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:

Last Day

The orphanage worker meeting was good. There were various issues that we had to discuss, but no major problems. We talked about ways to ensure that older kids, as they reached the end of their time in the orphanage, were counseled regarding their options for training and education after high school. This is an issue that the GCR Orphans Board has been concerned with for some time. We want to know what the options are for each area; what jobs are available, what training is important and available. Each of these men has a heart for their kids. They are increasingly seeing them as their own. They are fighting for them. It’s beautiful to watch.
After the meeting, I met with our office staff. We trained on the mystic art of mail merge in Microsoft Office. It seems like kind of weird thing to do, but it is part of a new plan we have to increase the response rate to the introductory lessons that we send out to new students. By mailing them from Nairobi, we hope to cut the time between enrollment and receiving the first lesson. Hopefully more enrollees will continue with the lessons and have their hearts and minds changed by the gospel. Typical of many of the things I do, not traditional ministry, but technical support for ministry. It felt good to do it in Africa.
Soon it was time to leave for the airport and home. Mbuvi took us on one more adventure on the way, driving on a road under construction. In America, when a road is being built, you can’t drive on it. The construction companies go to great lengths to make sure you don’t. But in Kenya, its common. We actually drove around dump trucks and other construction machines. This new road will connect the Nakuru Highway west of the capital with the Mombassa Highway, bypassing the city center. It will cut hours off the transit time for trucks moving from the port to the interior. It will also take a lot of trucks off the streets in Nairobi. That’s a good thing I can assure you. It will also cut our time to get to and from the airport in half. It saved us 30 minutes this time, even though the road was not complete and we detoured several times.
We arrived at the airport expecting our usual four hour wait after clearing security. At the check-in area, however, we were informed that our flight had been “rescheduled” until 11:45am the next day. They were going to put us up in a hotel overnight. We were not interested in that, so we appealed to the supervisor. He was a very large, very intelligent Kenyan who was sympathetic to our plight. “We have children at home!”, “We have connections that can’t be missed!” etc. He was able to book us on the KLM flight to Amsterdam, and then another KLM flight from Amsterdam to London in order to make our originally scheduled Continental flight to Houston.
We were worried about the connections; they were all very tight. In London, a Continental gate agent actually pulled us out of the security line and rushed us through, in order to make the flight to Houston. I am writing this post from that flight, so you know that our Kenyan friend was successful. I only hope we make the flight to Midland; it would stink to get so close and be left behind. So now if you ask me if we went through Amsterdam or London on the way home, I will just say, “yes.”
So now that the trip is over, I am experiencing my usual post-Africa funk. Every time I am there it feels a little bit more like home. Now that Susie has been, and seen me at work there, I know that our lives will never be the same. I was changed by Kenya after my very first trip. The faces of the kids that we are helping to save are intoxicating. Now that Susie has experienced it first hand, she understands what drives me to return, and to do whatever I can to save more and more of them. My role is a small one, but it’s easily the most important thing I have ever been a part of.
But the most amazing thing of all is to experience the swirling whirlwind of the Holy Spirit moving in his people. It’s like standing in the eye of a hurricane. The church is alive! The hundreds of people who turned out to meet us, the church members who have been helping the starving by themselves because of their love of Christ, the silent labor of the chosen leaders in Kenya, this is the power of His holy church. This is how we will reclaim the world for God. As Charlton would say, ‘This is Christ redeeming the word through the power of the resurrection.’ Great stuff!

Meeting Day Part 1

Today, Susie and I were in Kamulu at the WBS office. I met with our WBS follow up workers while Susie helped out at the learning center at Made In The Streets. She had a good time making puzzles with the girls and conducting a spelling quiz with the older kids.

I met with our Follow Up Workers here in Kenya. These men have assigned geographic areas where the evangelize, and follow up on WBS students that have requested a visit, as well as checking on churches that have been established through their work. We went over expectations and work rules, and had some spirited bible discussions. I was impressed by their grasp of some of the same issues that we wrestle with at GCR.

Tomorrow we meet with the Orphanage Workers, train the office staff for the new introductory lesson project, and pack for our 11:45pm departure tomorrow night. I'll update again from the airport. No new pics today. Blessings.