Kenya Kids Can!

They say that humor is universal, but I struggle. It was a windy day, and I told a bunch of students that if they weren’t careful, they would take flight just like the Flying Nun. As they gave me puzzled blank looks, I made an urgent note to myself to UPDATE CULTURAL REFERENCES. As they stared at me, one of them said, “Nuns can fly?”

We had over thirty colleges visit in the past ten days, which is both thrilling and exhausting. Most RVA kids will never see a college before they show up, so being able to talk to reps is such an important opportunity for them. There were lots of eyes opened and lots of good conversations, but it is always nice to throw in a miracle.

Our musical for the term was Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The guy that is our director is one talented person, and it was pretty spectacular. (Matthew was one of the brothers.) I was sitting next to the rep from a Christian college in Illinois who is African American, and when the sisters came on stage, she gasped. There were two African sisters and one Korean sister, and she whispered to me, “This isn’t stunt casting; this is just how it is here!” The grin didn’t leave her face the whole evening.

The miracle was this. Joel is a senior from RVA, and he had applied to St. Mary’s in California. St. Mary’s wasn’t here, but a rep from Messiah College was here, and they are best friends. The Messiah rep contacted the St. Mary’s rep and said, “You have GOT to take this kid; he stole the show!” And a college that was going to go to committee on Joel because he didn’t look strong enough has accepted him in the fall. Figuring out the odds of this happening would probably bust a Cray.

Two weeks ago, I visited a school that we work with. The kids know me well at this school; when I drive up, they all yell “Peifer” and greet me. I didn’t realize the extent of my fame, and how isolated they are, when another car pulled up a few weeks ago, and they ran towards the car and yelled “Not-Peifer!” The kids are thriving, our computer teacher is good, and they had a final in Excel that I don’t think I would have passed, but they did great on it.

They were full of life, and as I left there I thought the thing I never communicate is how fun this can be. The kids love to laugh, and I walked away thinking: “This is working. I get to be part of something that helps little kids.”

It is hard to explain how exhilarating it can be to do this work. It fills holes that are deep inside of you. There is a Scripture that says “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me” that I always figured was for holy people, but it even works for people like me.

And then there are weeks where everything is stripped bare, and stuff you’ve seen a million times hit you like you have never seen it before.

I had the video camera and I thought it would be fun to film students talking about what they were thankful for. Some of it was funny and some of it was touching, but then a little boy dressed in rags came up and told me that he was thankful for his clothes.

Usually I can hold it together until I drive off; I couldn’t that day. I had tears running down my face as I thought of how much I have and how much he didn’t have. I ran off like a fool full of crazy sorrow. I thought of how much need there was, and how little we could do, and I felt like giving up.

Sometimes it just gets you sad.

Your pal,
Steve

Kenya Kids Can is supported by the prayers and financial contributions of people like you, from all over the world.  If you are able, please make a donation today to either the “Peifer School Lunch Program – 000339″ or the “Peifer Computer Center Program – 000336.” Steve and Nancy raise their own funding; to support their family directly, make your contribution to “Peifer, Stephen C and Nancy J – Support 047930001.” Thanks in advance!

This just in from the Chuck Baker School of Management. Kids who get out of line can earn a detention on Saturday mornings. The biggest punishment is having to get up at 8am on a Saturday, although I famously led one that involved picking up trash on campus and singing Neil Diamond songs. For some mysterious reason, I have never been asked to lead detention again.

When Pinewood Derby occurs, Chuck counts on those students in detention to do chores and errands on the big day. Since there were only two students having to serve detention, Chuck had an innovative way of staffing Pinewood Derby.

He called it Detention Credits. The concept was pretty simple. Assign a kid detention for the weekend under the assumption that he or she will probably get a detention at some point, and they could bank the credit they had because they had always served it during Pinewood Derby. This was not embraced by administration, but my limited knowledge of educational reform seems to indicate that progressive ideas take time to implement.

We had multi-cultural day at RVA last week, and Nancy was one of the ones who were in charge of it. It was a wonderful day full of skits and songs, and the most emotional part of the day is when each of the 25 different countries represented on the campus this year are represented by a student holding their home flag as they walked up to the stage.

I looked at these kids, and the thing that struck me was how brave they are. They leave their parents at such young ages and live on a campus without heat or air conditioning, sharing rooms with strangers on a campus so remote there are baboons and monkeys about.

It is an honor to be around them. Remind me of that the next time I want to harm one of them.

I was at one of the lunch program schools recently, and out of a thousand students, three hundred were not receiving lunch. I asked the headmaster why, and he said that he did not charge for the food, but he charged 15 shillings a month (about 21 cents) to pay for the cook, the firewood and the water it took to cook the food.

