Greetings from warm sunny Kijabe. We hope your year is off to a good start. We are off and running at full speed here at RVA with a few glitches along the way. Sara was successful once again in getting all of our students back to RVA after the Christmas break. It just happened that there was a matatu (mini-vans used for public transportation) strike on arrival day which made the traffic in Nairobi even worse than normal. It took several of our drivers over 3 hours to travel the 75 km from the airport to Kijabe. Once the kids were here we were up and running immediately with classes and sports practices and other RVA activities.

As you can imagine when our kids travel all around the world during their month vacation they bring all kinds of things back with them. It seems as if one of our global nomads picked up a nasty little bug by the name of H1N1 and brought it back with him. So as you can also imagine a boarding school with 500 students and 100 staff living in dorms and going to classes together it didn’t take long for the bug to find its way to a large portion of our student body and staff. There seem to be about 3 different viruses going around campus but the most contagious and the one associated with elevated temperatures is the famous swine flu. This “outbreak” was identified on Friday and in an effort to isolate the outbreak the school has restricted any nonessential travel and we are trying to isolate any staff and students with fever. Fortunately we have not had any cases of complication with the virus, and nobody has been hospitalized. As of today we had 69 students and 8 staff members out. We pray that this is the peak of the outbreak things will begin to improve quickly. We appreciate your prayers for our nurses and for our administrators in the decisions that they have to make.

Blessings, Alan and Sara