Every Tribe and Tongue

A celebration of Kenya's cultural wealth by AIC today.  Five different tribes came in traditional dress, dancing in one by one to present songs, clapping and shaking, stomping and ululating. The Kikuyu, the Kamba, the Agusii, the Turkana, and the Maasai.  Each with their own rhythm, their own scale.  Music that originated from a time of rivers and sun, before any influence from radio and TV.  Jumps and spins that recall the grace and flourish of wildlife rather then the ubiquitous moves of Youtube.  A tribute to the glorious plurality of the Trinity, the billion reflections of God's nature.

And in the middle, a sermon by a Turkana man who had been in line to inherit his father's role as a witch doctor, but who preached the victory of Jesus over the powers of the world from John 16:33.  From Isaiah, he read about the promise of new things, of water in the desert and related it to the discovery of a deep water table under his arid homeland.  Echoes of Jesus' words in Revelation 21:  Behold, I make all things new.  Behold, the victory.

Which led to an interesting Kingdom paradox:  celebration of traditional culture with proclamation of a new way.  Holding onto the beauty of tribal songs but changing the words and focus to the one true God.  This tension between rejecting witchcraft and embracing tradition has challenged the church in Africa.  I doubt that we get it right.  But today was a solid attempt to hold onto the past and view it in the truth of the present.  

And a last paradox:  the service was conducted in KiSwahili, the common language forged by slave traders on the coast to bridge between the 40-plus tribes of Kenya.  A picture of redemption, that a language born out of enslavement and injustice now binds diverse peoples and is raised in praise.

A saga of departure

The great cousin visit came to an end today.  Sadly.  And of all their African adventures--  snorkeling coral teaming with neon rainbows of fish, being knocked by high tide waves on a deserted beach, gazing at lions and wildebeast, camping under the stars, hiking a volcanic peak, tutoring school kids and teaching art projects, playing with hospitalized children, sipping chai in our dusty little town, working on a tile project, making pizza, touching baby elephants, surviving Nairobi traffic or jolting cross country, bargaining in the market or crossing the Rift Valley --of all of this, the four hours between pulling into the gates of Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and getting onto an airplane this morning will probably be the most memorable.

48 hours before their departure, the Arrivals Terminal, which is the hub of the airport, burst into flame.  Well, burst may be an exaggeration.  Some reports indicate a small fire grew and grew out of control, because the firetrucks had been auctioned for lack of repair funds, the hydrants were dry, the response system was slow, until the fire was an uncontrollable inferno pictured above.  The fire occurred on the 15th anniversary of the US Embassy bombing in Nairobi, so terrorism was of course suspected, but so far the cause is not clear.  Whatever the cause, this fire gutted the main international airport in the country, which is the portal for tourism all over East Africa.

We were at the coast and made phone calls to Kenya Airways by that afternoon.  Should we try to take our nephews to the Mombasa airport instead?  Would planes be diverted?  No, my agent informed me.  By Friday morning, he said, I promise you that flight will be leaving from Nairobi.  Drive back. My nephews had a great visit, they were fun to be with, and game for most everything.  But they were ready, after 3 weeks, longer and further than they'd ever been from home, to go back.  They missed their family and friends and the familiarity of their normal food and normal beds.

At the 24 hour mark, Thursday morning, we tried to check in on line, but clearly that system had been disabled, so the computer would say "checked in" but then not print the boarding pass.  We checked the news, and it looked good.  Kenya Airways had resumed over a third of their flights on Thursday and planned full service on Friday.  They updated their facebook page with crisp, confidence-inspiring reports on their efforts.  All flights were now being processed through the peripheral domestic terminal, with the addition of some tents.  Domestic flights had been moved to the cargo terminal.  No problem.  African can-do, we won't let a fire stop us, we can improvise.  So we all breathed a sigh of relief, and piled in the car and drove ten hours back to the Nairobi outskirts for a few hours of sleep at the Massos (thanks!) to be poised for an early airport trip.

Friday morning, up and out by 5:30, into the airport complex a bit after 6, as the sky was lightening into grey.  Our first clue that the systems may not have been exactly worked out was the gridlock of cars on the entry highway.  It seems the traffic circle and parking lots which surround the still-smoldering charred terminal were closed, so the cars were just piling up on the road.  No big deal, we just got out in the middle of the gridlock and got the suitcases off the roof and walked.  As we approached the small domestic terminal, I could see lines of taxi drivers waiting for arriving passengers with their placards, groups of people struggling with suitcases, tents set up outside, people with clipboards and reflective vests.  I found a Kenya Airways uniformed lady and asked her where to go for the Amsterdam flight.  Amsterdam?, she said, move to the door, we're taking Amsterdam now.  Great.

