Ndhiwa

Since today was Sunday, that means church, of course.  This time I honored a request that was made to me last March and came to worship at our orphanage at Ndhiwa.  Alfayo had learned in our previous meetings that I was a minister who had never preached; a foreign concept in Africa.  So I became a preacher, at least for today.  I adapted a sermon Charlton gave a few weeks ago about Ruth.  I told the story of a widow, with little money or hope but great faith and love, who God elevates to be the ancestor of both Davis and Jesus.  With a room full of widows and orphans who have been redeemed by Christ’s love, it seemed a perfect fit.  I’m sure I delivered it inadequately, but the expected response was there and at least two orphans fell asleep.  I now feel complete.

Ndhiwa was our second orphanage, and is led by the very capable Alfayo Bodi.  Alfayo is a big man, really big for a Kenyan.  I always try to bring him shirts or a jacket from the US when I come because you can’t find 2XL in Kenya.  Ndhiwa is 130 kids compressed into ½ an acre.  They have little room to move, but they make the best of it.  Like all of our facilities, Ndhiwa is sporting new water filters.  These filters are made in Kenya of a design that uses slow sand filtration to achieve up to 95% purity from contaminants in a self cleaning, maintenance free filter.  The widows we spoke to were adamant that they always use the filters and the water tastes much better.  I took samples for testing so we can be sure they work as well as they were supposed to.

We met with the secondary school students who had to go and take end-of-term exams today.  We encouraged them to do their best and answered their questions as best we could.  They were open and frank about their concerns, yet they were typical teenagers also; struggling to adapt to adult life that looms in front of them.  Hopefully we didn’t scare them too badly.

We met also with the primary school kids.  They were full of energy but politely asked us dozens of questions about America, including some great questions about American government.  Can you name the US Chief Justice? I’m glad I remembered.  We did our best to encourage them to study hard and look out for their large extended family at the orphanage.

By far the most interesting meeting of the day was with the orphan’s board.  This is a group of adults who live in the area that volunteer to serve to advise Alfyao on how best to care for the children.  Alfayo has done excellent work in choosing his board members.  He has a teacher, a pastor, a District Children’s Officer, an Area Chief, a widow from the orphanage, a church member, and the director of the orphanage.  Later he will add two secondary students (male and female) to make sure the orphans are represented.  They had great questions and some good ideas to consider.  It was refreshing to say the least to know that others are worrying about the same things we are back on the orphan’s board in the US.

Alas, rain showers and fear of getting stranded on a really bad road forced us to leave somewhat abruptly, but we’ll see Alfayo again tomorrow as we head to the brand new, Tom Manning Orphanage at Ototo.  Here are some pics from today’s visit. 

Ndhiwa

Keep the comments coming; they are like fresh water to us here in Kenya.

Meeting Day

Today we stayed in Kisii at the new hotel Maureen found called Dados.  It’s much nicer than the Mash Park where we used to stay.  John Cherry and Cherie Creech can attest to the charms of the Mash Park.  We had our meeting today to discuss the various issues of the orphanage work.

What I was struck by today is how similar we are to the Kenyans in some key ways.  They also see that this work is vital, and that it is part of God’s plan for the redemption of the world.  Of course it’s more real for them than us; they live with the reality of death and despair every day.  But they struggle with the same dilemmas that we do with regards to this work.  It is far easier, and cheaper, to just provide food for those orphans who have none.  Housing them, educating them, and providing medical care triples the cost.  We struggle with how much care to provide the orphanage kids, knowing that it costs the outsiders dearly.  They struggle with it too.

We talked of ways to help the Kenyans raise money on their own.  Some of them are very entrepreneurial, and some aren’t.  Just like in America.  It’s kind of fun for me to be able to throw in a quick lesson on economics; I was surprised how much I remembered from those macro and micro classes when I was a business major.  Our workers are eager students.

The biggest blessing I discovered today however is the one that I have had for 21 years, Susie.  Today, she sat in our meeting, contributing some explanations when mine were lacking, and took pages of notes of the meeting on her laptop.  I can’t tell you how valuable that is when my memory is so bad.  She has also been keeping up with the money and receipts; no easy task here.  I know that John and the GCR bookkeeping staff will appreciate her work.  Imagine balancing an expense account with three currencies!  Susie’s role on this trip will really be shown in the next few days as we begin our orphanage visits.  She has the ability to bond quickly with the widows at these locations.  She loves them deeply, and they seem to return her affection.

