I am now a member of the Blender Community.
Perhaps I should explain. Perhaps the most important development to happen in my life in the last year was hearing from the Lord that I should make breakfast in the morning. Nancy has a first-period class; I didn’t have to get out until second period. It would take pressure off of her and allow me to develop gifts previously undeveloped.
To add to this, Nancy has been diagnosed as a diabetic. It was caught early, and so far diet has controlled it quite well. But making a nutritious breakfast became more important. Smoothies became a regular part of the morning. And then our blender died.
It isn’t easy to buy a blender in Kenya, so I set out to do research on blenders. And I discovered the Blender Community. Blender people have OPINIONS, and they are not shy about expressing them. To add to the fun, it is not important just to be right, but also to prove that the other person is WRONG. I promise you, you don’t want to be on the wrong side of the glass vs. plastic debate; it got ugly over there.
After reading more than I ever believed was possible to read about blenders, we bought one and have been very happy with it. So happy that as I tried to zip up a piece of luggage whose zipper had fallen off, I had the thought that I might actually join the Luggage Community.
I will give warning if I do. Too many exciting things are probably bad for your health.
You enter a new family dynamic when your oldest brings home “the girl.” JT was here this summer doing an internship in the business office and he brought his special friend, Janelle, who was also doing a project with the girls at St. Edwin’s Orphanage. They met at Wake Forest, and it looks to be pretty serious. She certainly passed the family test; we all fell in love with her. Katie had the best line: ”I think JT is going out with her because she reminds him of me.”
The rains haven’t come and it has gotten more desperate here. We had a meeting with all of our computer teachers, and they reported that the biggest challenge for them was to teach when students were crying because they were so hungry. The term ended with most schools running out of food 10-15 days before the end of the term; we just didn’t have the money to buy enough.
I had an incident with a local school recently. There is a computer center that both the primary school and the secondary school share. They border the same land; they are right next door. The secondary school headmaster had recently stopped his students from attending computer classes. I went to meet with him.
Me: Why can’t the students take computer classes?
Headmaster: They will not be able to take a class until you provide me with a computer for my office.
Me: No.
HM: Then they will not go.
Me: Fine. I am telling you also that I will no longer provide food to your school.
HM: (With a panic in his eyes) I have changed my mind.
Me: I don’t care. You will not threaten me.
HM: Brother, will you pray with me?
Me: I know what you are trying to do right now, and it is called manipulation. No, I won’t pray with you.
HM: You are not a very good missionary.
Me: I will tell you how bad of a missionary I am. The next time I come to this school and you are drunk (which was almost every time I went) I am going to beat you up.
HM: You are a very bad missionary.
We worked out that I am not going to provide food for the first two weeks of school. If his students are regularly attending classes, we will add the food for them. And now, every time I go to the school, he has a student run and throw water on him.
I should add that he is in his 30′s and 6’2″. In my best days, many decades ago, I was a skinny wimp. Now I am a skinny wimp with a large gut, which is actually rather hard to pull off.
We are reminded often that we are guests in this country, and we need to defer. And mostly, I adhere to that.
Mostly.
During the break, a pilot and his mechanic from our mission were killed in a crash. You shouldn’t be surprised when people who put their lives at risk to help the poor are killed, but it still surprises you in how much it hurts. Each man left behind his wife and four children; it is just such a great loss.
You look to the hills when things are rough, but he directed me a little lower.
To a driver.
Joshua is an accountant who is in law school. His father runs a driving service, and you can always count on him. It isn’t safe for me to drive at night because of my poor night vision, and their service is a blessing when there is a late airport pickup. Recently, I was going to fly out and I scheduled a ride. Joshua picked me up, and since we were running ahead of schedule, I asked him if he wanted to stop for dinner.
He told me the most amazing story. When he was in high school, he and four friends started to meet together and pray for Kenya. During one prayer meeting, they felt led to make a vow: they would all go to law school, they would all enter politics, and they would all work to bring justice to this land.
They are all in law school, and they still meet to pray. The odds of all of them remaining true to that vow, and for all of them to be accepted and be able to pay for law school, is beyond what I can measure.
I felt like I was hearing about something sacred and holy that is going to change this whole country.
Your pal,
Steve
When it comes to cold, I am pretty darn stoic.
Warren Wilson College accepted her, and gave her a generous scholarship, but we were still $7,000 short. Before we had a chance to ask, an old friend wrote to us and said that he and his wife would provide the monies. A friend and colleague from Darlington School collected all sorts of great items for her to have. The Howorths wanted to provide her airline ticket. My sister and husband live fairly close, and offered to house her before school began.
I have been told that I’m not direct enough, so let me say it as clear as I can: We need more money to buy more food. I understand the horrible economy in the US, and please don’t give unless you are supposed to. But if you are supposed to, please give. We are way under the monies we need for the September through November term.
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 told her no, I had never been hungry.
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:
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.
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.
We were going to be living among the Datooga tribe, a group that still lives in mud huts. They live in a national park, and it was a place of amazing beauty. A group had sent us solar flashlights, and we purchased Swahili Bibles. We were able to present flashlights and Bibles, and wandering the village the next day and looking at people reading the first book they had ever owned was thrilling beyond thrilling.
Me: A snake just dropped in my lap. 
The rap against missionaries is that they can be cultural imperialists, and historically it has sometimes been a fair criticism. Our goal is to not make someone like us, but like Him. So, do we tell someone to deny their culture? Or do we will tell them to do what their husbands want, when the infection rate is tremendously high?
P.S. Many people were interested in Tabitha. Here are the ways that funds can be sent for her college education. We received this information from Richard Blomgren at Warren Wilson College:
We have another student living with us this term. Like Rupert, she is a university student doing a paper on our work. Rupert wrote about the food program; Becca is documenting how to build a computer center. Both are extremely bright, and Becca has the additional benefit of not being a Brit, which means we do not hear tales of the wonders of baked beans for breakfast.
But one of my favorite scriptures is Genesis 50:20: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” There is a hand-out mentality prevalent here, and part of what we are trying to do is help children get the tools to be able to make a living rather than expect a hand-out. The parents called an emergency meeting, and voted to hire three guards. They didn’t ask for any money from me, they just did it. During one of my calls to the school, I could hear children loudly weeping. The community has seen the value of these centers, and they are going to fight for them.
She has been accepted to Warren Wilson College and given a $20,000 scholarship. We need about $12,000 more. In some ways, this is so hard to ask. I have a son who goes off to college in 2010, and his meager college fund was pounded into the dirt. I don’t know how he will go to college.
RVA has a senior banquet every year. The juniors do it in honor of the seniors. They write a play, build a set, perform it for them and cook all the food. The only people allowed are the seniors, the juniors, and the sponsors of each class. For some reason this year, Nancy and I were invited.
I had to take someone into town that week, and maybe the one thing you can get cheaper in Kenya is flowers. I bought 100 roses and spent less than $12. I would bring them home, and when Nancy came in, wow would she get a surprise.
Ben came down with malaria, which was really scary. We have been here ten years and none of us have gotten malaria before. Malaria is fairly easily treatable, but the only way they know for sure you have it is if they can do blood work while you are running high fever. Since he was running a 104 fever, the malaria showed up. He had felt sick for awhile, but the meds we used when we went to the coast virtually ensure that you won’t get it, so the doctors initially ruled it out. He was one sick boy for about a week, but he is back to his old self, and we are so grateful for that.
It had been a long hard year, and we hadn’t seen JT as a family for 12 months. So we were thrilled that he was able to come for Christmas, and we arranged to go to the coast the morning he arrived for five days on the beach. JT was a typically exhausted college kid just done with finals, so we had a nice relaxing time in Mombasa.
The flight attendant didn’t have a clue of what to do, but in front of me was a dive instructor from Australia, and behind me was an Indian herbalogist from Kenya. They both assumed it was a heart attack, and so they went to loosen my shirt and pants. When I came to, the first thing I noticed was that my pants were undone, which is about as disturbing as you might imagine it would be.
We had to make arrangements to get the kids home, and then got a ride to the hospital. They put me in a room on a bed with a drape pulled across where my feet were. The problem was that the room was too small, and so every time someone would walk by, they would hit my feet, which got funnier as time went by.
It was so nice to come home and have Christmas with all of us, and my favorite memory of the holiday was Katie holding her American Girl doll in her lap while she destroyed me in Wii Brawl.
A friend of mine has a son at Texas A&M, and he started a program of sitting in front of the cafeteria, and offering to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for students. He then requests a donation with the money they would have used in the cafeteria. It has brought in enough money to feed a school for a year, and in this harsh economic climate, I love that a young man with a creative thought can make such a difference to so many kids.
I think I am on to something big.
He knows.
And for the first time, I realized that I could be grateful for what we could do, and not bemoan my failures. We ended the year with 18,300 children being fed lunch every school day. Virtually every school had huge increases in how they were rated in their zones, and the dropout rate flirted with 0%. We have 15 computer centers operational now, and Bruce Kinzer, the force of nature who builds them, has started to add shelves to the centers, so they can also function as a library.
But sometimes you get kids that come up with interesting ideas on their own. I had a student last week who is Korean, and he was very upset that I hadn’t told him about this great school he had discovered.
At 9:30, they announced there were technical difficulties, and only four of the kids could take the test. So four of the kids started taking the test at 10, and four started taking the test at 12. It is almost four hours, and the room that they had to take it in was almost 100 degrees. We had plans to take them out to lunch at 1, but instead they ate cold pizza and warm Cokes during the breaks.
This year we facilitate a Sunday school class of juniors and seniors who go down to the crippled children’s hospital to share a Bible story, sing, and then play with the kids who are patients. We have a great group of students and they are such a blessing to the kids. The favorite games are batting a balloon back and forth or popping the bubbles that are blown. Often one or more of us would take our digital cameras and take pictures, which the kids just love to see. Last month a visiting friend brought us a small photo printer which we can take down to the hospital and print photos out on the spot. Most of them have never had a picture of themselves, and you should see their faces when we hand them a picture of themselves that they can keep. Yesterday, one mama just kept saying “Nimefurahi sana!” over and over again as she danced around the room holding the photo of her and her daughter. That means “I have just become so happy!” Sometimes when you share the love of Jesus it isn’t received, but sometimes you get the blessing of someone in some way expressing, “Nimefurahi sana!”
I was trying to think of something profound to say about Thanksgiving, and I came upon this little boy, who was wearing rags and had no shoes. He didn’t even have a spoon; he was eating with his fingers.