23.November 29, 1967: Letter from Frank to his folks

23.  November 29

Dear Mom and Dad, (Cochrane, from Frank)


Sorry I am late with this letter this week. I did too much procrastination, and we have been just a little busy, not all of it is vitally important, just things you can’t get out of. All the clubs and dorms and parties for the graduating students, and I had three of these to attend. Our students do not have a formal graduation. They just finish their examinations and the government confirms their satisfactory completion of the course, and they are assigned a job. Most of them know the village where they are going to teach, but they do not know what the assignment is. Evidently they have some choice in where they go, but I don’t know how much. One of them was telling me last night that he had been assigned a school in the Embu district, but he was still hopeful that he would get a Nairobi school.


Among our activities in the last two weeks, we have attended three parties. We had one here at our house that was the result of several people, including ourselves, who wanted to have a few people in, so we suggested that we make it potluck and come to our place. It was real successful. We had an international dinner and so much food that we had everyone back the next day for lunch, so it wouldn’t go to waste. We had curry and rice from India, which was much hotter than any that I have ever eaten.


Then Saturday, an AID man with NEA in Embu invited Barb and me down with a lot of others for Thanksgiving dinner. They even had a turkey that had been flown in from the States. They didn’t have it flown in, but answered an ad in the paper. Someone was bringing them in for resale.


The third party was held by the principal for all the faculty. He asked everyone to bring a few slides for a slideshow, so we took a few from home, New York, West Coast, and Korea. It was fun.


Tonight we have a dinner with the students that the principal laughingly calls the last supper, much to the disgust of one of our missionary type colleagues. Then we are through except for inspecting the dormitories in the morning.


Your house in Oregon sounds more interesting all the time. I don’t blame you for wanting to take a run over there as soon as those people are out. I suppose you will take the pickup to get your stuff from home over there. I was wondering what happened to all the dishes and utensils from the McCall cabin when you were talking about buying new dishes, but I guess you sold those at the auction. Anyhow, it sounds exciting to be working on something like that. I was unaware of the false impressions those newspapers might give of this place. They did have some nice cattle. And the crimes...there are a lot of them, they just are not sensational, because it is so commonplace. We have been clipping some items like the brief trial of a woman who had killed another with a spear, because she thought her to be a witch who had hexed her family for two generations, and the Masai tribesmen who were killed on a cattle raid. Six people were murdered in the little village a mile away, over a period of a month.  I didn’t hear about it until it came out in the paper a month and a half later, when a few people complained about police methods and the curfew that resulted. This evidently has been the result of the beer-drinking crowd at night, and they revert back to their native habits. Now, don’t worry. No white has been involved, but death is commonplace along with most other crimes, and therefore not sensational...got to quit.

 Love, Frank

(We made Christmas cards by silk screening a design on air letters. It took a long time for the paint to dry enough so they wouldn’t stick together.)


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