insert {this is africa} explanation here.

I send many warm, belated Easter greetings to those of you at home. Yes, I have been very quiet lately—I am behind in all facets of my computer life! Last week was packed with Hope Camp action and Gideon’s visit, followed by my exit for a holiday in Mombasa. Unfortunately, that vacation was cut several days short as Susan and I were robbed of belongings and cash from our locked room as we ate downstairs in the hotel restaurant {recommended by Lonely Planet by the way}. The manager proceeded to explain that he “did not believe there was a thief.” He even searched our refrigerator, because that is the first place I would hide my own camera in the event I was filing a false report with the worthless Kenyan tourist police {yes, tourist police}. Spending the afternoon in the Mombasa central police station being insulted by unintelligent men was not exactly how Susan and I had hoped to pass our vacation on the Indian Ocean or my last week in Kenya before I return briefly to the States. Sadly, there are no surviving photos of me riding Jack the camel…and I have painfully lost an appendage {my smaller Nikon}. This is Africa…

On a positive note, there is no place in the world as stunning as the Kenyan countryside from noon to dusk to midnight: monstrous baobab trees growing only below 2,000 feet on the coastal plain, spectacular lightning shows, the green oasis of Voi, the barely visible north slope of Kilimanjaro hiding in the clouds, hundreds zebra and impala crowding the highway in the dead of night, and Julius’s compassion and commentary.

“That man deserves a toot.”

I really do love this place. It feels so much like home now and I am going to miss it for a month.

Love to you with a promise of updates and details about happier things very soon,

tnick