At first I was angry, but the more I thought about it, I thought:  I have given an unfunded mandate. I’ve told them they can’t charge for food, but I don’t provide the other stuff they need to provide the food. I pondered this a long time.

What was really great was that before I could do anything, the other headmasters met with him and explained how he could use part of his operating budget to pay for firewood and water. They explained to him the value of the program, and I suspect they let him know what a jerk he would be if he messed up and I got cranky.

But the deeper you get in, the more complex it gets. Helping without hurting while being cultural sensitive is a lot harder than it looks.

But the hardest thing of all was thinking about three hundred kids who couldn’t afford 21 cents a month. I know how tough the economy is in the United States right now, but can you imagine not being able to come up with 21 cents a month?

Three hundred kids, about a third of that school, can imagine it very well.

Your pal,
Steve

P.S.  RVA REALLY needs a French teacher and a Spanish teacher next year. Let us know if you are interested.

P.P.S.  Kenya Kids Can is supported by the prayers and financial contributions of people like you, from all over the world.  If you are able, please make a donation today to either the “Peifer School Lunch Program – 000339″ or the “Peifer Computer Center Program – 000336.” Steve and Nancy raise their own funding; to support their family directly, make your contribution to “Peifer, Stephen C and Nancy J – Support 047930001.” Thanks in advance!

After my family, the short list of my favorite people to spend time with would have to include Chuck Baker, the shop teacher at RVA. Long time readers might remember that I’ve written about him several times before (see the post titled “21 Years and Four Months“). Chuck came to RVA after the death of his wife when he was in his 60’s and became our head shop teacher. He is a man full of the love of the Lord and good cheer. It feels very strange to be a man in his 50’s writing about a man in his 70’s, but he may be the most lovable person I’ve ever met.

But all that pales in comparison to his unique ability to lead a meeting. The Chuck Baker School of Management produces meetings that this former corporate pig could never conceive of. Chuck is in charge of our Pinewood Derby and his meetings regarding it are legendary. It would be hard to put into words how truly amazing they are, but in lieu of a video, highlights include:

1. The meetings begin at 6:03, not six. According to the Chuck Baker School of Management, if you start a meeting at 6, it is just another meeting. If you start at 6:03, you get people’s attention. This concept gets a little funnier every year.
2. It is VERY important to have an agenda, but also a time scheme that goes with it. It then becomes more important to constantly reference the time in relation to the agenda. “Ok, it is 6:41 and we are on agenda item 17 and we should really be on agenda item 22, so we really need to pick it up here.”
3. Stories that have nothing to do with pinewood derby, cars, woodshop or anything that isn’t 7 degrees away become VITAL in the meeting. Somehow, every year, a Volkswagen ad that ran in Life magazine in the 60’s gets mentioned.
4. All meetings MUST include the phrase “I’m busier than a one armed paper hanger … with an itch.”

There is nothing better than a Chuck Baker meeting. I would write more, but I’m supposed to be on my second point right now so I really have to pick up the pace.

We saw God use you all to produce a miracle last month. We received enough monies to completely provide food for almost 20,000 students at 34 schools. We just made it; every gift was critical. We are grateful beyond what we can say. For many students, it is about the only food they are getting right now. Thank you so much. All monies collected now go towards the beginning of the school year in January.

I was getting ready to run to the states for a two-week trip to speak at a conference and visit some colleges. Tabitha’s mother came by my office right before I was scheduled to leave. She is very ill with full blown AIDS and just getting to my office was a huge effort. She brought with her the smallest box of tea you could buy so I could bring it to her daughter.

It’s almost impossible to understand, unless you live here, how much that box of tea represented. You might compare it to buying someone a car when you were out of work, but that doesn’t even get there. I’m sure there were missed meals and extra work found to somehow pay for that tea. I can’t quite imagine the sacrifice involved.

I held that smallest box of tea and I knew for the first time what the Scripture meant about how the widow’s mite was the most significant gift of all.

Your pal,
Steve

P.S. Kenya Kids Can is supported by the prayers and financial contributions of people like you, from all over the world.  If you are able, please make a donation today. Thanks in advance!

Recently Korean missionaries were targeted in a country north of here, and several were killed. All of them were known by our students whose parents work in that country. None of our students’ parents were killed, but the game you can play with yourself that it is all ok and you aren’t in danger being here, came unglued. The next day you could tell every kid that was from that country; the fear was all over them. Their parents were in danger, and that was the reality of the choices they had made to share the gospel.

I was at one of the schools I work with in the valley, and I was trying to film the students about using computers, and it wasn’t coming together. After three tries with three students where I could get nothing but a yes or no out of them, I asked the computer teacher why they were acting like that. She told me that there was no food in most of their homes, and school was ending soon, and that the lunch at school was the only food they got in a day.

Then she asked me, very gently, if I had ever been hungry.

I told her no, I had never been hungry.

