To Kenya

Tomorrow we begin the 2 1/2 day trek to Kijabe to pick Luke up Friday for his midterm break.  It is never easy to leave here, we are just too connected in a complex web of relationship, of obligations and needs that teeters on the brink of imbalance in a good week and feels pretty tenuous after a week like our last one.  There are umpteen people to be paid and cared for, keys to be left, medicines to be supplied, letters provided, plans for patients, not to mention our little farm of two cows, a goat, and a dog.  We have to shut down power and clear out all the food so that rats and roaches don't completely take over.  The kids have been working to get assignments for missed classes in a place where family trips are pretty much unheard of.  We have to pack in such a way that everything can go in an open truck bed covered with a tarp, and survive being shaken for about 23 hours of rough driving.  We'll be staying for the long weekend in a restful, simple missionary retreat cottage in the highlands north of the Great Rift  . . .but in a town with no grocery or restaurants, so I've been baking and freezing and making a list of what to buy along the way.  We won't have much internet access, so we're trying tonight to tie up any loose communication ends.  It is a great treat to get our family back together, to get away from the front lines of Bundibugyo for a few days, to reconnect.  But the truth is that the effort involved to get there and back is, well, if not prohibitive, at least considerable.  

I don't call this the "front lines"  lightly, i do so from a sense that we have been hit hard lately.  I recently re-read All Quiet on the Western Front, a great read, and a gripping account of the brutal reality of trench warfare in WW1.  Sometimes our life feels that way.  And the rotation of being called back from the front to recover and regroup can lead to the same sense of disorientation and vague guilt that those young German soldiers experienced.  So pray that we would leave our worries in the capable hands of God and our colleagues, and truly rest over the next week.

While we're gone the CSB students will begin the intense month-long process of O-level exams, a situation always fraught with the potential for problems, for student anxiety, for accusations of corruption.  We pray the students will remain firm, that the process will go forward smoothly, that the Pierces will figure it all out in good time (we realized that this is essentially their first time to see it because they were on a short medical HMA last year, and suddenly they're in charge!).

If you don't see any new posts for a while, try to picture us either dodging pot-holes in our red truck heading eastward (first 2 1/2 days), or sitting around our cabin listening to Luke debrief his first half-term (middle 4 days), or trudging another 3 days back to Bundi.  I leave you with a verse from Psalm 119, hoping that our pilgrimage-house will be full of song:

Your statutes have been my songs 

In the house of my pilgrimage. . . 

You are my portion, O LORD . .