Meru and Meat!

Well its been a busy few days. On Wednesday we traveled to, Meru. It is about 4 hours away. It was a nice car ride. We stopped at the equator again to take another picture. We stayed in the Safari Hotel there in Meru. This village is located in the mountains of Kenya, so the altitude was a bit higher. Speaking of villages…to people here they think that the 100,000+ people living in Meru makes it a village. To us a village would be very small…but they think that a “village” of 100,000 people is small. Anyways, when we got there we ate dinner in the hotel restaurant. I had chips (French fries) and samosas! The power went out for a bit while we were there, but the generator eventually kicked in. The hotel was nice. It is equivalent at the most to maybe the 2 Acres Motel in Greenville or any hometown motel here in the states. We had a shower with hot water, but the only two temperatures it had was either really cold or scorching. We had blue mosquito nets to sleep with. We woke up to the Muslim prayer at 6am. There was a muslim primary school out back of the hotel…so we also woke up to children screaming and laughing. It also sounded like either a cow was dying or giving birth somewhere behind the hotel. There were lots of noises so we didn’t sleep too well in the morning. We ate breakfast down stairs. Then we waited for Vickie to come back from the church to pick us up. We were supposed to be picked up at 12:30pm so that we would eat lunch out at the church, but plans changed and we ate lunch at the hotel. We ate lunch on the terrace listening to a band play. It was nice. Katelyn, Jordan, and I walked up the streets of Meru a bit. We walked to the grocery store and back. Vickie finally came and got us around 4pm. We went to the church and did a childrens program. We sang songs, did a lesson, played a game, did a craft, and ate a snack. It went well. The kids here at the church in Meru are really fun. I enjoyed myself thoroughly. We ate dinner at the church with all the Pastors Wives because they were having a Pastors wives conference at the same time. All the pastors wives in this district came to Meru for a conference. The power went out at the church too. When we left to go back to the hotel we came back to a dark hotel because the power was out there too! They had candles lighting our way in the hallway so we could see where our room was. We sat out on the terrace with everyone and drank a cold coke and talked. We got up early on Friday morning because the superintendent took us to a cultural, community court. It is called an Elders court. People from the Meru community can bring cases to the elders. Most of the time the person would be fined or have to offer an animal sacrifice to the spirits. Its kind of a cult too. The government acknowledges it. Sometimes the civil court will send a case to the elders court. It was weird. Something like that would never go in the states. Its definitely a cultural thing here. We’ll put up picks later. Then we drove an HOUR away to see if we can view Mt. Kenya, but of course when we got to a viewing point it was too cloudy to see it…oh well. We were also shown this cool lake that was formed by a volcano at one point. You can’t even tell it’s a lake because of all the weeds growing in it. They told us that elephants come here to drink water!! We wanted to see an elephant sooo bad! We stopped to eat lunch at the river lodge place. It was in the middle of nowhere. It was kind of cool though. It is where we saw those big black and white monkeys with long fur. There were like six of them running! It was awesome! We eventually made it back to Meru to do another childrens program. Now we are back in Nairobi! With power! Ha…

We just got back from the restaurant called, Carnivore! It is a tourist place here in Nairobi. They serve lots and lots of meat. You go in and pay one price and then they bring meat to your table and you eat until you can’t eat anymore! We have been waiting for this night for a long time! We ate 10 different kinds of meat. We had…
Chicken Liver
Regular Chicken
Turkey
Pork
Lamb
Crocodile
Ostrich Meat balls
Ribs
Roast Beef
Sausage

PLUS a baked potato and Ice cream!!! Tell me about it…Im sure your stomach is hurting just thinking about eating all that. We did it though. I liked it all except for the chicken liver and crocodile…the crocodile had too much bone in it. We are fully stuffed though…man. We surrender. Then we went to a gift shop there and looked around. A man dressed in traditional Masai clothing came up to us and had us put on the Masai Womens traditional wedding clothes…ha…and we took pictures. It was really funny. It was a good day. No more meat for awhile though. We have church in the morning!