There have been lots of changes in our lives, but sometimes you sort of get used to them until they all jump out at you. Last year, when we were in the states, I would get really annoyed at advertisements on the radio. I found that if I did not understand what they were saying, it didn’t annoy me as much; that is why I started listening to Latino music.

I fell in love with a group called La oreja de Van Gogh. I don’t speak a word of Spanish, and I have no idea what the song means but they have a song called Puedes contra conmigo which is my favorite of the moment. (if you download the song from iTunes and discover that it is about being in love with a goat, please don’t tell me)

Anyway, Ben loves to sing along with songs. And the other day, he was sitting in my lap and we were looking out the window and it came on. And Ben started to sing:

Un café con sal. Ganas de liorar…

And I looked at my Kenya boy singing a Latino song, and all the changes in my life just hit me. I am so grateful for my little boy, and I love Latino music, but it seemed so overwhelming that there was only one solution.

I put on some Neil Diamond.

It may be in bad taste to tell you that our coldest months are July/August, because I have heard how hot it was in the states. It was so cold one day that you could see your breath at noon. This is particularly important when you don’t have heat in your house outside of a fireplace. The result was Katie and Ben got bronchitis, and Katie’s moved into pneumonia. She is almost all the way better, but it was a rough two weeks for her, and when Katie isn’t happy, nobody is happy.

Speaking of bad taste, I’m not quite sure how to share my recent experience with the Kenyan health care system. If you are over 50, doctors suggest you have a procedure that is unnatural. I went into the waiting room, and I was sitting there thinking `It just SUCKS to get old.’ Then a staff member came in, and I asked why he was there. When he told me that he was getting a vasectomy, suddenly life just seemed GRAND.

It’s all perspective.

We actually have two more computer centers completed. What took a year with the mission has taken six weeks with a businessman. Walter, our friend in the mission who is the designer of the labs, worked on about 18 projects at a time. We weren’t a priority, and we probably shouldn’t have been. But it got the ball rolling, and created a prototype for our new vendor to follow. He has completed two so fast that we don’t even have computers in the country yet.

I interviewed some teachers, and had to reject several because of their low level of knowledge. (One guy knew so little it was safe to say that he had NO level of knowledge.) I was talking to another guy, and I told him that he had the chance to change children’s lives. He asked me what the pay was.

During another interview, I told Samuel that he might be the only chance some of these kids would ever have. He looked at me and said `That is my dream.’

I knew we had our guy.

Center number four with Samuel at the Longanot school

We have the distinction of having a senior in high school, a freshmen in high school, and two kindergartners. School started yesterday for Ben and Kate, and it was a sweet time for all of us to walk them to their first day of school

I remember the first day of school for JT, and now it is just a few short months and he will be going to the states for college. Katie told me that she didn’t like college because college was going to take her JT from her.

I know how she feels.

Your pal