Until we came around the corner and saw that the door was one small portal surrounded by about 500 people with suitcases and carts and backpacks, all in a mob shoving towards the entrance.

This is how one pays school fees at a bank, or buys stamps at a post office, or drives in a traffic jam, or gets anything on this continent.  Push.  Get to the front.  Try to get someone's attention.  After two decades in Africa I wasn't afraid to join the fray, pulling the carry-on's and my nephews behind as I tried to obey the instruction to move forward.  Only the employees at the door didn't seem to be letting anyone in.  It was utter chaos.  No organization, no lines, no prioritization, panicked passengers, an entire airport's worth of flights and people fanning out from the pinpoint door.  In classic style, they had declared that all flights would go from this terminal, and left the details of that to play out as they would.  A couple of time frustration rippled through so violently it was a bit frightening.  We were pressed so tightly you couldn't have fallen over even if you tried.  I tried to talk to the employees, plead our case, that our flight was due, that we needed to get in.  It took about an hour, and people around me said they'd been there much longer.  When I finally fought my way in I had to beg to get my nephews; at one point I reached OUT the door and grasped Noah's hand and literally pulled him in.

We hustled through security, which was minimal, and then found an even more depressing sight.  There were as many people inside as there had been outside, another mass, 30 deep from the check-in counters, fluid lines, not as tightly packed or aggressive, but not exactly organized either.  Twice I found employees and checked, should we be waiting in this area for the Amsterdam flight?  Yes, stand here, wait your turn, we will call Amsterdam passengers forward if it gets too late.  We inched.  Another hour.  Longer.  The time for the flight departure came, and went.  People chatted, sighed.  I could hear a baby wailing in the noisy seething mass of humanity.  Kenya Airways people in reflective vests mosied here and there.  Finally we were only about 3 people from the front.

The guys ahead of us were South Africans headed home, in good spirits.  Just as they got to the front, they turned and told me, hey, we just heard that lady get turned away, the Amsterdam flight is full.  About the same time I heard yet another man with a clipboard talking to people at the end of the counter.  I left the boys to hold our place and pushed my way down to hear.  He was telling people the flight was now full.  I couldn't believe that we were about three hours into the process now of creeping our way from the car to the counter, through a thousand people or more, and it was all for naught.  I told him that the Kenya Airways rep had told us to come because all was fine, that I had checked them in on line but couldn't get a boarding pass.  A lady checked the computer and said no, they aren't on, but go back to your line and get a number for stand-by.  Evidently they simply announced that as of Friday they would fly, and everyone who missed flights on Wednesday and Thursday as well as all the Friday passengers were there vying for seats.

Back to my line, which had now collapsed with no semblance of order, I got the agent to type my nephews' information in her computer.  She said it was full, but checked their bags just in case something opens up.  I told her my reasons that they should have seats.  She said wait a few minutes over there and I'll try to get you boarding passes.  I said I'm sorry, but I can't leave this counter without boarding passes, because I've been standing where I was told for hours and now it looked like that was not going to be good enough.  Can you move them up to a different seat?  She printed one boarding pass in first class, but said only one.  No, we said, they have to both go.  She went back to print a second and now the first one was "gone".  Finally she gave us two boarding passes (no longer first class), but said they were standby.  How many people are standby?  Oh, about a hundred so far, she said, but they will prioritize those who actually had a Friday reservation.  Meanwhile all around me other Amsterdam passengers were being turned away.  I was thankful for our standby passes.

Another herculean struggle to get away from the counter, which was mobbed by angry people.  Again I had to go back and make a way for my nephews.  We handed their passports for stamping at the temporary immigration table, and then pushed up to security.  I asked and learned the flight was already boarding.  We barely said goodbye, I rushed them through.

Now I felt like I couldn't really leave, without knowing in this chaos whether they would get on the plane or be vomited back out of the tiny gate area into the sea of chaos.  I sat and waited.  I should mention that throughout this ordeal, my nephews never complained.  Not once.  I'm sure they were overwhelmed by the intense atmosphere, the crude physicality of the shoving crowd, the lack of information, the depressing prospect of not getting home.  But they were troopers.  I kept watching through the second gate security area, worrying whenever I saw someone a bit tall and white that they were being sent back.  I should also mention that about two hours into the ordeal, Luke and Jack managed to get through the outdoor crowd, climb up to the metal grating and wave to us while we stood in the pre-counter mass.  My phone is broken so Luke wanted to give me his to communicate with Scott and my kids in the car now pulled off to the side of the road.  I explained this to an airport employee who braved the crush of the door to get it from him and bring it in to me.  With no airtime, but at least Scott could call me every half hour or so for progress reports.

