Mombasa fun with Frida, Rose, and Seashells

So it’s been a few days! This is our last night in Mombasa and as Holly mentioned in the last post, it is just beautiful here on the Indian Ocean. This is Courtney by the way. So the first day that we were here we spent it on the beach, reading, talking, and exploring. We met a few friends, Frida and Captain Marco Polo. Frida is related to some of the staff at LIA and she was just so wonderful. She spent the past couple of days visiting and traveling with us. Captain Marco Polo made friends with Ben and wanted to take Ben scuba diving but he didn’t have any equipment.  So, Ben said No thanks. Our second day here we saw some of the sights and it ended up being a really busy day. First stop was Fort Jesus, an old Portuguese fort that was built in 1593. It was overtaken by the Arabs from Oman in the 1800’s and then Britain took over in the late 1800’s up until 1950. We got to explore all over and there was a beautiful view from some of the lookout towers. We had lunch outside the fort and then headed to Frida’s church for a midday service. Talk about hot weather, the church service in the middle of the day definitely made it hard to concentrate. I looked down the row at one time and everyone was just pouring sweat, and Lauren even pretended to dance in order to swish her skirt around and cool off! But the message was very heartfelt and I know I learned a lot. We got to meet some of the people and the pastor and then we headed to a hotel to meet another LIA volunteer, Rose, (she was a former staff and will be re-joining LIA in Nairobi in a few weeks and will be getting married to Gus, another one of our staff friends at LIA Kenya, in August) and she was just wonderful! She works at a beautiful hotel resort called Voyageur and we got to join her for tea, a tour of the resort, some great time of conversation, and dinner. It was very relaxing but a little weird for us considering we were hanging out at the resort, which to us looked like a very safe, stereotypical replica of Africa. It was lovely no doubt and apparently a great place for a honeymoon Rose said, but I think it just felt funny for us. So that was yesterday, and today we spent the morning on the beach and then the afternoon at Frida’s house. We got to meet her family and talk for awhile before heading back on motorcycle taxis! We squished two people on each bike and held on for dear life. Luckily they didn’t go too fast, and Daniel made sure to get everyone’s picture before they left. I think we were sort of allowed to be semi-tourists this week before we get ready to go back to Nairobi tomorrow. It’s been a nice rest and I think the favorite part of the trip was standing in the breeze and seeing the wonderful ocean. The funniest part of the trip – Ben and Daniel decided to fashion their own seashell necklaces and spent time collecting the shells, making holes in them, and threading floss through the shells. Then they wore them around and posed for pictures together! We were all a little concerned about the time and effort they put into the project. But, that gave us a whole lot of time to make fun of them. A picture is coming soon. Mombasa has been great, we’ll see you back in Nairobi!