Our new house!

We said goodbye on Tuesday to many of these great people at Africa Based Orientation and headed to RVA!  The drive was an incredible climb out of Nairobi to the 7500 foot elevation of Rift Valley Academy.  It was a beautiful drive and we enjoyed every minute of it.  We were met by our host and hostess and went right to our house!

This is us!  It is one of the older houses on campus with lots of character, but coming from a very old house in Colorado, we feel right at home!  The yard is beautiful and large, and the same can be said for the inside.  We'll have some inside pictures soon.  The solar panels on the roof are for heating our water, and there are many other distinctly "Africa" features of the house that we'll have to tell you about soon too.

Here is the front yard.  We have a wonderful hedge to keep the kids contained, and the family before us built this fort in the front yard, which Faith and Joel have really been enjoying!  There's also a "sand" (aka dirt) box and a swing in the tree in the right side of the photo.  It's just perfect.

Here's Joel in the living room enjoying a "long-lost" book with his teddy bears.

We are at the tail end of the wet season, so the yard will begin to dry up now, but there are quite a few flowers that we can still enjoy.  We just need to keep the kids from picking them all!

Jim is enjoying getting a few glimpses of new birds.  There's a bird feeder/bird bath in the front yard as well, and he's been taking notes on which plants seem to attract different birds.

I'm a bit embarrassed to admit this, but I decided to settle right in to my kitchen and try my hand at an African angel food cake today... it was good stress relief, with interesting results.  I couldn't quite get the egg whites whipped well enough with the hand beater, yet it seemed to bake up fluffy enough.  It is very sticky, and I think maybe the cream of tartar, cinnamon and cloves that I brought in plastic baggies might have absorbed some chili powder taste that was in another bag close by!  But it is definitely still good enough to enjoy for the next few days, and it was good to build my confidence a little for baking here!  (We have been provided all of our dinner meals so far, so we haven't cooked much at all.)

This is Mount Longonot, out across the Rift Valley, at sunset last night.  One of many beautiful sunsets to come here.  We are so glad to be home!