Catching up

Now that we're back home with consistent internet service, it's finally time to give an update on our Kenya trip. We arrived back at Philadelphia airport around 3:15 on Saturday afternoon, after being up for nearly 42 hours including 17 hours of flights. It was an uneventful trip (no airport fire this year!) with all the luggage arriving with us as desired! We look forward to doing it again next year!

Two of the cottages our team stayed in at Tumaini Cottages and Conference Center. 

Pastor Josh Schaeffer making balloon animals for a small group of the kids at Gituamba. 

Andi and new friend Elizabeth and baby Angel at a water filter distribution at a church in Nakuru. 

Water filter training presentation. 

Happy recipients of water filters. 

Our work team and drivers/translators/friends at the Gituamba camp project

Our completed walls. 

Our field day activities at the school 5km from Gituamba. 

SWOK employees and friends Lino Momo and Happy James with Rufus daughter Joy. 

My special friend Rufus Ngata with daughters Vickie, Faith and Joy and wife Gladys. Gladys makes the best chapati in all of Kenya! 

Our faithful drivers/translators/friends Happy James, Rufus, Steven and Bernard. The trip wouldn't be the same without them!

My friend and SWOK employee Sam Kariuki. He and Rufus Ngata are the only known Kenyan rednecks! I love these guys! 

Bernard and Steven with the only known albino Masi warrior, Tom Wolff!

Finally have Internet access!

We're on our way back to Nairobi to fly home around midnight tonight and stopped at a restaurant on the way. And finally, we have Internet access! It has been a frustrating situation to have so much to share and so many pictures but no way to get them posted. I'll try to get some of it up now in the little time I have and will follow up once home to get a lot of pictures up this next week. 

The first day we mortared-in the first rows of bricks to begin the school classroom walls. 

Enjoying being with the children in Deep Sea slum church/school. 

The walls by the end of the week - about 3000 bricks later! 

We started building our walls on footers that were poured by others. The last day, we poured footers for the next team to do walls for the next two classrooms. 

Our team in front of the school/church building. 

August 3/4

Yesterday was Sunday and a day of worship for the team with the Trinity United Methodist Church in Naivasha. It was their 15th anniversary Sunday, so it was quite a celebration with a lot of praise and worship.  Our group was invited up to sing, and we sang a praise song that we had practiced in both English and Swahili. When we started in English, reaction was normal but when we got to the Swahili, they went immediately into cheering and sang with us.  It was a great 4 hour service and continued after we left! We then stopped at an outdoor barbecue for a late lunch of chicken and roasted goat where we had stopped last year. 

Monday we continued our construction work back at Gituamba IDP camp, with wall construction up as high as we can build before forming up the rebar columns which lock the walls together. Our team worked with the Kenyan workers mixing concrete on the ground and carrying it up to fill the forms for the overhead support beams. A small work team will go back tomorrow to begin forming up the column supports, while the rest of the team will travel to Hell's Gate National Park for sightseeing in the morning and then do a hygiene training and water filter distribution to 50 people who are HIV positive and at more at-risk of other diseases because of their compromised immune systems. SWOK has seen an earlier case where clean water made a tremendous difference in turning around the health issues of an HIV positive woman. 

Musings on life in Kenya

Being in Kenya makes you reflect on your own life and the blessings you experience.  I have purposed to not take life for granted, which is so easy to do. And sometimes it's the little things, not big earth shattering differences. Please don't get me wrong: I don't in any way intend to use this blog to lay a guilt trip on you.  But it's a way for me to journal and get my thoughts in perspective. At home, there are so many distractions, it's often hard to hear God speak. Here in Kenya, it's much easier.

