Eye of the Storm

Whew...time for a deep breath!  The second visiting team to Kenya is off on their safari for two nights, so I've managed to catch up on sleep and sanity a little bit since yesterday morning.  The last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind - flying around the country, eating a lot of very Kenyan food and very nice food, enjoying Duncan's wedding, bouncing around in the Mara, walking around in the slums, and answering lots and lots of questions.  More to come at some point on each of those points, but I wanted to quickly thank all of you who have been praying for me and Jane during recent weeks.  It has been very busy, but God has done some incredible things and worked out the details according to His wisdom!

The team from Ft. Worth will be back here tomorrow afternoon before flying out, and then I'll have a week to hang out with Justin and Caleb.  It'll still be action-packed, but a little more low-key.  Look for some in-depth stories before too long!

Here's a little teaser from our trip to the Mara last week...

Welcome to Kenya!

Well, life has EXPLODED in the last few days!  We are now less than a week away from Duncan's wedding, which means that Kenya is getting flooded with Americans who want to celebrate the festive occasion and that I've got a lot of coordinating to do.  It has been so fun to hang out with the Thompson's here in Kenya, and we have had some amazing adventures since they touched down in Africa.  Riding in the copilot seat of a tiny Cessna and dodging thunderstorm clouds a thousand feet above the ground?  Check.

The last couple of days have been an alternating series of adrenalin and exhaustion, though, so I'm off to bed (before midnight, yay!).  I know I'll have a lot of catching up on stories and pictures to do, but for now, I would love to ask for all of your prayers.  Hosting so many people and figuring out how to help each one have an incredible, meaningful experience is an exciting and daunting task, and I would love your prayers for wisdom, patience, energy, safety, and all the other things that I'm sure I need but don't even know it.  Please pray that all of these visitors would have an amazing time and that their lives would truly be changed...

Road Destruction

Kenyan roads are REALLY hard on cars.  Between gigantic potholes, corrugated dirt roads,  stop-and-go traffic in Nairobi, and questionable mechanics, this is a dangerous environment for a car.  I saw this firsthand last week...

On Wednesday, I was in the process of pulling out of one of the busiest shopping centers in Westlands when the Prado ground to an abrupt halt.  I tried to get it started in every gear I could, but there was no moving it.  The guards were yelling at me, cars behind me were honking and backing up, and there was absolutely nothing I could do!  Eventually I was able to finagle it out of the way and get towed to a garage, where I found out that the clutch and flywheel needed to be replaced.  Ouch.  I guess after 220,000km it was about time, but it was still an expensive and poorly-timed development. 

I collected the car on Saturday, but quickly realized that I couldn't drive over about 60 km/h without a strong vibration making its way from the engine up through my seat.  Remember those questionable mechanics?  That's why I've been out of a car again for the last two days while they try to figure out what they did wrong...

The REAL excitement took place between stays at the mechanic while I was driving back from Karen on Saturday.  Going about 60 km/h (thankfully, the vibrations kept me from driving too fast), I felt the back of the car rocking around and then heard a big THUD while the back-left side dropped a good foot lower than it should have been.  As the back end fishtailed wildly on the road, I looked out the window and saw my back-left tire and wheel passing me in the left lane, only to smash into a brick wall and fly up in the air...YIKES!  I was able to get the sliding car under control and finally came to a stop partially in the median and partially blocking a lane of traffic.

This is one of those situations when you just have to take a deep breath and say, "well, here we go God!"  I jumped out of the car and locked the doors as several Kenyans ran over to help (and to hopefully get a tip out of the deal).  Thankfully, an awesome Kenyan guy who works for a USAID affiliate pulled over and offered to coordinate the recovery efforts.  With his help, we sent one guy to buy lug nuts and another to collect the tire, while we got a couple more started jacking up the car and replacing the tire.  About 30 minutes and a few bucks later, I was back on the road!  I followed my new friend Mike to a service station to get the brake drum hammered back away from the wheel, and then everything was ready to go. 

One thing about living in Africa - you never know when a little extra excitement is coming your way! 

ps - while I joke about this kind of stuff, let's seriously thank God that there were no other cars right beside me, that my car stayed upright, and that none of these breakdowns happened in the middle of the Mara last week! 

Up Close and Personal with a GIRAFFE

Giraffe are weird animals.  Everything about them seems oddly proportioned - from the obviously long necks to the spindly legs to the giant eyes and tongues.  All of this appears even crazier when you're seeing them from a FOOT away and they are eating out of your hand!

This weekend, Jane and I got to have dinner with some of my good friends, the Thompsons, at an awesome hotel south of Nairobi called the Giraffe Manor.  This place feels like it's straight out of the British aristocracy, and it's most unique attractions are the giraffes that live on the property and join the guests whenever they feel like - even sticking their heads through the breakfast room windows in the mornings!  Before dinner, we hung out with an awesome giraffe named Helen, holding out food in our hands while the giraffe scooped it up with her long tongue.  It felt like feeding a horse, but then it raised its head wayyy up in the air and reminded us that no, this is NOT a horse!

What an awesome experience...only in Africa!  Thanks Donald and Brenda!

Six Degrees of Separation

Sometimes the random connections that I identify with people I meet in Kenya are really mind-boggling.  It started when I arrived here and starting talking with Joe, who has become a great friend.  We realized that his girlfriend Caitlyn was the daughter of one of my professors at Vanderbilt.  Then we realized his best college buddy Whitlow went to high school with me, and that MY dad had completely remodeled WHITLOW'S dad's house.  A little bit freaky...

These crazy realizations continue to happen.  This weekend I was sent to go pick up some Americans and bring them to a cookout, and after searching for the white people on the side of the road, I met Dusty and Cecily.  We got to talking, and I told them about how my brother Preston just decided to take a church intern job in Jackson Hole.  They said, "wait, I think we know about him!"  Turns out that last week Dusty and Cecily were in the DC airport when they met a guy named David on their flight to Ethiopia.  Dusty and Cecily spent the last few years in Malibu, so when they mentioned this, David told them about his good friend Preston, who had just applied for a job in Malibu but decided to take one in Jackson Hole instead.  Well, Dusty had applied for the same job in Malibu - small world! 

It continues, though.  DAVID was flying to Ethiopia and then onwards to Rwanda, where he was spending a couple of weeks with a Peace Corps volunteer named Caitlyn.  While he was there, he hung out with Caitlyn's boyfriend Joe for a week.  On Saturday, JOE flew back to Kenya and came to hang out with me, Dusty, and Cecily at the cookout - yep, same Joe that's one of my best friends! 

I think that the "six degrees of separation" shrink to about 2 or 3 for white people in East Africa...

Mara Photos!

I've gotten all of my photos edited from our trip to Naboisho last week, so if you want to see more pictures like this one...

...head to this link:  Naboisho - Facebook  Enjoy!

Spiritual Growth

One of the big challenges that faced me as I began this role with CARE for AIDS was the need to standardize the services that we offer to all of our clients in different centers across the board.  Spiritual counseling was an especially tricky subject - how could we make sure that each of our individual spiritual counselors would offer the same kind and quality of spiritual teaching and encouragement to the clients?  At least part of an answer to this problem has arrived in the form of a partnership with the Kenya Bible League.  Over the past six months, each of our centers has met with their local Bible League office and worked out a plan for all of the clients to receive a workbook called "Steps to Victory" when they enter the CARE for AIDS program.  The spiritual counselors help them form into small groups of about 5 clients, and during the week they meet together to read through the fundamental aspects of a Christian faith and answer questions based on scripture references in the workbook.  Then, they meet together with the spiritual counselor to check their answers and review what they've learned.

After completing the Steps to Victory workbook, the groups are given a second workbook titled "Bearing Fruit," which focuses on how to live out a Christian life and share the gospel with other people.  When they successfully complete this book with good grades, they are awarded a certificate and a Bible written in Swahili, English, or their local language.  This process is producing great results with the clients.  They really enjoy the challenge of the workbooks, meeting together in a group, and reviewing their answers each way.  This method allows us to ensure that each client has a foundational understanding of scripture before we hand them a Bible, and this fact combined with the personal time investment that they put in means that they will value and use the Bible more than they might otherwise.  Kenyans also LOVE certificates, so that aspect definitely can't be overlooked! 

It's amazing to see clients so excited about receiving their Bibles, workbooks, and certificates, and it truly does create enthusiasm for the Word.  Just last week, a client from the Banana center brought two of her HIV-positive friends to see Moses, the spiritual counselor in the center.  The client had walked her friends through the "Steps to Victory" book, and they both told Moses that they wanted to accept Christ that day and sign up for the waiting list for the next group of clients at Banana.  This "spiritual multiplication" is so encouraging - praise God for how he is using these clients to reach out and make a difference in the lives of the people around them and for the empowering effect this has on people who used to view their lives as worthless! 

Night Drives

Another awesome part about our trip to the Naboisho conservancy last week (see last post) was getting to go on NIGHT game drives through the bush.  This was one of the sweetest/freakiest/amazing-est things that I've done in a while.  We hooked up two big spotlights to the car, and someone would take each of them and sit on the windowsills or stand out of the sunroof, scanning side to side and looking for eyes.  Yep, the way you spot animals at night is by picking out the reflections from their eyes through the bush - that's where the FREAKY part came in.  We'd be driving along and then, way off in the distance, see two glowing greenish or reddish dots kinda like this...

Then, we would head off through the bush in that direction, and if we were lucky, our spotlight would show us that the crazy eyes belonged to something like this guy:

Talk about a humbling feeling.  Sitting in the stillness of the night, with absolute blackness pushing in from all sides except for in the two small circles lit up by the spotlights, and with a four hundred pound male lion looking directly at you.  You also know that there are at least ten or twelve other lions in the area, but you've only spotted four.  They could be creeping up right behind you...

AWESOME!  It was absolutely exhilarating. The whole experience was made even more magical by the fact that the skies were full of more stars than I could ever count, with the bright cloud of the milky way cutting a line across the blackness.  What a great way to spend an evening...

Angry Elephants

Jane, Joe, and I had a pretty darn SWEET adventure this weekend going to visit our friend Cath who works at the African Impact volunteer project in the Naboisho Conservancy adjoining the Masai Mara Reserve.  Since we were safari-ing in a private conservancy, in our private truck, the door was wide open for a little more freedom of exploration that you'd normally get on a Mara safari, and we did our best to take full advantage of that opportunity!  The weekend held several great stories and a LOT of great pictures, which I'm only just starting to wade through, but I'll start with an elephant encounter that we had on our first evening in the bush...

A great part of the conservancy is the lack of established roads and, therefore, the lack of need to stay ON the roads like you need to do in the reserve.  This meant a lot of off-road exploration, which gave me ample opportunity to put to use all that off-road driving skill acquired in high school.  On our first evening, we drove down to a riverbank and parked opposite a big group of about 12 elephants of all ages and sizes.  This "Big Mama," as we christened her, is the dominant female that leads the group, and she spent the next hour happily chowing down on this brush inside the riverbank.

Seeing that all of the animals were on the other side of the riverbank, we decided that this would be a good time for me to try out my "trumpeting" skills that I'd been working on for the last couple of weeks after hearing about an elephant research who can "talk" with the elephants.  This is another thing that you can't do in the Mara Reserve (also known as antagonizing the animals).  Anyway, after a few strong trumpets, we were surprised to see many of the elephants look at us and hastily retreat up the riverbank to group up on the opposite side.  Wow...didn't expect them to actually respond!

We waited a few more minutes, watching the elephants eat, and then observed that a baby and a couple of older animals were moving across the river about 30 yards away from us.  A fairly large female was leading the group, and she was looking at us very suspiciously:

Without taking her eyes off of us, she climbed to the top of the riverbank, spread her ears out wide, and started shaking her head around at us.  These are all signs of anger and aggression from elephants, and we decided to name this overly emotional girl "Rhonda."  Rhonda wasn't content just to flap her ears at us, though, and a minute later she started pawing the ground and taking quick steps towards and away from us, all while making ominous grumbling noises.  At this point, Cath ordered all of us inside the car (we'd been sitting on the windowsills and roof) and said something along the lines of, "Uh-oh...that's not good."  Rhonda seemed to remember my ill-advised trumpeting from before, and she also didn't seem to like the clicking of my camera, or our general presence anywhere near her.

Thankfully, Rhonda cooled off after a few minutes and moved away to antagonize some baboons, so our attention turned to another adult that we called "Roger."  Roger was probably actually a female, but it seemed like an appropriate name to us as we observed him pushing himself so far into a tangled fallen tree in pursuit of choice leaves that he got completely stuck.  Luckily for him, elephants are MASSIVELY strong, and he proceeded to simply smash the offending tree into the dirt and go on his merry way.  This led into a discussion of how elephants can flip over a truck using only their TRUNK and unpleasant images of what could happen if one charged full speed into ours...

Ready to move on to the next adventure, we put away our cameras and started to drive away from the riverbank.  We must have come a little too close to Roger's backside, though, because he swung around in front of us and let out a full-fledged, super-loud trumpet.  Yikes.  We were about to calmly back away when Joe yells, "Here comes Rhonda!" and we turned around to see our old friend Rhonda running FULL SPEED and trumpeting with her trunk in the air through the bushes about 30 yards away from us.  CRAP!  Thankfully, Rhonda diverted away from us to stand in front of a baby elephant, Roger calmed down and went back to eating, and we were eventually able to slowly make our way out of the midst of the herd, which had managed to completely surround us during the last hour.

Whew...I don't think I'll ever forget that moment when I was sitting in the driver's seat with an angry elephant trumpeting 20 feet in front of me and another one charging from the opposite side, yelling "Cath, what do we do??" and getting no good answers from the expert!  At least we had this to look at and calm us down during the whole process:

 

ps - you can also hear Jane's take on our trip TO the reserve here