Coming back to Mumbuni from RVA was a return to comfort. I remember diving onto the living room rug with such joy, loving the home feeling. We always had spaghetti on the first night home and it was so good! These stories are not in chronological order and depend on the way I remember things. Apologies to those who remember differently. I deliberately haven’t used many names so I don’t impinge on the way others would tell their stories.
The missionary families who lived at AIC Mumbuni in those years were mostly from the US, the UK, or Canada. We often did things together. On Easter mornings we all would often go before dawn to a kopje on Mr. Button’s ranch about half an hour away. A lovely and relaxed time of worship, singing as the sun rose over the African plains.
It was hard to be home for only a month at a time. Mom was a thoughtful teacher. She worked hard at getting all the teaching in that she could in the time we were with her. She was prone to rather fun spoonerisms. Once
, as I remember it, when we were complaining about some asked my sister and I to sit at the dining room table with her. She carefully made eye contact with her kind hazel eyes and said, “You must remember to be palm and katient in spite of all your difficules.” We laughed and she was frustrated, but the phrase stuck with me. I’ve repeated it to my own children and grandchildren.
Home at Mumbuni came with a lovely group of friends. There were several of us girls near each other in age. It was so comforting to rather automatically belong to the group. A couple of the girls were in my grade at school, but there they mostly hung around with others. At home, occasionally we had sleep overs at each other’s houses. At one sleep over, we’d been talking and laughing. Suddenly one of the girls asked me, “why can’t you be like this at school?”. I thought about that. She was right. I was different at school. Much edgier and uneasy. I shook my head and shrugged, “I don’t know.” Quickly I dropped that thought, glad to be happy where I was. I didn’t want to think about school.
Most days at home were unplanned and often full of spontaneous group games. In addition to us girls, there were older and younger boys. The cast changed as families came and went, but quite a few were needed to run the college. Often there were more than a dozen of us kids. One school break, we played Robin Hood for weeks. We made ourselves cudgels from solid straight sticks and borrowed our dad’s t-shirts with a tight belt around to make tunics. We shouted things like, “Avast and anon thou naughty knave! Thou must fight me!” It felt so heroic! We’d stand feet wide apart and bang the ends of the home-made cudgels together blocking blows. If you missed a block, or caught your fingers, that was no joke!
I think all of us had bikes. I’m the nearest girl in the photo above. We would loop the station, tearing down the rough steep track under the Mumbu tree as fast as we could. Throwing our bikes sideways into the deep sand where the track hit the dirt road into station we tried to make the longest skid mark. Dad’s office was near the bottom of station, and I remember pushing bikes to his office to get help realigning handlebars or putting chains back on. There were often local cattle grazing near the bottom of station. One crabby white cow with a bent horn often chased us.
At Machakos, the nearest town about a mile away, the local British expatriate community decided to make a sports club. They invited the missionary community to join. They’d built squash courts and a rugby field, but the important thing to us kids was the swimming pool. Not very big and only six feet deep in the deep end. We would decide we wanted to go swimming. Then we would circle the mission station looking for a ride to the pool. Once one of the single missionaries gave us a ride in his VW bug, all of us piled in with the biggest boys on the bottom and the little kids on top. In the pool, we played wild and rough games of keep away, tag, racing each other for coins thrown in, or playing follow the leader jumping from the edge. We came home very hungry, comfortably exhausted and crusted with white chlorine salts.
I did ask mom about why it was much easier to feel like I fit in a home. I said I felt weird at school and kids were often mean. She sat on our porch with me and explained that the meanest kids were often the most insecure, fighting for their place in the sun by putting others down. We talked about why it wasn’t wise to use that social strategy and the importance of being kind no matter what. She said I shouldn’t ever worry because I was God’s loved child and she and dad loved me. I shook my head and said, “I wish I could just be normal!!” I still struggle sometimes with social anxiety, and it still sometimes makes it hard to respond to others in a relaxed and caring way. It’s much easier to deal with things if I can get away by myself sometimes, and that just wasn’t possible at boarding school. I was possible at home. I often spent whole days reading. I was learning to think, reading Kipling, the Narnia stories, and Tolkien. Evening devotions began to include searching questions. Dad seemed happy to discuss questions that still puzzle me: How could we have free will if God is charge of everything? How could God be fair to those who never heard about Jesus if Jesus was really the only way to come to God? I understand a little more now, but my peace is in God’s great goodness that I’ve known in so many ways.
I was fascinated by anything alive. I spent time looking for chameleons, amazing creatures. They couldn’t run, but boy could they hide! It was so fun to find one. They didn’t seem alarmed to be caught and would crawl deliberately on my arm looking around with eyes that swiveled like independent turrets. The one on me in the photo is a Jackson’s three horned chameleon. I always let them go in a tree after a couple of hours.
I wasn’t all that aware of mom and dad’s work. The Bible college where mom taught had the same break times as our boarding school, so we didn’t meet her students very often. When we were home, mom focused on us. We did encounter bits of what they did to serve the community. If there was no trained nurse on station, sometimes mom took a turn as “nurse” to the local community. She would do simple first aid, and she and dad often took people to the government hospital in the nearest town. In those days, many local people slept around an open fire. Once, a badly burned toddler who had tripped and fallen into the fire came to us. After hospital treatment, mom was instructed in how to change the dressings daily for many weeks. Another time, my sister and I woke to the sound of a man screaming. We crawled out of bed and into the space under the house eves. There was a tight woven wire mesh to provide ventilation where the soffit would be, and we could see down onto the porch. The man was clawing at his head and yelling. It turned out that a small scarab beetle had crawled into his ear while he was sleeping, and it was still clawing in there with its sharp legs. Mom and dad tried to get it out with tweezers, but it was hanging on. Finally, they poured cooking oil into his ear and pulled the beetle out after it drowned.
Dad was managing the development and printing of Bible curriculum for the many AIC schools and Sunday schools. Sometimes I’d go down to his office with him, and he would give me jobs, sometimes to do with the illustrative art he was doing for some of the curriculum. When the Kenyan men from different areas came by to discuss things or pick up boxes of books, I would listen with a sort of contented feeling that dad’s work was important. One day I found a strange heavy metal object shaped rather like one of those old-fashioned mantle clocks. It had a crank and a kind of fan inside. I turned the crank, and it made a “whup whup” noise. Odd. I asked dad what it was and he laughed and said to turn the crank faster. The whup noises merged into an impressive howl. It was a siren!! A few minutes later a group of men ran into the office asking what the emergency was. I guess we should have been more careful!
One family had twin toddlers, and they had a Kenyan ayah, Mbaika. I used to enjoy spending time with them. The kids had a Little Red Hen golden book. Mbaika asked me to tell her the story. It wasn’t easy since my Swahili wasn’t great. When she understood the story, she nodded many times. In Swahili she said, “Yes, that is true, those who work are the ones who eat! That is a good story.” Other than that sort of casual interaction, we kids weren’t very connected to the surrounding Kenyan community. Mostly we ran with each other. In that sense our lives were very different from our parents. Sometimes I regret how few connections with Kenyans I built in those years.
My bed was up against a west facing cinderblock. I’d lean against that warm wall so glad to be home. If I sat up in bed in the night, I could look out the window. I remember watching the full moon slide through clouds with a deep sense of the huge beauty of God and his world.