One thing I have never really spent much time thinking about is life expectancy. On Tuesday, I was working with the Kenyan laborers making a ladder for working on the top of the wall, and I got talking with my friend Rufus about age. I asked how old he is, and he told me to guess. He has three daughters , age one and a half to nine, and he is probably close to 40, although he never told me.  One of the Kenyan workers offered that he himself is 45.  He looks nearly old enough to be my father, but not quite! And I'm 62!  Life in Kenya is certainly hard. I don't think that this man is an exception. For the vast majority of Kenyans, every day is an effort to just keep going, and it's not like you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. And yet the majority of the people we see and meet are joyful. It's hard to explain. But a few nights ago after dinner, a friend, Chief Francis Kariuki, who is chief over a large area of Kenya, spent time with us. In our group meeting, he addressed the subject I had been typing about just before dinner - he echoed that life in Kenya is hard. But he also gave the answer of how the Kenyan people can be joyful in spite of circumstances: "by the grace of God".  Kenya is largely a Christian nation, as ours once was. I like to think that ours still is, yet it's sometimes difficult to find enough evidence to prove it. Christianity is constantly viewed in a bad light in the press and is the faith that is easiest to pick on without being criticized.  And yet it is their Christian faith that allows them to find joy where others would find none. 

Last night, we had a discussion about the standard of living of the people we see on the street.  You constantly see people trying to earn a living in whatever way they can; many haul hundreds of pounds of dirty water in jerry cans, either on their back, bicycle or motor bike, to sell to others.  Many more carry mountains of sacks of charcoal in the same way, since this is used by everyone to cook their food over small open cookers, and they have a ready market for the charcoal they make from raw wood.  Many more set up whoever they can find to sell fruits and vegetables, whether at a small stand or with their produce spread on the ground at an intersection.  We asked Sam, the Kenyan project manager for SWOK, what people could hope to earn from their endeavors and whether they could earn a decent living.  His answer was hard.  He said their hope is to earn enough to feed their family for THAT DAY.  No planning for tomorrow, no putting away something for a rainy day, just trying to survive for that day for them self and their family.  That's a hard reality.  We are so blessed that we can plan and save and put away for tomorrow.  We actually have something called "retirement" that a lot of Americans look forward to. I wouldn't even be surprised to find out that there isn't a Swahili word for retirement. I'm embarrassed to even ask. 

Another thing I know I take for granted is recreation. The only forms of recreation I have seen in Kenya are playground-type activities for the young kids (home-made hose hoolahoops, soccer ball or jump rope) and a soccer stadium in Nairobi. There is the evidence of some fun activities for the kids, but not much for the adults. Again, I wouldn't be too surprised if there is no Swahili word for "leisure". I cherish my weekends and time off, and it gives me something to look forward to during the work week. I'll try not to take it for granted. 

It's a real rarity to see a Kenya who is overweight.  Food is a precious commodity, and I've never seen it wasted here. I try not to waste it either.  But at home, it's everywhere. If I want a snack between meals, I have a myriad of choices.  I have never wondered where the next meal is coming from. Ever. I've never in my life gone to bed hungry (okay, maybe there was that once when my parents sent me to my room without dinner for acting bad, but you get the point!). I'm a billionaire when it comes to comparison with the average Kenyan, and my food pantry and refrigerator prove it.  I am amazingly blessed, and I don't want to take it for granted. 

Another necessity of life that's easily taken for granted has been emphasized to me both this trip and last year: clean water. We think nothing of drinking water from the tap, swimming in a pond or stream, taking a shower and letting the water run in our mouth. In most of Kenya, you wouldn't think of it. I haven't seen a stream that isn't flowing brown, dirty and nasty. We are fortunate to be staying in a conference center that has an expensive, complex water purification system, so we are able to drink it or shower without concern. But this is an unheard of luxury for the vast majority of Kenyans. Their digestive systems are more accustomed to it than ours would be, but they get typhoid, cholera and dysentery just like we would if we drank it.  And they have no choice. That is, until some organizations like SWOK and others started addressing the problem. There are organizations that have dug wells and put in water purification, but these can only have a limited area of influence, and they must be maintained to keep them running properly. SWOK has chosen to address the problem on a local, personal level.  The filtration kits that they train people to use and give them for free will provide clean water to them and their family for the rest of their life! They will each produce over one million gallons of clean drinking water by gravity with no ongoing cost or effort except daily back flushing with a small amount of the clean water produced.  SWOK has been distributing these for four years, and they have demonstrated significant reduction in waterborne illnesses in communities where they have been given away. They are truly making a difference here in Kenya, one life at a time. 

August 1

Today was our third day of construction work at the Gituamba IDP camp.  A lot of work got done on the interior walls, with most of them now up over 7 feet tall. Window and door openings were left, with the doors hopefully arriving next week so we can install their frame anchors into the concrete columns we hope to be able to pour. The supports for the rebar beams are nearly complete, so we should be able to work with the Kenyan workers on Monday to mix, carry and pour concrete into the forms.

