Dirubi and the VTI

This morning we enjoyed a good breakfast buffet at theDados, and set out for the Dirubi Orphanage and the Vocational Training Institute (VTI).  It takes about and hour and a half to get there from Kisii, and Francis really shines as a driver on the bad roads of this remote area of Kenya.  Jeff and Arnold were fully packed, as we were leaving them there to work on the automotive shop.

We arrived about 9:30 and Thomas proudly gave us a tour of our first orphanage at Dirubi.  There were a few changes from my last trip, notably some decorative fencing and improved ventilation windows in the kitchens.  The old clinic has been transformed into a library with quiet study rooms for the students, and the new clinic is looking really fine.

Then we went across the road to the construction site for the VTI.  To say that they have been busy is the understatement of the century.  There were easily fifty masons hard at work with diggers, rock breakers, concrete men, and water women swarming like ants all over the four-acre site.

Construction began on 18 June and today they have six classroom buildings and one widows dorm complete, two more classrooms with walls up, the administration building has walls, and three girls dorms are at the foundation stage.  The Great Hall, (dining hall just doesn't describe it) has its footers laid and foundation walls being built, and the girl's bathhouse foundation is started. The west septic tank is being dug and the plumbers start tomorrow on its structure and the drains for the bathhouse.  The progress is truly amazing!

We met with Thomas and discussed a few changes, some questions that they had for the architect (me), and final fitting out for the automotive shop.  Jeff and Arnold met the two candidates for automotive instructor and settled on one of them as the best choice.  His name is Evans and he owns a shop in Sondu.  He trained one of our orphans a couple of years ago that is now a successful mechanic on Kisumu.  Notably missing was our choice for principal, it seems he doesn't want the job as bad as he did in May, so we will be meeting with another man Wednesday evening at our hotel.  Please pray that he works out, because its past time to get the teachers lined up and furnishings purchased and installed.

After a great lunch prepared by the women of the Dirubi church, Susie and most of the team went up to see the Melanie Feeding Station at the Lee McGraw Orphanage.  Jeff, Albert, and I looked at the VTI some more and made plans for their week here at the site.  They will be staying at Thomas' house in Sondu so I know that they will be in good hands.

While we waited for the others to return, I walked to the top of the site and pondered all that had been done and all that was left to do.  I said a prayer for the workers and for our plans and thanked God for all he has done here.  He really does use broken people to do amazing things.  This facility will give job skills to orphans, those whose lives might otherwise have been lost, and allow them to be the salt and light of his kingdom to the next generation of Kenyans.  Truly, the meek shall inherit the earth!

On the way home, we stopped at Sondu, where it was market day.  A traveling carnival ride had been set up there, the kind with chairs on long, swinging chains that spin around and swing way out.  We stopped to take a picture of it, but that wasn't enough for Pam Hicks and Francis Mbuvi.  They jumped out and ran to join the riders on the shaky structure.  Susie went to take pictures and Doris went to see up close.  I hung back with a video camera to capture the disaster, er, uh, I mean, fun!

The workers loaded our riders and a dozen or so more and prepared to start the equipment.  Apparently there was some critical electrical component missing, so they were using a bucket of water with a crude copper switch arrangement to start the machine.  VERY SCARY!  Everything went well, however and our riders and witness came back excited and beaming. 

We finished up back here at the Dados with another fine buffet and are now preparing for bed.  Tomorrow we will be at Ndhiwa to see my friend Alfayo Bodi.  Here are some pics of todays fun:

26 Sept 2011

On The Road Again…

Today was a driving day.  We left Kamulu bright and early to pick up our lost bag at the airport.  This bag was one that belonged to Susie and me, but we tagged it as Jeff Roland’s because we were one over.  So after visiting the Security Duty Officer and getting a pass to enter the baggage area, Jeff went back to retrieve it.  He had to pass through a metal detector and it went off, so he turned to me and emptied his pockets: a leatherman, some change and three pocketknives!  He retrieved that bag and we were on our way.

