14. , 14.1, 14.2 October 22, 1967: From Barb, Diane, and Vicki to Barb's folks (Line)

Dear Mom and Dad,

Our mid term break started last Wednesday, so we went to Nairobi as the girls have already told you. I met with some of my classes the first part of the week, seven in all and about eighty girls in all. It is going to take some getting used to for sure. We started out sewing and are making a bag to put things in! We are going to use machines, if they can learn to treadle! Some of the machines work by a hand-crank and that is easier for them.


Frank bought a great big clay pot on the way home. It stands three feet high! We enjoyed our trip, traded houses with the Knudsons at Kenyatta College. We got to see Mzee Kenyatta as he went past on his way to the parade and speech. The girls told most of the rest. Frank carried Kiva up Mt. Longonot, it took two hours to climb it. It was a sight, but I think I will wait at the bottom when they climb Mt. Kenya! One TEEA person got to the 1490 ft. level on Mt. Kenya but couldn’t go to the top.


Everyone’s in good health and has new rubber boots!

Love, Barb.


14.1 October 22


Dear Grandma and Grandpa, (Line from Diane)


We really had a good time in Nairobi this time, no car trouble or anything. We

went to the Rift Valley. That’s a sight. It looks like a huge river valley. It’s not craggy and rough on the bottom like I had imagined it, as a matter of fact, it’s quite flat. The sides of the valley are real steep, sort of like a canyon. From the side of the Rift Valley you really get a view. From where we were we could just see across the valley. There are three volcanoes in the area of the Rift where we went. All are extinct of course. One of them is Mt. Longonot. It’s 9111 feet tall and we climbed 7000 feet of it more or less. We got to the rim but didn’t have time to go to the peak. There was a trail up the side of the mountain so going wasn’t too bad. There were some real steep places though. We all made it to the rim, even Kiva. The view you got from there was worth every step you took to get there!


You could get a wonderful view of Lake Niavasa from Mt. Longonot. It’s quite a large lake and very beautiful. The bottom of the crater was very flat and covered with shrubs. I wanted to go down to the bottom of the crater, but no one else did. I think they had a little more sense than I did. All the sides of the crater were steep. Getting down wouldn’t be much of a problem, all you’d have to do was to try to fall easily. But getting out is the part that would be hard. We wanted to walk around the rim of the crater, but we didn’t have time, so we made Mom and Dad promise that we would come back and climb it again. And next time I will go down into the crater.


Well, we are in the rainy season now. It rains almost every night. You know the saying on the salt ad “when it rains it pours”? Well that’s what happens here!


I took the exam to see if I was good for Kenya Girls’ High this weekend. I think I flunked. The math was all algebra that I didn’t know and the English was stupid. It took a lot of time and a lot of worry and then I found out that the test didn’t count. They will put me where they want me no matter what I got on the test. Got to leave room for everyone else, so I’ll say so long.

Love, Diane


14.2

Hi Everyone! This is Vic. We had an all out shopping trip in Nairobi this time. We split up into two groups, Mom and Dad in one and Diane, Vicki and me in the other. This other Vicki is a girl my age whose parents are with TEEA too. I met her in New York and we’ve been friends ever since. By the way she does spell her name the same as I do. Our list ran something like this: two skeins black yarn, big needle, rug hooking needle, material for March Hare, (Diane’s present for Kiva’s birthday), and I guess that’s all.  Would you believe it took us all day to get just that stuff? You’re right, it didn’t. It only took us until noon. 


First we couldn’t find Bazaar Street where all the material and yarn shops are supposed to be. Then when we did find it, everything was so expensive we couldn’t stand it. So we looked for Woolworth’s. We stopped at one hardware store and met Dad. We asked him where Woolworth’s was and he told us down Kenyatta Ave, Later we found out that we had been standing right next to Woolworth’s all the time. And then they didn’t have anything we wanted. We finally got the yarn for ten shillings for four ounces. (I made a mistake before, we wanted 8 ounces) When we went to get Die’s material the clerk gave us the funniest look because we bought all kinds of little pieces and chunks of material. The biggest one was a yard. All in all it was quite fun. 

Love to all, Vic

P.S. I wouldn’t have changed ink, but my pen gave out!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

46., 46.1 May 14 &17, 1968: Letters from Barb and Milton to Grandma and Grandpa Cochrane

46. May 14, 1968 Dear Mom and Dad, (Cochrane from Barb) Got your letter today and I guess we don’t say enough about what goes on here. I mean with regard to the floods around. There are plenty of them, but none real close by, and only one minor one on the road to nairobi. There is a valley on the way to Nairobi that was flooded, but the road goes around it instead of through it. In fact, I think the guy who built the road between here and Nairobi did his best to see how far up and how far down he could go at every turn. It is an uncomfortable road to ride because the pavement is full of dips and bumps, similar to small frost heaves, but Frank says it is just poor road construction. And while there are many curves and uphill and downhill, it seems to be fairly easy to drive.  Some of these African drivers are something else, but you don’t worry about that, you just drive with extra caution. On the way to see Diane last Saturday, we saw two wrecks. One, a bus was laying half way down...
Read more

The Beginning

The following is an introduction that Barbara wrote to this collection of letters that Barbara penned in 1988-89.  Greener Pastures. That connotation must have mutated into our genes by the thirteenth year of teaching. We had moved so many times in Frank's teaching career, always with the hope that we could find that "ideal job", that it seemed a natural fit, when our friend and colleague, Kim Kimberling, discovered an advertisement in the NEA Journal for tutors to train teachers in East Africa. Frank was feeling the potential stagnation of teaching several years in the same junior high school in Boise, Idaho. He really began to worry that things were going too smoothly; that he might be taken for granted, and as such might be staring at the same four walls, in the same classroom when he reached the age of fifty five. We had been farming since 1959 when we moved on to the family farm from a teaching job in California, in hopes that we could make a thriving enterprise out ...
Read more

47. May 20, 1968: Barbara's letter to her folks - Diane is home

  47. May 20, 1968 Dear Mom and Dad (Line from Barb) Last Saturday we went to Nairobi and brought Diane home. Frank decided she wasn’t covering enough, especially in Science to  make her ready for the tenth grade at Madrid, and that on top of everything, moving so slow in class that she had to be first in the class and keep up two correspondence courses, one in Algebra. So she’s home to finish the correspondence course we brought, plus an extra course in Earth Science that Frank is teaching her. We are all real glad! Especially Vicki! I don’t think they have stopped talking since we got home! I suppose it will be just as bad when they go off to Madrid next fall, but at least we are all together now. Lately it seemed every time we wanted to go somewhere we felt we couldn’t because Diane wasn’t along. And when we did go somewhere it was always to Nairobi and to see Diane. Now we are thinking of some one-day weekend trips around here to see the country in some other directions be...
Read more