After half an hour, I got a lovely young Kenya Airways employee to go check and see if my nephews were chosen.  She came back and said they were not yet on the plane, but there were still 47 seats to board.  I waited. I tried to help a mom with kids.  I decided to pray for the airport employees, as I watched disgruntled people upbraid them for the disastrous situation.  I prayed for the boys to be chosen from the standby list.  I saw the group I'd been smooshed with most of the morning arranging a hotel, having given up on Amsterdam.  An hour, and I found another Kenya Airways uniformed woman and asked her to look up my nephews again.  This time she checked on her computer:  they were through the doors of the plane she said.

HOORAYYYYY.

I have to say that the prospect of repeating this four hours of struggle the next day or the next was pretty grim, so I was VERY GLAD for their sakes and ours that they were chosen.

I wiggled and excused my way back out through the crowds, back to the blackened smoking empty main building, back to the road.  My nephews finally took off, hours late, missing their connection, and are now having the adventure of a hotel in Amsterdam courtesy of KLM.  I suspect they were even more relieved than I was.

I love Kenya.  In spite of the maddening aspect of simply declaring that the flights will depart without really preparing for it, I admire the courage and sheer determination to simply carry on.  I admire the uniformly pleasant nature of every harried employee I interacted with.  On most continents I think the airline and airport personnel would have dissolved into a heap of tears if confronted with the terminal I saw today.  In Kenya, they took it in stride, they smiled, they listened, they tried.

But don't believe the press when you read that operations are back to normal.

And do hope with me that the country buckles down and finds the  money to rebuild, that the airport which arises from these ashes will be a fittingly beautiful welcome to this spectacular place, that whether the evil was corruption and incompetence or hateful purposeful sabotage, it will be overcome.

Food, Math, Computers, Mosaics, Elephants and Mountain Climbing . . .

 . . Or cousins, part 2.  Last Friday we spent a day in Nairobi, crowding along with a thousand tourists at the Shedrick Wildlife Trust's Elephant Orphanage, doing our part to save the wildlife of Kenya.  The keepers introduced each young elephant (This is  . . . . . who is 2 years old, and was rescued from poachers, and is still milk-dependent . . ) while we watched the 300 pound babies suck down bottles of milk and roll in the dust.  After a half hour or so, the front-row hundred identically suited primary school kids filed out, and dozens of tourists with them, enabling us to get a much more enjoyable view of the bulky, playful, wrinkly beasts' antics.  These oversized orphans are eventually habituated into family groups in Tsavo National Park.  A beautiful picture of caring for the fatherless, and for creation, and for restoration.

After a fun lunch at a very authentic Ethiopian restaurant (where we were the only non-Ethiopians) and where our cousins gamely tasted goat and injeera for the first time, we spent the afternoon at the National Museum and Snake Park, learning about archeology and anti-colonial movements and pythons.  And meeting up with another RVA grad who was coming to stay with us for the weekend.  I love witnessing the kids from far reaches of the globe settle back into the comfort of Africa.

Saturday saw us climbing Mount Longonot, the extinct volcano in our valley.  Up the side and around the rim, narrow ridges, gritty dust, friendly fellow climbing Kenyans, scudding clouds, brilliant sun, glimpses of wildlife, spectacular views.  For the cousins, an African peak and a day of glorious outdoor air. And for me, gasping lungs and leaden feet, vowing never to climb with Scott and a bunch of fit kids 30 years younger than me, especially not within two weeks of blood donation, again.  I felt really really old.  When the fastest sped ahead, most of the group who gamely held back with me decided on a short cut that turned out to be a very very long cut, winding by a giraffe and zebra until we finally found the park entrance.  We all survived, a 15-20 km hike and a great day.

After church Sunday, the project of the afternoon was to arrange broken tile pieces on the dome of the pizza oven as a globe-like mosaic.  Scott and Luke pressed on to the bitter end, the caustic mortar stinging their hands.  We were pretty happy with the result, which both beautifies the oven and hopefully improves heat retention.

