Ingredients: beans, coconut juice (clear and white), onions, oil, Royco mchuzi seasoning (like bullion), stamina, patience, strong muscles, strong teeth, sense of humor
Directions:
1. Go to market to buy beans.
2. Attempt to cook beans on gas stove for 1 hour. Realize they are still hard, eat some buttered bread, etc, but go to bed hungry, letting beans soak overnight.
3. Ask Sophie for help and find out the next day that you should use a charcoal jiko for cooking the beans longer so as to not use so much gas, and should also add coconut.
4. Find someone to shimmy up a coconut tree, throw down dafu (young coconuts) to enjoy fresh and nazi (mature coconuts) to use for cooking.
5. Cut hole in dafu.
6. Drink coconut water.
7. Cut coconut in half, scoop out and enjoy fresh.
8. Discover that coconut is a natural laxative. (no picture needed)
9. Recover, cut nazi in half, and reserve water.
10. Grate coconut half while sitting on cool-looking yet scary tool.
11. Press cream out of the grated coconut by using a tool that looks like a woven bag (or a tea strainer), and reserve.
12. Break up charcoal chunks and place in jiko. Light “gazette” (newspaper) with a match and feed it to the stove.
13. Continue feeding it newspaper until the charcoal starts to burn. Let jiko burn until stops smoking, about 15 minutes, then bring inside.
14. Cook beans on jiko for about 5 hours, then transfer to gas stove.
15. Saute chopped onions in oil, then add beans and coconut water and cream mixed with Royco. Cook for about 10 minutes.
16. Serve with chapati or rice.
17. Eat carefully, realizing that any “beans” that are still hard are actually rocks. Vow that next time you will carefully pick out stones and twigs from the beans before cooking.
18. Optional: attempt to make stove-top macaroons with leftover coconut gratings, since they are otherwise just thrown away.
We have been so blessed by these opportunities to join others who also have a heart for reaching out and helping communities around this area. God has been at work in these interactions all along the way: It began when we wanted to go visit Crossroads Fellowship as described here a month or so ago, and began our new friendship with Kristin (from Waukesha, Wisconsin!) We joined her another weekend to visit an orphanage called Tumaini (too-my-ee-nee – “Hope”) House, and hike and bike through a nature reserve.
and game activities
(including a parachute!), 
as well as a snack time and bible lesson. They also learned a couple songs with hand motions to perform in church the next morning. 
After church on Sunday, Kristen came back to Ribe with us to see the incredible views and experience a slightly different part of Kenya. Tito’s family was here, so she got to meet them, and we all watched the futbol game. Kristen also met Sophie and Nesta, and invited them to Nyali. It may have been a casual invite, but they wanted to take her up on it, so we looked into it and it was indeed possible!
After church and a long relaxing lunch on Sunday, we prepared to come home to Ribe. Nesta had so much fun that he didn’t want to come home! For us, these trips have been such great refreshment and seeing the children enjoy the events so much is so replenishing from working in a school setting and kind of “behind the scenes” in the community in Ribe. Seeing and learning the activities and schedule of those events has been great to possibly do something like them in Ribe too (let us know if it sounds like something you’d like to help support!) 
The number of sets is pretty much the exact same number of students in Lesley’s maths class too! It is so many that there would have been no way that we could have brought them all back to Ribe if it were not for Kristen coming to Ribe, meeting Sophie and Nesta, and them coming with us to Nyali! God has truly provided in many ways through this chain of events!
However, I apparently did not get fouled enough to merit more play; we’ve been hoping to get more pictures of me playing, but the guys want to win. Therefore, a few of the players and I have not gotten to play. I’ve begun joking with Tito that I think we need to be winning by 3 goals for me to have a chance to play again. Well, this past week, we did not have game a game (thankfully, since we spent the weekend in Nyali again), but the weekend before, the guys did win 3-0! Just my luck that it was the week that I had been sick with a bit of a cold/minor flu (they seem to call everything with a sniffle or cough the flu though), so I hadn’t practiced all week and was not prepared to play.
Fortunately, I had caught a ride to the game with Tito, or else I would not have gone, because the game was in the next town over, which the team walks over an hour each way to get there! The other time we had a game there, I walked with them, did not play, walked back with them, and was completely exhausted. I can’t imagine how tired the guys who played most of the game must have been! I would not have made it when still trying to kick that cold, but was sure glad I went in Tito’s car because it was great fun to celebrate with the guys.
Tito apparently bought him with a couple others many years ago, but he is the only one left and is more like a stray that lives at our house … we give him leftover food occasionally and he sometimes growls at night to protect us from whatever is out there, but mostly he lies around all day. We just called him “Mbwa” for a while until we found out he has a couple other names: “Rhino” and “Marty,” depending who you ask.
We see small herds of like a dozen or so in town being guided down the streets by their herder to graze, etc. However, some people, including Tito, keep a few in stables and feed them as shown in the picture. On our third day in Ribe, one of the guys who lives and works on Tito's shamba (farm), Masudi, came to our house and motioned something about the cows. We had the impression we would milk them, and excitedly put on boots and headed down the hill with him. When we got there, he motioned to some gloves, which Chris put on while Masudi explained in Swahili that was completely lost on us. Then he pointed to a large serrated blade, and made a cutting motion. We looked at each other in pure horror and thought that we were about to help kill a cow. After a few moments of whispering furiously to each other about what to do, Chris began taking the gloves off asking him to demonstrate. Masudi picked up an armload of nearby brush clippings, fed it to the cows, and urged us to do the same. We think it turns out that he had explained that the equipment was for cutting down ndizi (bananas), not killing the cows. Phew, one animal slaughter avoided.
(a relieved Chris with Masudi)
One of the duka (shop) owners also has pigs including this mama and her babies that we've been able to peek in on since they were less than a week old!
They are around town grazing, often tied to tree stumps, and can be quite loud - sometimes we think it is a child crying for help! There are usually 4-5 near the school each morning.
These also roam around town and the school, and we enjoy seeing the little baby chicks run around except when they dart across in front of me and I have to watch my step!
In this quiet rural life, one of our typical evening activities was sitting after dinner and watching the geckos. At first we were a little creeped out that so many lived in our house, but when we realized that they ate mosquitoes they became our best friends. Some of the regulars include Tom, Beck, and Charlie, whose names are derived from the founding missionaries of Ribe, as well as one that blends in with the door that we call (GI) Joe, a small guy called Tiny Tim, and the even smaller Junior. Yes, we do realize they are very unlikely to be the same geckos from night to night, but they have became fun “pets” anyway. We don’t see them as much anymore because geckos don’t like noise according to Tito.
Chris found a small chameleon the other day that we tried to keep for a bit. We named it Lucky, because that is a name here (Lesley has a student named Lucky), and also because Chris saved it from certain death. He’ll have to write about it. Hoewever, he wasn't so lucky when Tito's family visited and, as his wife said, "[their daughters] probably gave it a heart attack!" ...as they tried to see if it would turn red on the floor of the porch (it did not turn red - see the picture). So, while they were distracted by something else, we let Lucky go into some bushes. 
there are lots and lots of them … ants, millipedes (this one was on the wall of our kitchen), flies, beetles, bees, wasps, and of course, mosquitoes. DEET is a wonderful thing here – the lesser of evils!