Tomorrow we head to Ndhiwa to see their orphanage and worship with them.  I’ll be preaching one of Charlton’s excellent sermons about Ruth.  It struck me when I heard that sermon how much Ruth’s story fit with the widows at our orphanages.  God uses the weakest, most marginalized, broken people to do his most amazing work.  He even includes them in the redemption of the world.  Without Ruth, there is no Jesus!

Safari

On Wednesday we were picked up by three vans from the travel agency and driven to the Masai Mara Game Preserve on the edge of the Serengeti International Park.  There are dozens of lodges and camps in the Masai Mara that cater to foreigners who want to see wild animals in their native element.  Our lodge, Mara Simba, is a “Luxury” hotel, by African standards, which means the facility was much like a Holiday Inn, only with an African tribal theme, and lots more workers.  It had hot and cold running water in the shower, not the usual electric water heater shower head that most other African hotels have.

The purpose of this trip was team-building.  This is a place where the average Kenyan will never get to go because of the cost.  We took all the orphanage workers, Maureen and Francis, Risper from the WBS office and Susie and I.  We took time on Thursday to meet together about education needs, but otherwise it was all rest and relaxation.

When we arrived, we were served lunch; the food is excellent, by any standard.  Then at 4pm they took us on our first of four game drives that we experienced this week.  They have these vans that the top comes up on.  You can stand up or sit as you prefer.  The drivers have radios so they can communicate a “find” to the others.  They do a great job of finding the animals you came to see, though the terrain is very bumpy. 

 

We were able to see lions, mostly females but a couple of males, and cubs.  We saw a rhino on our first day from a distance and then Thursday, we were able to get amazingly close.  We found a cheetah, which are amazingly beautiful creatures, though we did not get to see her run.  There were wildebeests aplenty as well has hundreds of zebras.  Yesterday, Simon Karanja, who was riding in our van, spotted three lionesses sleeping in the sun that the driver had missed.  We were able to get to them and have them basically all to ourselves, though the driver was nervous because they were a little “off the track.”

We had a great time each evening socializing and kidding each other over dinner and after.  I think the workers really got along well together.  This morning we did our last game drive on the way out of the park.  It was ok, but a little late in the day for great animal spotting.  After we left the park, we did have two animal encounters that were memorable.  

Along the side of the road, near a Masai village, we spotted a couple of dozen Kenyans looking at a large carcass.  As we approached I was saddened to see that it was an elephant, killed by the poisoned arrows of poachers, and with its entire face hacked off to get the ivory.  It was awful to see such a mighty beast slaughtered for nothing more than a human’s greed.  Ivory is tremendously valuable and the poachers use of poisoned arrows ruins the meat of the animal so very little can be salvaged.  I won’t be posting the pictures as they are pretty disturbing.

After a little more driving we came across two giraffes “necking.”  This is a type of fighting that two males do to determine the leader of the herd.  We scared them off, however and the fled back to the herd who numbered at least twenty.  They are amazingly large, not at all like the cartoon figures you are used to.  Very elegant runners; almost like slow-motion.

Tomorrow we’ll have another meeting with the workers and then bid them farewell back to their homes.  We’ll be seeing most of them again this trip as we begin to visit the orphanages Sunday with Ndhiwa. Below is a web album of the safari pix.

Kenyan Safari 2010

Don't Panic

In the Masai Mara, the data service is not good. Only our iPhones work well, and then only when we are out on a game drive. Figure that! So right now I'm cruising around the game preserve, just saw three lionesses and a herd of giraffe. I'll make a proper blog entry with pictures when we get back to the excellent 3G service in Kisii. Oops there was a hyena!

Sent from my iPhone in Kenya!

Travel Day...and...God Shows Up.

