The morning started with a close encounter with some giraffes! A driver from the mission organization graciously drove us to Giraffe Park.. a place where you pay the equivalent of about $3 US ... get a handful of feeding pellets and make your way up a platform where giraffes freely make their way up to you and lick them right out of your hand...and mouth! ... we took a ton of pictures of course and some of us decided to be brave so we stuck a longer pellet between our lips and got a big fat kiss from the giraffe as it got the pellet out!...a little gross with the slobber but its just one of those life experiences where its like...when else are you ever gonna be able to do that? One of the national workers also gave us a short talk on the giraffes, and we were informed that their saliva actually contains antiseptic as their favorite food is a type of cacti which often produces sores in their mouth, making the antiseptic very advantageous...and making their kisses very safe for us :)
Our next stop was an elephant orphanage a couple of kilometers away. Unbelievably, the elephant orphanage was only about $7 US and we arrived just in time to get a good standing posistion for their feeding time. A thin rope attached to flimsy poles was all that seperated us from 6 young elephants that immediately came running up towards us and headed straight for the 6 workers standing with bottles of formula 2 feet in front of us. The elephants were incredibly eager for their feeding (although they get fed every 3 hours, they still have a hearty appetite!) After they consumed their milk, they started to play with the twigs on the ground, wrapping them up in their long noses; they got drinks from the buckets of water and squirted them at each other. It was obvious that the elephants were very social and had a tight bond with the human workers. The smallest elephant there, only a couple of months old, stayed by his human worker the entire time after feeding, wrapping its nose around his arm and following just behind him wherever he walked. We were told that all of the 11 elephants who stayed at this orphanage were rescued after their mothers' had been poached for their ivory in the south of Kenya or had died of natural causes such as starvation. When they reached 2 years old they would be transferred to another orphanage sight in a protected area in southern Kenya where they would slowly be reintroduced back into the wild. It really seems like a great program and it was a joy to touch their prickly skin and see their playful spirits. Our God is SO creative! We rode back in the van and thought about what joy animals can bring!
We made it back to Mayfield Inn in time for a duumpling and mashed potato lunch after which we were met by a lady we will be working with next week. She works in a ministry called "Changing Times" in the middle of Kibera, a slum in Nairobi, Kenya...and in fact the biggest slum in all of Africa. They provide health care, education and spiritual support for the very poor population in the slums...many of whose inhabitants live on less than a dollar a day. We learned a lot about the economic and social conditions of Nairobi as a whole but especially relating to the Kibera slum. We will go in next week in small groups accompanied by nationals and ministry workers where we will assist in doing physicals and giving medications and will do our best to love on the kids we find there!
Other news, the last 2 memebers of our team arrived today, they are a married couple in their 20s from Melbourne, Australia. They both work as nurses in Australia and will be with us for the next 4 weeks before they will go back to their jobs at home. Like most of us on the trip, they are thinking about a future in medical missions and hope that this trip will give them some insight on whether or not it is for them!
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