Several comments about the exciting contest:

1. Many of you have WAY too much time on your hands.
2. If someone is having a baby and I yell `Name it Steve or Stephanie’ that is CHARMING. If you suggested the name Steve or Stephanie to name a COW, it is a sign of IMMATURITY and RUDENESS.
3. Those of you that decided to use this contest as an opportunity to insult me severely hurt your chances of winning.
4. We had more response to this email than when we announced that we were adopting Katie and Ben. It has made us ponder if we should have adopted cows, or had a contest for naming the babies. 5. There were over 150 entries, and it was not easy to come up with a winner. But in the end, with the help of our Kenyan friends, we picked the following:

Kow-Jabe

The winner will receive a beautiful batik, and I’ve enclosed an attachment of it as a sample of this artist’s work. If you are interested, or just sore that you didn’t win, there are more available. Just let us know.

We invited some special Kenyan friends to lunch, and after lunch, I told them `I have tried to understand your culture, but you must join me in understanding my culture. You cannot truly do that unless you watch `Star Wars’ and eat popcorn.’

You haven’t seen Star Wars until you have seen it with people outside your own culture. They did like Chewbacca the best, but we suspect it is because Katie sounds like Chewie when she is happy. They all seemed to enjoy the refreshments, but they all referred to it as `popcorns’ which made Matthew giggle.

During the lunch, we asked all our Kenyan friends about Fred’s wedding. Both JT and Matthew are going to be in the wedding (JT as a groomsmen and Matthew playing the wedding march) and Fred has assured us that it would only last an hour. I polled the rest of my Kenyan friends at the table and asked them for their guess on times:

Grace: Five hours.
Stephen: All day.
Cecilia: Five hours.
Joel: All day and some of the night.

The wedding is Saturday. If you don’t hear from us, you will know why.

Matthew and I went down to the hospital to deliver some gifts to the children. We haven’t been able to go as much during the term because of the twins, so it was special to be down there. We saw the usual sad cases, and I was reminded of what a friend of mine said about working in the African health care system: `This is the only place I’ve ever worked where malaria is a hopeful diagnosis, because at least it can be treated.’

While we were leaving, we heard a small girl, about 5, crying as she was being dismissed. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, and I asked the nurse if she was still in pain.

The nurse said no, she wasn’t in pain. The little girl was crying because the hospital was the first place she had eaten three meals a day, and she didn’t want to go home and be hungry again.

Last week a Kenyan friend stopped by to see the babies, and was amazed at how big they are. She asked what we fed them. Nancy replied `Fruit, vegetables, cereal and formula.’ Our friend responded `If you can give them all of that, then they will be very healthy.’ Again, a reminder that a balanced diet is out of the reach of most Kenyans; once a baby is off of breast milk, it usually stops having a regular and balanced diet.

As we celebrated with a sunrise service this morning, I kept thinking about them. We are surrounded by people who do all they can to provide one meal a day for their family.

It’s just not right.

Steve Peifer

PS Jeff Brodie was released from the hospital and is doing better. Thank you.