Rainy Sunday

This morning our church service was 3 hours and 20 minutes long. That’s longer than the movie Titanic and I can guarantee the bench I was sitting on was much less comfortable than any theatre seat you can imagine in North America. Usually our services are about half that long, but today was Pastor (now Reverend) Simon’s ordination, so there were choirs and singing groups from other churches that brought a lot of special music. One of the Bishops from AIC gave the very energetic message in Swahili (another of the ministers translated it into English), but since it only started about two hours into the service, and the translation was so rapid and heavily accented, I’m not sure I got too much out of it. Still, if I wasn’t still having to blow my nose every ten minutes and if I would have thought to bring a pillow to sit on, it would have been a fun service. The biggest excitement of the service was when Natalie and I noticed a small scorpion crawling up the back of the person sitting in the pew in front of us. Natalie, being much braver than I, used a song book to flick the scorpion off the guy’s jacket and squish it to death. That is the first scorpion I have seen in Kijabe. Apparently there are a few here, but in general it’s too cold for them, so they aren’t very big. I’m glad the first encounter I had with one was with a little one; if it had been the size they get in the lowlands, it might have set me packing.

The stuff of nightmares…