Flying by!

Hello family and friends!! It has been awhile since we have posted, and I am sorry about that. Time has definitely gotten away from us this semester! One of my fears (Tricia) going into this semester was that it would drag on since we don't have a holiday until the beginning of April. I am seeing now, that, thankfully, my fear will not come true. We have already been in school for 6 weeks and it has been such a blur. Everyone here told us that the Spring semester flew by, but we couldn't understand how that would happen. I can't say anything really major has been going on, it has just been busy. My job has really picked up and I am enjoying staying busy each day. Ed also has seen how this semester is going by so quickly and has been enjoying teaching. 

Next week for the Elementary school here we have Spiritual Emphasis Week (SEW). For those of you who have been reading our blog, you might remember me blogging last semester about the Middle School and High School SEW. Now it is the Elementary schoolers turn. Each afternoon next week is set aside for SEW. From what I have been told this will look a lot like a VBS in the states. The kids will go to craft stations, watch dramas, sing songs, etc. This is a really neat thing that the school does considering the churches here do not do anything like VBS. Plus, the students we have that do not come from a Christian family get immersed with the gospel all week. It is definitely a prime time to witness to these students and hopefully their families as well. Please be in prayer for this time, that the students will really grasp what it is to be a child of God and that their ears and hearts will be open. I will fill you in about how it goes.

I realize I haven't done a very good job of posting prayer requests on our blog, and I am going to try to do a better job about that. Here are some prayer requests we have right now:

• Our marriage: Please pray that God will continue to strengthen our marriage and that we will grow closer to one another while serving here in Kenya.
  
• Our quiet times: that we will be diligent in spending time with the Lord and open to his guiding.
• Work: that we will see every opportunity God gives us to show his love to these children.
• That we will remember whole-heartedly why we are here in Kenya and not get pulled away by worldly things.
• Please keep Ed's mom, Nancy, in your prayers as she continues to battle cancer. We are praying for God's healing touch on her body.

Thank you for sharing in our adventures with us here in Kenya. We are blessed with a wonderful group of family and friends. We pray that God blesses you wherever you are in your life and walk with him. 

Ed wants to say "hi" to all of the students of CJHS and CHS!! :)

In Him,

Tricia

Lake Naivasha and Mombasa

Hello all! We hope you are having a wonderful beginning to the new year! We wanted to share some pictures with you from our camping trip and our trip to the coast. We went camping a couple of nights, including New Year's Eve, a week and a half ago. There were 6 of us total from Rosslyn that went. We went to a sight that borders Lake Naivasha. One neat thing about the site is hippo's will come up during the night to the shore to eat. We were lucky one night to see one. We also went to Crater Lake, which was just about an hour from where we were camping, to hike. We also ended up doing a night game drive which was a  really neat experience. Here are a couple pictures from that trip:

One other cool thing about the site is there is a large group of monkeys that live nearby and often stroll through the campgrounds. They are cute, but we know enough to keep our distance.

This is the top view of Crater Lake and it's surroundings.

We had a great time on our trip to Mombasa this last week. It was full of swimming and relaxing, a perfect vacation! :) We did go snorkeling one day which was really cool. We saw a lot of different kinds of starfish and some cool fish. The resort we went to was really nice and the beach was beautiful. We had a wonderful time hanging out with our friends Kelly and Matt and getting some sun! 

Kelly, Matt, Ed and Tricia 

This is the view we had from our porch off of our room. A nice view to wake up to!

We start our 2nd semester here at Rosslyn tomorrow. Please pray that we will be positive and encouraging in all the situations we may find ourselves. Pray that our students will see the Love of the Lord shining through us each day. Thank you for your encouragement. It is almost unbelievable to think we have been here for almost 6 months. We have had our rough times, but the Lord is faithful. We hope you all are blessed abundantly!

~Ed & Tricia

Happy New Year!

I hope you all have had a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year! I am running a little behind on getting our photos up. Below are a few from Christmas. We were blessed to spend Christmas with Matt and Kelly's family. Matt and Kelly have become very good friends to us here and it was great being able to meet Matt's parents and sister. We also had a family and friend from the church Matt works at join us. We had a nice Christmas Feast in our backyard. It was a wonderful time of fellowship.

Katie, Matt's sister, brought a gingerbread house for little Melanie to build. I think Melanie had more fun eating the candy than anything else, but it was lots of fun to watch!

Above is Matt's mom and sister: Dena and Katie. And Emily and her 2 little ones.
Above is Ed, Matt, Matt's dad Doug, and Ken who is a friend of Matt's from church. Not in a picture is me and Kelly and Moses, Emily's husband who works with Matt.
This is our lovely Kenyan Christmas Tree!! You are able to get small trees here, but since we don't have ornaments or anything, we just decided to go with our lamp tree. It worked for a little bit of holiday cheer! :)

I hope you have all had a blessed beginning of the new year! We went camping over New Years Eve with a group from Rosslyn and had a great time! I will try to post some pictures from it next weekend. Tomorrow we are headed out to Mombasa on Kenya's coast. It should be a wonderful relaxing vacation before we start school next week. Pictures of that will be coming eventually in the future too! :)

God bless!

