Brother Richard's House

After church, we were kindly invited to the home of Brother Richard, Sister Elizabeth, and their baby Collins. Brother Richard was so kind to arrange everything, including picking us up in a tuk tuk.

This is their home.

The door on the right behind Sister Elizabeth is actually their home. The one behind me is the door to the outside. The walkway we're standing in is a shared area that leads to several homes like Brother Richard's. 

This is quite typical of a Swahili home. The walls, Hunter told me, are built with a wood lattice structure, and then the holes are filled with mud and coral/rocks. Most people, I think, just live with the mud walls bare like this on the inside, but Brother Richard had carefully lined the inside walls with the same fabric that bags of rice are made from.

The home was one room with a shower curtain dividing the little sitting area from the sleeping area. This is also typical. The sitting area consisted of five plastic lawn chairs and a small wooden coffee table. The room was very neat with clean swept tarmac floors and just a few Liahona magazine pictures or free calendars hanging on the wall. There was one light mounted on the wall to provide light at night time. On the other side of the curtain, the sleeping area was just enough space to fit a double bed. And that's it. The only other possessions I saw were a "library" which was a stack of Liahona magazines piled on top of a few strings like a hammock near the ceiling, and some containers of water.

Here I am feeling grateful for lights.

They generously served us several packages of biscuits (pronounced bisk-weets'), bananas and three 1-liter bottles of fanta!

We visited with them only for about an hour. I was very pleased with how the boys behaved. They entertained everyone with the "black magic" game, which they call "green monkey" here. Our hosts were stumped for a good long time until we finally revealed the secret of the trick to them.

Afterward, while we waited for the tuk tuk to come get us again, we strolled outside to see Brother Richard's little vegetable stand business and bought some potatoes from him.

Then we strolled down the "block" to let the kids play with the other children on the huge water pipes and sand.

I was going to trim this video but I thought you'd like the silly guy at the end.

It was a wonderful evening.