We finished intentionally at 3:00 today to take a ride to the equator. It is a beautiful ride up to 7425 feet, passing through coffee and tea plantations. We finally got some rain when we got back to Tumaini, which hopefully should help to keep the dust down somewhat on the roads, which have been a continuous dust cloud.

Our team has been healthy up to this point, although a few have come down with stomach issues recently.  Prayers for good health for the team would be appreciated.

Tomorrow will be a mixed day for us. We will do a game drive in the morning through Lake Nakuru National Park, have lunch at a restaurant downtown in Nakuru and then do a hygiene training and water filter distribution at a church in one of the slums in Nakuru.

Once again, power has been off and on this evening, so access to the internet has been nearly non-existent. Trying to load a post with pictures just doesn't work. Hoping for a better signal one of these days......

August 2

This was an easier day than the previous four, planned as a day to give the team some fun and not push as hard. We started off very early, leaving the conference center at 6:30 for a game drive through the Lake Nakuru National Park. This is a 73 square mile wildlife sanctuary, and we drove around the entire park in five safari vans, observing an unbelievable amount of wildlife. We were blessed last year to see lots of birds and mammals, but today we saw probably fives times as many, including six lions, at least 30 giraffes, both white and black rhinos, Waterbucks,  probably a thousand each of Cape buffalo and impalas and at least 50 other species of birds and smaller mammals.  The beauty and variability of God's creation is astounding! And it is also very evident He has a great sense of humor to design some very strange animals!

After lunch in downtown Nakuru, we went to the Hope church in a slum on the outskirts of Nakuru, where we did a hygiene training and water filter distribution to 25 women.  These women are among the very poor and neediest, with many of them HIV positive. Most are living in really substandard conditions with little more than a roof over their heads and not sure where the next meal is coming from. It was amazing to see the number of hands that went up when we started the presentation and asked the women how many had previously had Cholera or typhoid. It was probably 40-50%.  These are diseases that we never even hear of anymore in the US. It was obvious when the presentation and training session were completed the value these filters have to them. They clutched their new filtration kits and every one of them had an ear-to-ear smile.  It's obvious these will be treasured possessions that will have a significant impact on them and their families.

Tomorrow will be a day of rest where we join the Methodist Church congregation in Naivasha (about an hour drive south) for their 15th anniversary celebration service.

7/31

July 31

Today was our second day of construction on the "school in the barn" project at Gituamba IDP camp. The five wall building teams finished the first two courses of mortared block on the footings and began dry stacking the levels above that.  These will be the walls that define the classrooms. We got all the walls built up to about 4 feet each, plumbing each block as the wall went up. We will continue building these tomorrow up to a height of approximately 9 feet. The walls will all be tied together by concrete beams and columns that will be formed and poured with rebar frames constructed inside then. We have begun wiring rebar together and wiring it to the short sections of rebar protruding from the footings.  One team drilled holes into the existing stone walls and began wiring rebar supports to tie the new walls into the existing structure. This is probably a lot more construction detail than you really ever wanted to know, but it just want to point out that there a lot more steps than you would think to just "build a wall". I also want to emphasize that our teams that are doing this are everyday men, women and young people who do all sorts of jobs at home on an everyday basis. None of them work in construction as their daily job except myself.  And yet you should see the work they are doing! It just goes to show that the Lord doesn't call the prepared, He prepares the called.  If we give him the chance by saying "here I am, send me", He'll take care of all the rest. It is amazing to me to see teams of all ages and skill levels getting out of their comfort zones and achieving great things.

The other activity that is ongoing is the preparation of the troughs and supports for them to construct the beam across the barn main opening.  A group of Kenyans has been doing this work, lead by our driver/construction engineer/tour guide/energizer bunny, Rufus Ngata. He is truly a jack-of-all trades and invaluable. The forms and supports, made from trees and crude building materials, are nearly complete, and once we put the rebar "trees" in them and complete the troughs tomorrow, they will be ready for the concrete to be mixed (by hand) and carried up 13' ladders and dumped in the forms. Stay tuned for tomorrow.........