Pampa

Today our team from Pampa, TX has arrived in Kitale! We are excited to have them here. Our children have been counting down the days and today when they sang, it was obvious they were excited to have visitors.... and maybe a good lunch to have with the visitors as well. But we'll say all the excitement was for the visitors alone :-). When they arrived, the team dropped their bags at the team house, then went out to Mattaw Children's Village. It's about a 10-15 minute drive from the team house. The children greeted them at the gate and did a little march thing from the gate to house one. They sang, danced, recited memory verses, and welcomed them all. We then had chicken pilau for lunch. I'm pretty sure that was the best chicken pilau in the country! Our house two mom knew how to cook it when coming to Mattaw so we introduced it into the weekly menu. Our kids always look forward to Saturday lunches. Since we had visitors come in today, we switched today's lunch with tomorrow so that we'd have a nice first meal with them and the teachers could enjoy with us. They then had a tour of Mattaw and played soccer with the children for the afternoon. While they hung out with the kids, Brittany, Rachel and myself headed to town to finish up a few errands and get a few Kenyan ladies started on helping make dinner for the team. I'll have to give a bit more update on who Rachel is, but to sum it up, she is here for a month to help volunteer at Mattaw. She got her first try at helping make chapati's for the team. This is the Kenyan version of tortillas. She also helped watch my kiddos while Brittany and I finished up making all the beds for the team. Well, we kinda traded off. But my kids already love her. We welcomed the team for their first dinner in the team house with chapati, beef stew and rice. Most Kenyans favorite meal. Tomorrow morning the team will spend the morning playing games with the children and doing some activities they brought with them. Then I might take some of the girls with me in the afternoon to go get some skirts made for them. Looking forward to what the week holds! Here are a few random shots I got today...

Mercy is our oldest at Mattaw Children's Village. She came home today for mid-term break and will go back to her secondary school on Tuesday.

And look who already made his way into almost every team member's arms! I'm sure you can't guess who that little charmer is grinning at me...

The kids like having Brittany and Austin around consistently. Austin is right at home with our kids. This would be him "feeding" Jose to the puppy....

And these two random photos I just had to stick in here for the grandparents. And they're sweet little memories I wanted to tuck away in my head to make me smile. I had walked in the living room to find Elisha had put his new blow up chair he just got from his grandma on the table and with his hat and juice watching t.v. It was just cute. (and no, we do not normally let our kids act like monkeys and sit on the tables.)

Grandma also sent Claire her first dress up jewelry. It was pretty cute how she already knew what to do with it and be oh so girly.

Well, except for how most of it became teething toys.

More updates to come on our team