Ed & Tricia

Merry Christmas!

Here are the pictures I promised from our Thanksgiving lunch with friends and our "Turkey bowl" flag football game! Hope you enjoy!!

 

This is our gathering for the Thanksgiving feast!

Us in our "Turkey Bowl" shirts!  :)

The Gentlemen! 

The Ladies!!

This is the group of Turkey bowlers! Most played, some were spectators. We had a blast!

On to the present: We are officially out of school for 3 weeks on Christmas break! Our first semester at Rosslyn went very well. It wasn't without stress or frustration, but that was to be expected with all of the newness we experienced. Ed is settled into his job quite nicely and I feel like I am getting the hang of mine. Being here in Nairobi is becoming more and more normal to us. We are realizing that Christmas time is a hard time to be so far away from family. Please keep us in your prayers that our homesickness during this time will be a minimum. We are blessed to be able to spend Christmas dinner with some friends and their parents who came over. I will fill you in on all of those details after Christmas. I pray that you all have a wonderful Christmas celebrating the birth of our Savior! God bless!!

 

~Ed and Tricia

 

Blessed Thanksgiving

Greetings and Happy Belated Thanksgiving!! I hope you all had wonderful Thanksgivings with family and friends. This year was our first year to not be able to spend the holiday with our family. As much as we would have loved being with our family, I think we definitely  had the next best thing! We were surrounded by friends and actually got to have 2 awesome Thanksgiving meals!

On Thursday evening we had dinner at the Conways. The Conways are a family that my younger brother and sister-in-law got to know last summer when they were here on a mission trip. They are such a sweet family and have been so welcoming to us. Hollye set up her dining room with all fall things: leaves, a fall table cloth, candles... It was so homey feeling and really just made us feel like we were having a "normal" Thanksgiving. We are so thankful to them for allowing us to be a part of their Thanksgiving dinner. :)

On Friday we got together with some Rosslyn folks to have a Thanksgiving lunch. There were about 19 adults and 6 kiddos and we had it in a finished basement of a Rosslyn rented house. The kids had made place mats and name tags for all of us which was really cute. We had an assortment of holiday foods and enjoyed some great fellowship. Afterwards. (a couple hours afterwards...gotta let the food settle!!) about 14 of us went out and had the 1st Annual Turkey Bowl! Sounds fun, huh?! We played flag-football for an hour and a half straight. It was so much fun! We had gotten together earlier in the week and made some Turkey Bowl t-shirts. I didn't have my camera, but am supposed to be getting emails of some pics. I'll post some on here when I get the. Anyway, we had a great time and a wonderful holiday weekend! We are very blessed with the friends God has provided. :)

Again, I hope you all had a blessed Thanksgiving! Love and miss!

~Ed and Tricia

National Holiday

Hello all! Well to start with the first part of my title, we got a day off of school when Obama won the Presidential Election. So, how many days did ya'll get off in the states?? :) Yeah, I know, it was a crazy week! The President of Kenya called a National Holiday on Wednesday when the vote was final. We found out that holidays can be called without a moments notice! Definitely different than what we are used to! We had an inservice that Monday and then had Thursday off as well. The students only had school 3 days that week! We also weren't the only country in Africa to have a day off. One country got 2 days while another got a whole 5 days!! Yep, can you say "Craziness!!!!"

 

Anyway, we are doing well. Still staying busy. Ed is done with basketball while this will be my last week. Our Varsity girls won a tournament this last Saturday which was a lot of fun. Tomorrow (Wed.) we play in the League Semi-Final game to determine whether we will have the opportunity to play for the championship. It has been fun and I have really enjoyed the girls.

Ed sends his regards. :) We love and miss you all! May God be with you and bless you!

~Ed and Tricia

Catching up

Us!

This is Ed and one of his 8th grade students next to the different animal bones and skulls.

Sweetwater has a santuary set up for chimps because they have become endangered. They started with a couple that were rescued and now have dozens in their care.

Zebras!

Family of Rhino's. The baby was cute! :)

Hello all! So I just remembered that the time change in the states took place last night. Now there is a 9 hour difference between us and our beloved Texas. :) And yes, that is very confusing! We are doing well. Staying busy at the school. It is hard to believe it is already November! A month and a half and we will be on Christmas break and finished with our first semester at Rosslyn. Above are some pictures of the middle school CFS trip. Part of that trip was going on a short safari with our group of students. The pictures are from that event. Hope you enjoy them! We love and miss you all so much! Thank you for your continued prayers. 

Love,

Ed and Tricia