A Different Day

Written Wednesday, November 15th

Today has been a bit of a bizarre day here at MCF Ndalani. Everything was just a little different… A little different and a little bizarre. Let me explain more. It started out normal – get up, get dressed, head to breakfast, etc. Then at breakfast we heard that the Gr. 12 students (who have all just finished their final exams) will be heading to the Yatta location to do tree planting. Lindsey and I thought it would be neat to go along, so we inquired. It took a little while to find out so we chilled in our room while we waited. Our answer came – not today, but yes another day. That was fine, so we headed to work.

Due to the delay leaving the house, we got to work about an hour or so late. Joshua, the farm manager, said that the fields were a bit muddy and gave us some office work to do instead. Then while we were working in the office we saw quite a sight. A group of about 10 boys were outside trying to push a tractor that had gotten stuck in the mud. They were pushing and pushing and pushing and at last the tractor was free. But the tractor wasn’t working properly so we watched as the boys pushed the tractor all of the way from the farm office, down the driveway, onto the lane and all the way down the road. The best part of the whole thing was when the guy who was steering the tractor got a call on his mobile, so there he is sitting on the tractor talking on the cell phone while he’s been pushed by the boys down the road. There is a great example of one of the paradoxes of Kenya!

Shortly after this we went for lunch and then tried to find one of the staff members because we were going to have a meeting with him. Our day was about to get even more bizarre. As we were looking for this person we wandering into the big hall where we found some of the senior boys literally doing back flips off of the stage onto the concrete floor below. That itself was pretty cool and kind of dangerous. We found out from them that Mr. Tom (the man we were looking for) was sending them up to the farm office to help get the MCF cube van out of the mud. Apparently the tractor we saw this morning was attempting to pull the van out, but had died and gotten stuck itself in the process. We figured that Mr. Tom was at the farm office right now, so we headed up there with the boys.

Along the way we paused by the greenhouses and the guys starting doing backflips again, this time off of on of the dirt embankments. I pulled out my camera and starting taping them. When they realized this they came running over to see the clips. They loved watching themselves! This of course inspired them to do more sets of back flips for me to video tape so that they could watch more. I felt like a proud big sister!

Once the gymnastics session was over we finally made it to our destination. The truck was stuck but good in the mud. We watched them struggle for almost 30 minutes trying to get it out. It took planks of wood, a tractor pulling and 40 high school boys pushing for that truck to finally be free. As you can imagine, there was a great cheer of victory when at last the van was on firm ground. The hole that it had been lodged in was big enough to take a bath in. I don’t think they’ll be driving anywhere near that location again.