Seems like now would be a good time to introduce my fellow travelers.  Susie and I are accompanied by Jeff Roland, automotive expert, GCR member, and all around great guy, and Arnold Assusie,  who is the automotive instructor at the Village of Hope Technical Training School that Jeff Roland help established in Ghanna, West Africa.  Also with us are Pam Hicks, from GCR, and Michale and Dorris Fortson.  The Forstons were missionaries in Tanzania years ago, and now are looking to return and spend their retirement years serving orphans in East Africa.  They are touring the area, looking at established orphanages, and listening to God about where they should next serve.

Our only goal for today was to reach Kisii before dark, and we made it.  Ut was a beautiful, clear day.  Temperatures were in the 70’s with scattered clouds, so viewing at the Rift Valley overlook was spectacular.  Check out this amazing panorama!

After fighting of the hawkers there, we continued on.  We stopped at the Delemere, our favorite roadside eatery, for samosas and ndazi.  It was 11:15, so the Americans were calling it lunch and the Africans were calling it “tea”.  We rolled on through Nakuru and headed for Kerico when we encountered a “diversion” , that’s “detour” for the Americans.  Turned out to be an hour detour onto a very bad road, while they worked on a section of the B1 motorway that couldn’t have been nearly as bad as the diversion was!  The views along the diversion were really great, however.  That delay put a squash on any plans for a “real” lunch at Kericho, so we stopped for fuel and more snacks and finished up our long drive to the Dados Hotel in Kisii.  We arrived well before dark; we even had time for a quick trip to the Nakumat, and sat down for dinner at 7pm.  Maureen had thought ahead and ordered a buffet for us that was really good.  No “spoons of hope” for you fellow Dados veterans.

25 Sept 2011

So here we are!  Tomorrow, we will head over to the Dirubi orphanage, see it and the training center that is under construction, and leave Jeff and Arnold to see what trouble they can cause.  They have together already done what we are trying to do, so I am counting on their expertise to help select an instructor and equip the shop.  More tomorrow!

Travel Days

It’s easy to forget how tiring all of this travel can be.  I’m writing this on Saturday night, after a whirlwind three days that has left us all very tired.  Our travel was uneventful, until we got to London and our plane had mechanical problems that BA was never able to resolve.  They gave us a new plane, but by the time we departed, we were 5 hours late.  This put us into Nairobi at 3:30AM local time, and the one lost bag out of the 12 we checked had us arriving at Kamulu at 6am. 

We decided to change our plans and stay in Nairobi for today and get some errands run that we needed to do anyway.  We hoped that would give us some rest time, but Nairobi traffic never cooperates. We made it back to Kamulu at 7pm, and we have been sorting baggage, and packing for our 8am departure tomorrow to Kisii.  So here we are.  Everyone is in bed, except me.

I feel like this post is incoherent, but I cant seem to fix it.  Fatigue is like that.  I’ll wrap it up here and post again tomorrow.

Kikitemo

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you know that I really love to go to Kikitemo IDP camp.  The work that God is doing there is amazing.  The short story about these people is that they are Kenyans, whose lives were torn apart by the post-election violence of 2008.  They have wandered around Kenya for a while before finally settling in a wind-swept valley near Nakuru.  Our WBS worker, John Kariuki met them and preached the gospel to them and helped the start a church.  We help these folks with some food money each month for the orphans and widows among them.  If you want to read more about them, scroll down to my blog post from Friday, March 18.

When we last saw them, they had started a fledgling business to raise money and occupy their time.  They make jewelry and baskets that can be sold to tourists.  They are leveraging their one resource, time, to improve their lives.  They are aware that God has blessed them by providing them food through us, so now they are inspired, not only to tell God’s story to others, but to join with God in His redemption of their lives.  We have been buying their goods and bring them back to the US to sell for their benefit, and to give us another opportunity to tell the story of our part in their redemption.

Grace, their leader, tells me that they have seen a big difference in the attitude of the people in their camp.  Always grateful, they are now beginning to feel the satisfaction of benefiting from their own work.  She says that even the few men that are there are eager to help in basket making and other camp chores, now that they share in the profits.  This has made them think of future plans moving some of the families back into normal Kenyan society and making room in the camp for others who are less fortunate.   They no longer think in terms of just surviving, but now they are considering how to expand God’s work here.  Very cool.

