Our Kenya Safari

Shortly after arriving on our mission in Douala, President and Sister Jameson came to visit us.  They told us that they had been on a safari on their first mission here, and they highly recommended that we go on one too if we could afford it.  Pres. Jameson even mentioned that the General Authorities had said that a safari would be a wonderful opportunity since we are so close and may never be this way again.  Since that day early in our mission we have planned to make it happen.  We decided to go on our 9 month anniversary which would be half way through our mission.  This week, the long anticipated day finally arrived.

Our good friend Pam Atwood, in Morgan, helped with the arrangements and everything went very smoothly.  Here we boarded a Kenya Airways 737 for a 4 hour flight to Nairobi Kenya.  Sister Whitesides is sitting behind us.  She and Elder Whitesides from Yaounde and Layton Utah, have shared everything here in Cameroon with us and we were so glad that they were on the safari with us also.


We spent the night in Nairobi in a Hilton Hotel, and then got on an 18 passenger plane and flew to the Mara Intrepids where we would spend 4 days and three nights.  We made two stops and let passengers off and picked up new passengers at two other camps along the way.  We flew over some beautiful country and could see wild life as we came into the dirt landing strips near the camps.

After a brief orientation and a fruit drink, we were taken to our tent.  It was very nice inside and had this nice deck that overlooked the river below.  The tent had a hardwood floor, a four poster bed with a mosquito net, and a nice bathroom with a large shower.  More pictures of the inside will be coming later.

As soon as we arrived at out tent, we looked down at the river, about 30 feet away and there was this huge hippo sunning itself.  He was there most of the time we were there.  An elephant also walked down the river bank one afternoon while we were watching.

Every morning at 6:30 we would go out on a game drive until 11:30.  They would pack a breakfast for us so we didn’t have to come back to camp.  The first animal we saw was this Gazel which had just had this baby.  She was still licking him clean and we saw him take some of his wobbly first steps.

Coming into camp after getting off the plane we were greeted by this baboon.

We saw a lot of Elephants just grazing in the meadows.  They are so huge when you are only about 10 feet away.  This one started walking toward our Land Rover and Jan was ready to bail out the other side.  They seemed so much different in the wild than they do in the zoo.  They just roam free and don’t seem to have a care in the world.

Many of the pictures we took were while bumping along the road and some of them are a little blurry.  The ostriches were running away.  They are even bigger than they look

.

One of our favorites was the Cheetas.  They are so pretty.  We saw a mother teaching her son how to hunt.  They caught a small gazell and the little one kept pouncing on it and then letting it go and then catching it again.  They eventually ate it.  The food chain is very evident in the wild.


This is a hyena.  They are scavengers.  They hang around a kill until everyone else is finished eating and then clean up the bones and scraps that are left.


This is a wilderbeast.  There were only a few left because every year 11/2 million of them migrate to the Serengeti for new grass lands.  Then in 6 months they migrated back to the Mara for the new grass here.  Our guide said this one was left behind and now he is a bewildered beast.

These are the strangest animals we came across.  We rode in these open Land Rovers and could stand up and see all around us.  This is us with the Whitesides and the Gills who were with us for the 4 days.  The Gills are from England and we loved their accents.



The giraffes were some of the easiest to spot.  With their long necks we could see them from miles away.  They are so majestic.  Jan thought I should have posted one with him looking at us.

We drove up to the river and looked over the edge and there were 20 hippos swimming together right below us.


There are 1/2 million Zebras in Kenya, but they also migrate every 6 months.  There are a few that stay behind and we saw about 30 of them.  They have very weak backbones and the lions sneak up on them and jump in the middle of their backs to bring them down.


There are a lot of beautiful birds and a lot of vultures.  This is one of the prettiest birds we have ever seen.  It has brilliant blues, purples and greens.  There were 3 of them on this tree.


Many crocodiles live in the  Mara River.  They can go for up to a year without eating and when the wilderbeasts migrate they hide and attack them as they cross the river.  This one was probably 15 feet long.  His head is by the tree.


This little baby Hippo was so cute that I had to include it on our blog.


Rhinos are very rare.  There are only 30 left in the whole park.  Poachers have almost killed them off, to cut off their horns to sell.  We were very lucky to find this one and to get within 30 feet of it.  He just eventually wandered off after resting in the shade for w few minutes.


We crossed this river a lot.  One morning as we crossed, we looked upstream and saw all of these elephants getting their morning drink.


This has to be one of our favorite finds.  We were a couple hundred yards away from a small tree.  We saw a male lion stand up and stretch.  We drove over to the tree and there were 4 huge male lions sleeping under the same tree.  They would yawn and stretch and roll over and then go back to sleep.  We parked 10 feet away and watched them for 1/2 hour.  By the time we left the tree was circled with other Land Rovers that had come to see our find.

Dr. Samuel and Caro’s Home

We have talked alot about Dr. Samuel and his clinic for orphans, street children and underprivileged people, so I thought you would like to see where he lives.  His clinic is on the ground floor on the right, and behind it up three flights of stairs is his humble home.

Sister Gailey is just ready to head up the stairs to the right to go to his house where we will teach his wife Caro.  We sometimes teach their daughter and her cousin when we can catch them home from school.


This is the second floor of the building.  It caught fire at some point and has just been abandoned and left as it was when they got the fire out.


I am starting up the stairs to the third floor.


At the top of the stairs on the concrete floor they have a little fire pit where they cook food in large pots over the fire and coals.  They are so kind and almost always try to feed us something.  Usually we have just eaten before we get there.



