The New Year

Tuesday, January 1st
There was no electricity again when we woke up this morning. All of the caregivers did come to work though! Staci had asked our group if we would be willing to care for babies if some or all of them were unable to make it. Today was the day we needed to make a decision about coming home. Raila Odinga was calling for a rally at Uhuru Park in downtown Nairobi. He said there would be a million Kenyans there to swear him in as President. We discussed leaving a day early so we would be in Nairobi and that much closer to the airport. We also discussed leaving two days later in hopes that everything would be over by then. We learned that Staci's parents delayed their arrival from January 2nd to the 10th and the airline didn't charge them anything! Our regular driver also wanted us to wait a week but we told him we would rather not wait that long. It was finally decided that we would leave the baby center at 7:00am on Thursday to hopefully get to the airport before anything happened. This was going to put us at the airport almost 14 hours ahead of our flight but seemed to be the safest and best choice. Pastor Dave asked us to OK it with Terry Duncan of WGM as he had issued a no travel request for all of the WGM missionaries in Kenya. We did, and Terry felt our plan would work fine and suggested an alternate route to the airport. We were told by both Pastor Dave and Denny Yoder that people were praying for us. It was such a comforting feeling as there were so many "unknowns". Dan and Dana were also to make a decision by tomorrow if they were going to leave early and come home with us. We once again painted railings and windows. And of course spent as much time as possible with the babies. The Jesus Freaks group from church had sent 20 onesies that the students had tie-dyed. It wasn't easy, but we were able to get a picture of each one on a baby! They looked so cute! The men again "dipped" water from the rain tanks because the pumps weren't working. Shadrach's uncle was able to get water from somewhere nearby and drove it to the baby center on a tractor pulling a 3,000 liter tank. That helped, although they still didn't plan on doing laundry today. This morning at Chai one of the workers told me that the men in her area stayed up all night to guard their homes. Normally Chai time is a time to relax and chat with the Kenyans who are working that day. This trip though most of the conversations revolved around what was happening in their country. We all played Catch Phrase after supper. It was fun, but we all felt a little down tonight because we realized that tomorrow was going to be our last day here.