Nairobi

A city of contrasts, Nairobi - beautiful flowers and lots of traffic.  The beginning of the end for our trip. We leave from here in a few hours for the long journey home. This picture of me is today, when I am fresh and rested. There will be no pictures of what I look like when get home. I am having a cappuccino, reading a NY Times Digest, and chilling out.

Sometimes, it feels like paradise here, within the confines of gardens and lush vegetation.

Ed is perusing the "birds of paradise."

In paradise, it can rain and have sunshine at the same time (picture at right). We have had rain around 4 or 5 every afternoon. Sometimes, it just rains for an hour but last night it rained for several hours.

Outside the gardens, we spend a lot of time in lots of traffic!

Yesterday, right after we left the elephant orphanage, it started pouring rain. We were caught in a lot of traffic. I caught this shot of a cemetery through the rain and the fence.

The Africans are great at improvising and entrepreneurship. As we were driving in the rain and getting stuck in the traffic, we spotted this car wash. Yes, people were getting their car washed in the rain. In the past, most car washes we have seen are simply a bucket of water, a rag, and elbow grease.

But this one has a large water tank and high pressure hoses. They take the seats out of the car (notice in the first picture, the seats on the ground in the rain), then they squirt water into the car with the high pressure hose (see the second picture, the silver car in the background).

With Ed's background in the construction industry, we are always curious about construction techniques. Nairobi has lots of construction going on and many of them work seven days a week. We saw this Westin Hotel going up (seriously, it is).

We will miss this part of God's wonderous creation and His children in this part of the world. They have both been good to us; He has blessed us beyond anything we could ask or imagine..... but we are looking forward to our own bed, our own shower, a Little Mike's burger ..... our family and our friends.

We are so grateful for your prayers as we start home.

In Nairobi

We are now in Nairobi.

Our follow up meeting in Dar es Salaam went well. We had several people from Bagamoyo and Dar es Salaam there (people who had been to our conference and workshops last year). We were so excited to see them again. We were very encouraged to hear their testimonies of what God has done since last year.

Our only woman pastor from last year said that she had 3 woman she had counseled on marriage (since learning from us last year) who had reconciled their marriages. One woman had now been separated 10 years from her husband and they were not united again. The other couples she had counseled had similar stories. Some pastors shared about doing sermons and seminars on marriage since last year. They had also performed some premarital counseling. Soon after they started marriage ministry, other pastors have invited them to speak to their churches about marriage. We told the that they are now "marriage missionaries."

We taught a brief session to them about the first wedding and the last wedding in the Bible, and about the marriage covenant, the old covenant, and the New Covenant - what we call a "higher view" of marriage. One pastor told me that it was the first time he realized that marriage is a picture of Christ and the church.

Rhett and Megan spoke about how marriage ministry had impacted their marriage. We told the groups that Rhett and Megan were our visual aids for marriage ministry.

We are now taking a few days of vacation before we start the long flight home on Sunday night.