Peter and Paul

Posted by Ali

Would you believe that I went to bed at 9:30 last night?! Yeah, I can barely believe it either. I was pretty tired and there was no internet in my room to tempt me to stay up later so I ignored my night-owl tendencies and crawled in bed. But it seems that no matter when I go to bed, I pretty much always wake up eight hours later. Yes, I woke up at 5:30 this morning to the screeches of the resident storks who have decided they should be my natural alarm clocks. Although I was very much awake, I managed to doze off for a couple more hours before actually getting out of bed and at 9 a.m. I was standing outside the ADRA gate with Danielle. Yona, the programs director, drove up a couple minutes later to pick us up and drive us to church. We had thought we'd be going with him to a mountain church to help out with the kids but, since Yona had been gone for a few weeks traveling for ADRA, he wanted to go himself this week to make sure that everyone knew we were going to come there and then he'd bring us with him next Sabbath. So his driver dropped us off at the university church, the one we'd gone to last week, and they left for the mountain church, telling us they'd be back at noon to pick us up.

Danielle and I went in and found seats for the Sabbath School program and then, when lesson study started, we found out that there was a class in English so we went to that one. We were the only females out of the seven people in the class and at least four of the five the men in the class with us were pastors or administrators of the university. They were all very friendly and excited to have us in the class with them and we went around the circle introducing ourselves. For Sabbath school we had a very lively discussion about the lesson but, since neither Danielle or I have a quarterly to study over here with us, we mostly just listened. Then men, though, did encourage us to give our opinions about the issues in the lesson several times and we did as best we could when we were asked. After the lesson Danielle talked to one of the men who, during the course of the lesson, had said he went to Spicer College in India. Danielle told him that her grandpa was the president of that college for years and so they found a common bond through her grandpa. That's something I love about the Adventist church...that we can find people in common with, it seems, nearly any Adventist around the world. It's just so neat!

We found a seat again near the front of the church and the kids from Havilah Orphanage, which is located on the University of Arusha campus, came and sat with us. One little girl, who I would guess was about 9 years old, sat on my lap for the last part of the service. It was a very long one. All the preliminaries, like welcome and announcements and songs and offering and special music, started close to 11 and when the sermon started I looked at my watch and was surprised to find out that it was 11:51. I was a little worried that Yona would have to wait outside for us forever, but since we were in the second row from the front, we didn't want to just walk out right at the start of the sermon. We ended up staying and by the time the sermon was over I kind of wished we had left. The preacher was very fired up about the story of Peter getting out of prison with the help of the angels and his shouting made me almost cringe (on the inside) more than once. I found myself paying more attention to the Swahili words the translator was saying than the English ones shooting out of the preacher's mouth. Finally the sermon was over and we filed out and found Yona's Land Cruiser in the parking lot. They had been on time to pick us up and we felt terrible that they had been waiting for us for almost an hour, but they assured us that it was fine and they'd have a good time sitting there and talking. Yona said he would have felt bad to have us miss the sermon. During the drive back to the ADRA campus we talked a bit about what we are going to do at his church next Sabbath and then they let us off and Danielle and I parted ways to make our own lunches.

Food has been better for me lately. I've mastered the art of turning on the gas stove (which is much easier to do when I can find the matches!) and I also have been savvy-minded enough to learn how to toast bread in a frying pan. I actually kind of like it better than toast from a toaster (although toast from a toaster oven is still my favourite) and I definitely like it better than toast from a toaster that has spider webs and dead spiders in it. I really need to give the kitchen a thorough cleaning someday soon... In the afternoon I started a book that I had bought at Campmeeting and enjoyed getting into that and then around 5 p.m. I wandered over to the baby home and helped the volunteers and nannies there give the kids their supper. After feeding them, we took most of the babies back to the playroom and played with them while the nannies came periodically to get another baby changed and bathed and into a sleeper and put into a crib. Jackie and I played with the babies and she taught me some of their names. These are the ones I can still remember: Hope (who I met last Sabbath), Jacob, Karen, Jackie, Miriam, Tessa, Ramah and Paul.

Jackie told me a bit about Paul. He has very underdeveloped legs that I'm not sure he can really use at all and, while he looks like he's about one and a half, he's actually three years old but just doesn't grow anymore. Jackie also said that Paul is a forgotten child because he doesn't make a fuss or a bother and just sits in his baby swing and watches all the other kids. So once all the crawling and walking and crying babies were thinned out a bit and taken to bed, I went over to the swing where Paul sat and tried to engage him in a game with a small squishy ball. Eventually he reached out his arm to grab the ball, but had a really hard time holding onto it and basically just dropped it as soon as he had a grasp on it. When all the rest of the babies were out of the playroom and it was just me and him, I took him out of his swing and tried to get him playing with some of the other toys lying around the room. Then he did laugh a little bit, but still was rather quiet and couldn't really do any actual playing. It almost broke my heart to see a three year old like that when I know many three and even two and one year olds who can do more, physically, than Paul can. I decided that I really have to go over to the baby home more often and try to spend some time and work with the kids who don't demand, and therefore don't get, a lot of attention. I saw several during my few hours over there and there are probably more that I didn't notice. There's got to be with 40 babies in the big house and 10 more in the nursery.