Today was supposed to be a travel day.  Our only goal for today was to get from Nairobi to Kisii, where we would meet up with our workers to begin our retreat at the Masai Mara Game Preserve tomorrow.  Along the way, we decided to stop in and look at an IDP camp that one of our workers has adopted.  We recently started giving them a little money for food, and it seemed smart to check in on them.  So when we were least expecting it, God showed up.

It turns out that these people were survivors of some of the worst political violence that Kenya has ever seen.  Back in 2007, there was an election for president, and the results were very close.  When the ruling party decided to not wait for a full accounting of some irregularities in the balloting, violence erupted along tribal lines.

Now the thing is that Kenya’s tribes don’t really have a strong history of antipathy for each other.  But that didn’t stop corrupt politicians from using whatever they could to get their way, so over 1,000 people were killed and tens of thousands were “displaced”.  Most of these people were members of minority tribes that had migrated to other tribes’ traditional homelands.  Having lost members of their families to the violence, many fled away from their adopted homes and into what the U.N. calls Internally Displaced Peoples (IDP) camps.

These particular people, after living in a U.N. camp for a while, were invited by a concerned Kenyan to camp on his land.  There they could break away from the hopelessness that surrounds these types of camps.  They could farm and work together; things were looking up.  But after a while, this Kenyan sold the land they were on and they had to move on.  They settled near Gilgil, a town in Nyavasha Provence.

Somehow during all this they ran into John Kariuki.  John is a WBS follow-up worker, which means he is a preacher who checks on WBS students, baptizes them, and organizes them into churches.  John knew that God wanted him to minister in some way to these people, so he went there and did what preachers do.  And God showed up.  Now they have a little church that meets under a tree.  

John and some people he knows raised some money and bough them a ½ acre plot of land to settle on.  That’s great, right?  Only problem is there are 155 of them.  On a ½ acre.  With no money. Of the 155, 46 are orphan children, 27 are widows, and 20 are over 65.  The rest are able bodied and John is busy finding them work so they can restart their lives.  These are some of the weakest, most helpless, destitute people on earth.  They live in huts they cobbled together from sticks, shrubs, discarded plastic and mud. 

John Kariuki told this story to our John DeFore and it seemed like God had placed us in their path so that we could help them.  One of those “good works” that the bible says were prepared in advance for us to do.  So we have started sending them a little money for food for these helpless ones, and today, we drove up.

We met Grace.  Grace is one of the widows, and she has a natural love for others, an amazing faith in God and good leadership skills.  She told us that one day she was sitting outside her hut, watching the orphans play, knowing they could all starve soon.  As she had done so many times, she cried out to God in prayer to save them. Later that same day, John came to tell them our help was coming, and she said “God is faithful.” 

John recognized that Grace could be the one who could organize the feeding of all of these people, and she has.  Once again God used the least likely to save the most helpless.  Check out this video I made of Susie's amazing pics.

These people still have incredible needs.  Their latrine is a pile of sticks for privacy around a hole.  They carry water 1km in jerry cans.  Their huts are not suitable for the rainy season that swept down from the rift valley this very day, showering us as we drove away.  They need blankets, shoes, tents, clothes, and most of all, hope.  Isn’t it cool that it’s ours to give?  If you’d like to help, just call our John DeFore.

Almost there

Who could have thought that one thunderstorm could cause this much trouble.  If you have ever flown through DFW airport you know how much chaos a well placed storm can cause.  A "ground stop" in Dallas because of the storm meant that our flight could not leave Midland.  We were set to depart at 11:20am and ended up leaving at around 5pm.  Our next flight to London left without us at 5:30 and we were forced to re-book onto a later flight leaving at 7:30.  That made us 1 hour late for our Nairobi flight and stranded in London; tough break.

We made the best of it, however.  After securing a hotel room for the night we ventured out with a 6-hour pass for the Heathrow Express and London Underground.  We had nothing planned, we had never been here before, but we managed to find the London Eye, that big Farris-wheel thing, parliament square, Trafalgar square, Whitehall, the theatre district and a decent pub for dinner.  Pretty cool.  So tonight we will have an unexpectedly nice bed and depart for Nairobi tomorrow at 10:20am.  Kind of a nice, unplanned, mini-holiday.  Thanks God.

Here's a little video I did of our day: