For these three months, we're staying in a rural area about 20 minutes drive from Nairobi. We're renting a little cottage only a 2 minute walk from our school and 5 minutes from the international school where we've enrolled Dominic in preschool. We get up at 6:45 every morning, have breakfast together, and then Kris does some studying or walks up to the coffee shop (roughly 7 minutes walk) while Dominic and I do 15-20 minutes of "school work" - learning to write letters and numbers. I then drop Dominic off at school on time for classes to start at 8:30. Currently, our language school has 9 - 12 students (depending on the day) and 7 or more teachers, which is necessary for the small class sizes (1-3 students per class) and one-on-one conversations. We all take a half hour "chai break" at 10:30 and a one hour lunch, and classes are done by 3pm at the latest. After the last four years working 60-80 (or more) hours per week, this schedule is a dream!! The short school hours are somewhat offset by the fact that we spend many more hours at home or in the coffee shop in self-study every day.
So what else are we doing to occupy our time? Making most of our meals from scratch and washing laundry by hand take up a lot of time. Kris has participated in some pickup basketball and soccer. We've been befriended by several families around the area, and have enjoyed spending time with them. I'm also enjoying spending more time with Dominic than I've been able to since he was a newborn, and we've even pulled out some old board games to play as a family. We walk in to the local town to buy fruit, or to a nearby farm to buy cheese and ice cream. On the weekends, we've taken Uber to go shopping in Nairobi, and we walk to a nearby church for a service in both Swahili and English.
We're so blessed to have this time to spend together as a family, to learn Swahili together, and to prepare for the next step in our journey! Thanks for following along with us!
Mzungu (white boy) dancing at church
