Day 1 Lake Nakuru

So now that I am home and have my computer and some pictures I will go back and try to provide a little more detail about each day. So we arrived in Nairobi minus one (our leader) and made our way to the guest house and retired for the evening as all of the events of the last days traveling were tiring. We woke up on Saturday and Joel had been able to get a new passport and join us. His story of how God moved and he was able to get a passport is pretty incredible and I will share with you later.

So we all hopped on our bus with no idea of how much time we would be spending on this bus over the course of this trip. I took a picture of us standing around getting ready to load here it is. As you can see the day started out a little overcast. The plan for this day was to take the kids from the Havilla orphanage on a game ride at Lake Nakuru. We were meeting them on the road to Lake Nakuru as we were coming from different directions. On the way we saw monkeys and cattle...lots of cattle. We drove for what felt like forever but I am sure that's just because we were so excited to be on the ground and get this party started. Our drive was a little over an hour. The ride was bumpy but nothing like what was in store for us. On the way I had a lot of emotions and thoughts. It's overwhelming to be living out a dream that you never thought would come true. And I was also hoping I would be able to connect to the children, what will they be like, how are we all going to connect.

Finally we pulled over and it was a place where tourists can stop and take pictures as well as shop and I use the word shop umm loosely. Here are the pictures I took of the view:

Isn't it gorgeous? It was quite a site. So now we are here waiting, for the kids and the men and women who own the little huts with various items are some of the most aggressive sales people I have seen in my life. It's a little off putting but some of their items are quite gorgeous. I did not buy anything here as a matter of fact its one of the few places I didn't buy anything.

A few more minutes pass and two buses pull up with lots of children and before we know it they are off the bus and running over to us. All of our concerns about connecting literally vanished in the blink of an eye. These kids are just simply put magnificent. They are open, loving, incredibly well behaved and excited. I had no idea at this point how much these kids would mean to me over the next couple of days. Here's the first pictures I took as we greeted them even before we got back on the bus. In these pictures it a close up of some of the children and a group shot that includes Leslie our co-leader and Joel's wife and Simon our bus driver. You can see some of the shops from this stop in the back there. The little girl is the front is Grace and I will give you more info about her later.

Can you believe the excitement on their faces? The joy, the excitement and these pictures were taken just minutes after they got off their buses. So after a few minutes we divided into three groups because we had three buses and we divided into three groups and we loaded up to head to Lake Nakuru.