By the way, when I say they are making baskets, I mean it.  They even make the sisal cords that are woven together with colored plastic tape to make the basket.  Grace demonstrated for us how they take raw sisal and roll it on their thighs to make the cords.  

When Grace and I were alone together, I told her she is my hero.  I’m not sure she understood what a hero is, but I know that she knows how much she means to all of us.  God changed her life in a very tragic way because he had bigger plans for her.  She told me that she knows that her reward is in heaven, and she is right.  In the fully redeemed world that God will create from the new heaven and the new earth, Grace has a mansion waiting for her.  I hope I can live in one of her closets or something.

Here are some pictures that Paul took.  He has been a great friend and helper to me on this trip.  Tomorrow he will be taking an early flight to Mwanza, Tanzania to visit his missionary friend, Jason for a few days.  I will be taking a later flight to start my long journey home. Hope this blog has been a blessing to you.

Banging my head against the wall

God has a way of making us humble.  Yesterday, I was opining about how great I felt that all of my experiences had prepared me for this work, and all that rot.  Today I tried to merge my two passions, computers and Kenya, and the result was "splat."

My goal today was to meet with our guys and cover a few items of orphanage business and then spend some time working on their computers and training them on how to use a new email program and Picasa, for managing pictures.  While I was looking at their laptops and installing software, Paul was leading them in a great presentation on vehicle maintenance and driving tips.  He had prepared manuals for them and everything. The software installation went well, so I was encouraged to continue on with my plan.

When we started the training, I discovered immediately that I was in trouble.  I know these programs very well, and to me, they are simple to use.  But "simple" to a man who has owned every major class of personal computer since they were invented is different than to an African who has only used it to do one thing. Here's an example.

Me: "Go ahead and launch your web browser."

Them: Blank stare, no movement.

Me: "Okay, double click on the Firefox icon."

Them: Blank stare, some little movement. Shuffling uncomfortably.

Me: "That orange, round picture on the desktop?"

Them: Some intense staring at the screen.  A few mouse movements.

Now, don't hear me saying that these guys are stupid, they are not.  They're just from a totally different mindset than we are.  It would be the same if they were trying to walk me through how to milk a cow, or plant sugarcane.  Chaos. In the end, there were so many problems uncovered during our training that I scrapped most of it and had to be content with the few tidbits of something that they might have picked up.  Paul's, deal was good, though.

After most of the guys had to leave, the rest of us went for a stroll in downtown Kisii.  It was interesting, like a walk back in time.  We saw brand new things that our great-grandparents must have bought.  Hand drills, two person bow saws, a plow made for an ox, side by side with Nokia cell phones and pirated DVD's.  We thought we might find a restaurant, but no luck.  Everyone in Kisii eats at home or from a street vendor, and I'm not that adventurous.

We are bout to go back to the restaurant to wait for a couple of hours for the same food we had yesterday and for lunch both days.  The Kenyans don't mind, it's what they eat every day.  Americans are spoiled to variety.  Even me, Mr. Kenya, is seriously craving pizza.  At least we will be able to watch another episode of "Soy Tu Duena", a Mexican soap opera, badly dubbed in English, on Kenyan TV.  This Is Africa!

A pitiful few pictures are here.

Training Center Day Two

Today was a good day.  After breakfast we met up with one of my favorite people in the world, Alfayo Bodi.  Alfayo runs our facilities at Ndhiwa and Tom Manning and acts as a member of our Kenyan leadership team.  He came to be with us as we met the contractors who will build our new training center. We got to hang out in the back of the van on the way to Dirubi.

Alfayo, Francis, Paul, Thomas, Simon, Simon the Principal and I arrived at the Dirubi orphanage and we sat down to go over the revised plan that I worked on late into the night.  I had to accommodate a stream running through the middle of the site and a change of plans on the septic system in order to get a workable building plan.  The guys were all on board with what I had done so we called in the mason (who acts as the general contractor), the electrician and the plumber to join us.  These will be the principal players in the construction phase. But first, a pause for a personal moment.

