Friends

I am beginning to realise that home is not a house or even a place - but it is where God is and also where your family and friends are.  Take lovely Leafield where we used to live and call home. Beautiful as it was (and still is) and as much like home it still feels like, if all of our lovely friends upped and left, it would still be Leafield and still be beautiful, but it wouldn't be home.  It would just be Leafield.  It wouldn't carry the same love and fondness in my heart - it's my friends that do that.

So with that thought in mind, I would say that this big, bustling, noisy city called Nairobi is now beginning to feel like home as we are starting to make friends.  I found Edie this week playing 'clap hands' with a friend at school when I went to pick her up - it was so cute.  And when I took Audrey to panto practice yesterday she raced off to be with the 3 girls at another table (all of 3 different nationalities) and I was left on my own with my laptop!  Elijah too is making friends and enjoying being on a compound with ready made friends to play with.  He is also making friends at the local hospital too as we had to visit it last week when he cracked his head open and needed stitches! (photo taken the next day at a coffee shop (Costa replacement!) as a treat - thankfully his hat covers his stitches and the big bald patch he now has on his head!)

I too am making friends.  The MAF family here is amazing and Ken and I feel very blessed to have great people to be around.  I briefly stopped by at a friends house this morning as she too has just moved to Nairobi from Cairo and knows what it is like to be new!  She is busy this week unpacking all of her goods as her shipment of things arrived - unlike ours that still hasn't left the UK as Ken's work permit hasn't arrived yet.  She showed me around her lovely house that is beginning to also feel like 'home' as it is filled with items and photos that bring meaning and memories to them.  As we went into her attic room we laughed at the 30 or so boxes which still need to be opened.  I was about to ask her if I could have a few of the empty ones so that I could make things out of them for our children to play with as their toys are also still in the shipment in the UK.  But she told me that her house help has already asked for them so that she can insulate her house with them.  Wow - It certainly puts things into perspective!