Kenya (4)

Saturday was a bit less active but in some ways more exhausting than anything we have done so far. We attended a music festival / choir competition in Kaburu. Treated as honoured guests we were seated on a pew to the side at the front of church right next to where the choirs would perform in full view of a packed building. However, no one had warned us what the format of the competition was. There were 21 choirs in our section of the competition and each performed four pieces. The first piece by the first choir was pleasant enough but after the third choir I thought the song sounded familiar. It turned out that in the first competition each choir sings the same piece and after two and a half hours I decided that if I never heard 'Jesus comes with power to gladden' in Swahili again it will be too soon. The pews were painful and I kept falling asleep in the heat. On Sunday we were to discover that the cathedral choir had won.

Eventually we headed to the vicarage (no green guide for clergy houses in Kenya!) for a pleasant lunch and then it was back into the church for more choral singing. After about half an hour the choirs began to perform traditional Kikuyu folk songs and these were highly entertaining. One song in particular accompanied by traditional instruments and a vuvuzela was brilliantly performed and afterwards we were informed that it was a song against the evils of drink. At this point I decided not too mention I was hankering after a long cool Tusker beer. Two days on and I think my rear end has just about recovered. The toilets were the usual fare though one of our group was caught out when she went in the wrong shed and found herself confronted by some angry chickens. The phrase 'going to see the chickens' has now been employed as a suitable euphemism for the rest of the trip.

The late afternoon included a brief stop back at the cathedral for some tea and a chat with some of the Church Council. The focus of the short discussion was how we might develop ways of partnering in mission between our parishes and this is a very exciting prospect. The council were amazed to discover that our young people had self funded their visit in the summer through months of hard work. The assumption had been that the young people were very wealthy and had been given the money to come to Kenya. We assured the council members that our youth group had been transformed by their experiences on the trip and this in part was why some of our party, which included three parents, had wanted to visit.

Back to the hotel for dinner and to catch up on the footie results and then I spent the rest of the evening preparing my sermon for Sunday morning in the cathedral. Sunday would prove to be an amazing day but the battery on the iPad is running low and there is no power in our game lodge during the day so more about that in the next post.

- posted on iPad using Blogsy from Samburu Game Lodge.