When GCR cancelled phase two of the Kingdom Now project that would have completely remodeled the auditorium for the first time in 45 years, I was pretty depressed.  I felt like we had lost a great opportunity to transform the nature of our worship and our church.  I wondered if we had completely wasted a lot of time and money designing a room that will now never be built. I took this as a personal insult, even though I know it wasn't about me at all.  But one thing I have learned about God in the last few years is that He is able, and totally willing, to use tremendous pain in this life to teach us about His nature. In every loss, there is a lesson to be learned.

During the design phase for Phase Two, I met a brilliant architect named Kevin Callahan.  Kevin is a little weird, very west coast and ADD at the same time.  But Kevin did the very cool thing as we were gearing up to start construction.  He took the entire building design, every page, and taped it to the walls of our meeting room.  Then he invited a representative of each of the sub-contractors to pour over them, asking him questions and taking copious notes.  He was as eager to learn from them how better to do his job as he was to get the project ready to build.  He totally exposed himself to their criticisms, in order to make sure the design was as tight as he could make it.  Now, I'm no Kevin Callahan, far from it.  But I saw the tremendous value in what he was doing and it stuck with me.

So today, when we went over the design of the new training institute with these Kenyan tradesmen, I tried to emulate the master, and I asked them over and over to ask questions, make suggestions, and help me get this right.  At the end I did just what Kevin did at GCR, I asked each of them to look me in the eye and tell me that they could build it like I had drawn it.  And they did.  So we are going to build it.

God uses loss and tragedy to teach us lessons He needs for us to know, when we need to know them.  I have no idea why I am here, at this time, doing this work.  I could never have imagined that almost everything I have ever learned is being put to use in the kingdom in this way.  But God knows, and that's enough.

So why are we building this?  To do our part to help God redeem the world through the power of His church.  Because it not enough to save the life of a child if you leave them as a helpless young adult.  God expects us to lavish His gifts on them like he would, and He is doing it through us.  No gift is too small, but none is too big either for our God!  Praise Him!

After our meeting we drove back to Kisii to welcome our orphanage workers for our meeting together tomorrow.  On the way home I put my fancy Bose headphones on Thomas and let him experience Gungor's Beautiful Things album.  He really liked it and so do I.  There's a song on that album that says, "He makes beautiful things, He makes beautiful things out of the dust. He makes beautiful things, He makes beautiful things out of us!"  How right you are.

Pictures from today are here.

Back at Dirubi

First, let me apologize for not blogging last night. I know a few of you are waiting to hear from us but sometimes, fatigue wins.
We got to worship with our friends at Kamulu Sunday morning, which is always a blessing. Francis Mbuvi preached a great sermon and the singing was amazing. Very African. We even got to see an original song perfumed by the youth. After worship, we quickly set out for Kericho to be close to Dirubi where the new training institute is to be built. On the way, we stopped for some supplies at Nakumat at the Village Market. Security was quite a bit tighter there than usual, owing to the tensions surrounding the UBL killing.
Last night we stayed at a new hotel, called the Dream Cottage Guest House. It was nice, newer than the Tea Hotel, but smaller and with little character. Meals were prompt though, rare in Kenya. This morning we went to Dirubi, site of our first orphanage. Across the road is the new site for the Vocational Training Center. This requires a word of explanation:

With over 900 kids of all ages in our orphanages, every year a few of them graduate from high school. We had to come up with a way to get them some edge in the employment market in order for them to have some shot at taking care of themselves. Up until now, there were just a few but every year there are more and more. Next year, there will be more than 40 and each year the number increases to around 150 per year. The new KWO board of directors decided that building a training center for our graduates would be the best way to tackle the problem. Last month, John DeFore made his (maybe) last trip to select the best site for the new center and Dirubi was selected.
I am here to finalize the building plan and meet the new principal and the builders who will construct the facility. It's very important that we get this right. This will be the biggest thing we have every built, so good communication and planning on the front end could save a lot later. So today we were on the site. I brought a good, long tape and we walked the entire site. It is more than big enough, but it has a small stream running through it, so my initial plan required some modification. After all of our discussions, we went to our hotel for the next few days in Kisii and I have been modifying the plan in order to print for the builder. We will meet him tomorrow.
Sorry for the lengthy explanation, but it's the whole reason for the trip!  Here are some of the pictures Paul and I took . By the way, Francis let Paul drive us from Dirubi to Kisii, about a 90 minute drive. He did great!