week or so I was staying up until 4am and waking up around 2pm. Lately I'm conking out at 2am and getting up around 12 noon. A night or two ago I could barely even sleep a wink, the twitches and tremors were on something fierce agsain. I slept some in the afternoon, but didn't get a whole lot the next night. It's 10pm now and I'm about to fall over I'm so sleepy =P
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| I just have some unintentional knack for making people fussy with me =P heh
Wasted
the entire day yesterday doing generally nothing at all. Developed an
insane headache all of a sudden but it went away fairly quickly. Found
a new favorite flower: the orange gerbera daisy. I bought two
artificial ones at Hobby Lobby when their stems were half-off last
week, and have them on the desk here. There sure are a lot of cuties at
Hobby Lobby, too. Discovered that a guy I'd met once before works
there, met him at a friend-gathering of sorts (mostly friends of a
mutual friend) and we hit it off somewhat well considering we both
speak French, although he is insanely better at it than I am. I can
come up with a good response in French after like 4 minutes of figuring
out what was just said in an "oh, duh! I should've known what that
meant way faster" reaction =P
This week I hope I can get
scheduled for two shots, a tetanus update and a Hep-A shot for the
upcoming Kenya trip. The trip still seems half-and-half as far as
whether it's on, although I know it is still full on, because I keep
getting mixed impressions about whether the civil unrest is just
overblown or really is something to avoid. In some articles, all the
stores are closed.. but in others, tourists aren't having too much
trouble with it.
Or leader dude, who will be making this March trip his seventieth
short term mission trip, says he has near-daily contact with a bunch
that are over there and they keep emphasizing that it's still OK to
come down it seems. He said it's largely an issue between two major
tribes that have a disagreement on a recent election tally, but that
both tribes recognize the dire importance of missionaries and foreign
assistant (like tourism) and have no issue with visitors bringing aid,
since both tribes benefit. They agree than tourists and missionaries
are off-limits from their political issues, so it seems like safe
passage is very plausible. The lead guy also noted that our lodging is
guarded by security personnel, so overnights should be no worry.
I'm
considering making some sort of atypical eBay auction for messages that
will be written in a notebook that will be taken to Kenya with me and
then shredded and thrown into the landfill. They can be confessions,
prayers, proclaimations of love, etc, and charge like $2 for each
message, to help offset the costs of the trip. Good idea? Bad idea? | | |
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