She told me that if you had ever been hungry, and you knew you would be again, it was the worst feeling you could imagine. The fear would grab a hold of you and not let go.

The reason the children were not helping was because they were wrapped up in the fear of being hungry.

I thought about this all weekend. On Sunday, my daughter had asked if we could go into town and watch the Hannah Montana movie. (Ben threw up in his mouth when I asked him if he wanted to go.) As we sat in that awful movie, with her sitting eagerly at the edge of her seat, I thought about the unusual path that it took for us to have a daughter.

Having a daughter has helped me face all the awful things I’ve seen in Kenya. Love is the only thing that can help you face fear. And love is the only thing that makes you want to fight for those who don’t have a voice or a chance.

I’m so grateful that love is greater than fear.

Your pal,

Steve

PS: After sitting in my tenth assembly to honor the fourth place volleyball team, I decided that what we needed was an award that recognized the best efforts in college admissions. You can see the story here:

The Prestigious Scheenstra Award (video)
The Prestigious Scheenstra Award Part 2 (video)
The Prestigious Scheenstra Award Part 3 (video)

I hear lots of interesting things as a guidance counselor, but perhaps the greatest thing I’ve heard all year was from a parent who had come in to express her rather extreme displeasure with me about the advice I was giving her daughter:

VERY Displeased Mother: Why on EARTH are you recommending Cal Tech to my daughter?

Me: Your daughter is bright enough to get in and I think Cal Tech is one of the premier colleges in the United States. When I was at Oracle, we revered the graduates. It is a beautiful campus filled with the best minds in the country.

VDM: I FORBID her to go to Cal Tech.

Me: Why?

VDM: It is FAR too nerdy.

Me: Where do you want her to go?

VDM: MIT

Me (Desperately looking at anything besides VDM, and trying to think of unpleasant dental appointments I have had): Oh.

Mom was right, and the first female in our history is going to MIT. And I am QUITE sure that MIT has outgrown any nerdy tendency they ever had.

I had someone ask me if I enjoyed college guidance, and I thought about another student. I think Katie was as insecure of a student as I had ever met when she came to RVA as a freshman. She was gifted, but she really had no confidence. RVA is a place that grows lots of kids, and she was progressing nicely. When she was a junior and I suggested Harvard, she laughed and told me there was no way someone like her could ever go to that college.

She got an interview, and as we drove over to Nairobi, she was pretty nervous. We were with someone else as we drove who was quite a talker, but then we had to take a cab to a part of town I would have never have found on my own. It was just the two of us in the cab, and I told her I really didn’t care where she went to college. That was between her and her parents. What I cared about was that she realized that she had a legitimate place at the table. I encouraged her:  Go and show them who you are.

Our fourth student will be going to Harvard in the fall. I cried when I heard the news. But I cried when our first student was accepted to Wellesley on a full ride, and I cried when I heard the news on all the kids. These parents have sacrificed everything to be on the mission field, and when their kid gets into a great school at a price they can afford, it is as fulfilling as anything I know.

And Tabitha now has all the monies to go to college this year. The only hold up is her getting her passport. Thanks so much for helping her and please pray; there is no reason for them to deny her a passport, but they are doing it to her right now for no good reason. We need a miracle.

One of my best friends here is thinking about adopting a child. He is in his 50s and they didn’t set off to adopt; the baby was abandoned and his wife went down to the hospital to hold her, just because babies need to be held. One thing led to another, and they are in love with this child. But the path of adoption in Kenya is crazy hard, and there are no guarantees. When we were talking about it, he realized that they were opening themselves to potentially tremendous heartache in trying to adopt Hope.

I realized that was the holiest thing I had heard in some time, and probably what we are all called to:  to make our self vulnerable to heartache for something greater than ourselves. 

This has become real in the past few weeks. Perhaps the greatest pain is when you have tried to help someone, and they betray you. We have had so many computer centers attacked that we had to take all the computers and bring them to a secure place. When I would visit a school and didn’t have computers with me, the children would cry.

A part of me was just sick of the hassle. Everything takes 20 times more than what it would take to do in America, and then this started happening. It would be so much easier to just pull the plug. My hero Mark Buhler told me the sad part of that thought is that it would be the children who will suffer.

But if you are fortunate, and you have people praying for you, you can move from disillusionment to anger and cynicism to something greater:  you decide some things are worth fighting for. The thieves don’t motivate you, but you can use what they have done to fuel the drive to not back down.

Bruce came up with a way to reinforce the doors so it will take a tank to break in. Every school now has two guards, equipped with cell phones and weapons. The next school that gets attacked will be greeted with dozens of parents who have been notified, and they will come running. They are outraged at what has happened, and they will fight for their children.

If those who would steal from children want a fight, I will give them a fight. 

Your pal,

Steve