Sister Gailey on the third floor by their front door with their laundry hanging out to dry.

Looking down from the third floor to Dr. Samuel as he come out of the clinic to join in our lesson.

Inside the home we find the beautiful children waiting to climb up on our laps.  This is Jackson their son and his cousin Favo.  They are two years old.   I told Jan her number one responsibility during the lesson is  to make sure my scriptures are protected.  They love the sound of tearing paper and love to write and color on anything we bring to them.

This is the rest of the family.  Joy, 6, Jimmy, 1 and Caro.  We have been teaching Caro and she is going to be baptized in our pool on Saturday May 25th.  Her husband will baptize her and I will confirm her on Sunday.  Dr. Samuel has been waiting 5 years for her to join him in the church and we had the priviledge of teaching her.  They both are English speakers.  She will be Jan and my first convert in Cameroon.

This is their older daughter Lydia.  We have taught her a couple of times and she has a lot of questions.  With school out for the summer,  we hope to be able to teach her and her cousin more often.

This is a look inside their front door and into the kitchen.  It is literally 6 feet square.

A Man’s Blog

Bro Ebere is my mechanic and this is his shop. He is in the Branch Presidency and speaks English.   My truck was making a terrible noise and he found out there was a loose part on the air filter box.  He heated up a wire with a torch and pushed a hole in it to put a screw in to hold it tight.  It fixed the rattle.


There are many cars in various stages of disrepair.  He dropped everything to work on my truck.  As I walked around, his yard looked like a salvage yard in the US and none of the vehicles would have been thought worth repairing, but he will fix them.

Brother Ebere is building a home on the corner of the lot where his car repair business is.  It will be nice when he gets it finished and he will be closer to his family when he works.  I haven’t seen the home he is living in now.

We took a taxi across town to get the parts we needed to replace the clutch on the truck and I took some photos as we were riding in the taxi.  This is a portable plumbing shop that sells all kinds of plumbing repair parts.  It is pushed around town by the owner.

The store on the right is a plumbing store.  Notice the sinks hanging and the pipe in the roll.

This is another plumbing cart.  It is a little blurry, because we were driving by pretty fast and the road was very rough.

This is a large building under construction.  They pour cement collums and then fill in the rest with home made cinderblocks.  We pray that they never have an earthquake here.  It takes years for anything to be completed and often they get to this stage and then the owner runs out of money and they just sit for years.

Brother Ebere and his helper are putting a new clutch in our truck.  For those of you not mechanically minded, that means they have to take out the drive shaft, and the transmission to get to the clutch.  In the US they would put it on a hoist and stand under to do the work.  Here they raised up the front a few inches and put some old engine blocks under to support it and then lay underneath on some cardboard and drop everything to the ground.  I watched the whole process and was amazed what they can do with a sack of tools.  They didn’t even have sockets and of course no air tools.

This is the waiting room.  I would watch out in the sun until I got too hot and then I would sit on these old car seats and study my French.  It took about 6 hours for them to change the clutch. 

In the taxi on the way to buy the new clutch, I saw this guy on the back of a mototaxi with two weed eaters up in the air.  They do all the trimming along the side of the roads with weed eaters.  I was expecting him to hit a low wire and to come rolling off the moto.

There are thousands of old abandoned vehicles along the roads.  They drive them until they stop and then a mechanic comes with his little bag of tools and rebuilds the engine or transmission or puts the front end back on.  He does it where ever it dies.  I asked my mechanic about preventative maintenance and he laughed at me.

On our trip to Yaounde, a city 4 hours away through the jungle we often see critters hanging on the side of the road for sale.  We have seen monkeys, and other animals.  We finally got the courage to stop and ask if we could take a picture.  The one on the right is a porcupine and the one on the left I’m not sure what it is .  There was a turtle hanging with them.  It is below and was alive at the time we took the picture.  These two were not alive.


People still carry a lot of things on their heads.  When they unload trucks they haul it in on their heads.  We have seen many times men with two 100 pound sacks of cement on their heads.  This guy has a huge bag with scrap plastic and metal parts that he will recycle I assume.

Zone excursion to Kribi

For P-day we took our missionaries to a resort town 21/2 hours away called Kribi.  It is on the Atlantic Ocean.  We are at the bus station at 7:00 a.m. to leave and finally left at 8:30 after stopping to get gas and to get a new spare tire for the one that was flat.

At Kribi we saw these beautiful water falls that empty into the ocean.  We rode in taxis for about 20 minutes from where the bus dropped us off in the center of town.  This was by far the most beautiful place we have seen in Cameroon.  It was a refreshing change of scenery.

Elder and Sister Gailey sitting on the trail that lead to the falls in an old boat made from hollowing out a log.

The missionaries changed into their p-day clothes after we arrived.  They always wear their name tags.  It drove them crazy not to be able to get in the ocean and go swimming.  When the frisbee went into the ocean the native below would go out and get it for them.  He played soccer with the missionaries and he was a lot of fun.

This young man played soccer and frisbee with the Elders.  He found this little sand crab walking along the beach and put it on his head where it would show up better.  We were having so much fun just getting away that we didn’t even take a picture of the ocean.  On the way home we were crammed into a 18 passenger small bus that had small fold down seats added in the isle that expanded the capacity to 34 people.  We were 11/2 hours late getting back to the bus because our taxis didn’t come on time.  We had 24 people sitting on the hot bus that were not very happy to see 10 white people show up and squeeze in between them.  We handed out pretzels and that seemed to help.  The ride back took 31/2 hours because the traffic was so bad.  My back was sore for a week.