Today, after a brief morning in the hospital, I took advantage of our visiting help to get the cousins OUT of Kijabe, and arranged to accompany an RVA teacher Mark D to visit one of the 25 schools in the Kenya Kids Can school-lunch and computer center program.  A previous teacher, Steve Peifer, started this program in response to chronic child hunger.  The idea is simple:  provide corn and beans to the neediest schools, who agree to provide a cook, kitchen shelter, and fuel.  Feed 17,000 kids so that they have the energy to learn.  Later he added simple computer centers so that even the poorest and most rural children can engage in the 21rst century.  You can read the whole story in the excellent book Steve just published, A Dream so Big.  Having known the Peifers, and having worked quite a bit with schools and kids and nutrition in Uganda, and having a great respect for Mark and Sherri D who are the new directors, it was a privilege to get to sit in the classrooms, chat with the teachers, and see the whole program in action.

Two more days in Kijabe, trying to give my dear nephews a full view of Africa from spectacular scenery to hungry curious kids to the challenges of elephant survival to art to independence.  

The Cousins

The cousins have arrived. Our in-house family now consists of four boys all between 6' 2" and 6' 3", Julia, and Luke's Yale research colleague M who is a petite cross-country runner.  Six kids, massive chocolate chip cookie consumption, lots of laughter, long hikes, and constant motion.

 

Within hours of arrival we headed out to Maasai Mara to catch the annual wildebeest migration.  Two million of these unlikely animals with curving horns, subtle stripes, fringed beards and sloped backs move en masse from TZ to Kenya at this time of year.  So Friday we squeezed all 8 of us, 4 tents, two coolers of food, a kitchen-in-a-trunk, sleeping bags, mats, firewood, segilis (jikos), and many liters of drinking water all into the Landrover and headed south on dusty rutted roads.  Extremely gracious missionaries with homes a stone's throw from the park gate prepared a fenced, private acre of their compound for free camping for colleagues, and there we pitched our tents and cooked our first gourmet chicken tikka and naan-over-charcoal meal.  Saturday morning we were in the park as the sun rose pink through the dust behind us, scouring for wildlife.  First treat, a whole family of hyenas, pink-faced with blood, on a kill in the tall grass, pulling entrails and quarreling.  Next treat, a lioness slinking through the grass, big paw footprints in a bog we barely cleared.  Hippos in the river, the massive crocodiles waiting.  Then a pack of adolescent male giraffes with their classic neck-whapping fights.  A secretary-bird, tall, stalking, serene.  The churning Mara, wildebeest entering then pawing a foam of water, rushing back, jittery.  Carcasses floating, bloated, while vultures perched on their flanks and soared above in climbing circles.  The tiny Tommies, delicate gazelles; the plump zebra.

But I think my favorite park was watching my oldest son, back in his element.  He drove most of the day, deftly navigating the tracks.  He spotted animals.  Stopped to chat with the Kenyan game-guide drivers in Swahili and exchange tips on animal sightings. Found us a pair of large-maned male lions lazing under a bush.  He was finally at home, in the game park, on the trail, fully himself.  Wonderful, but poignant, when one realizes the stretch that he makes to fit in a northeastern, competitive, inner-city university.

Since returning to Kijabe Sunday evening, the week has unfolded well.  All cousins are thriving as they play basketball and enter into service projects together.  Various kids or pairs of them have shadowed on rounds, observed surgery, tagged along with the chaplain playing with sick kids or praying for families.

They saw our incredible case of the week, twin boys joined at the chest sharing a single heart, otherwise perfect and beautiful, who tragically died after being transferred to the national referral hospital.  Work continues, busy, team meetings and new visitors, policies and protocols and admissions and decisions.  I've spent most of the days in the hospital, with Julia in charge of the home front.   In the afternoons they've gone to a local primary school for tutoring reading and math.  One morning the boys accompanied our local brave conservationist on forest patrol, arresting an illegal charcoal-burner.  Today I declared sleep-in and free time, and after lunch we went on a long hike through the eucalyptus scrub, down ravines and up steep pine-shaded paths.  There has been pizza making and a Lord of the Rings marathon.  Book reading and discussions of essays and applications.  In African culture, my sister's children are my own.  I feel that way with them here, and I'm thankful.

In spite of twenty years on different continents, these cousins have slipped seamlessly into our family.  I suppose that is a small comfort for younger missionary families.  The ties that bind do stretch, and pull us back together again.

Surprise! Do Not Be Surprised!

1 Peter 4 tells us not to be surprised when fiery trials come to test us, as if something strange were happening.  Because this is the NORMAL LIFE of a person following Jesus.  Instead we're supposed to see the trials as evidence that we are sharing Jesus' path, and therefore rejoice.

So here is a double reason to rejoice.  First, we know that health and life and nourishment and safety for the babies of Bundibugyo will never come without a high cost, the kind of Jesus-sharing-suffering that Peter talks about.  So the fact that Monday Julius (see posts below) was dismissed from medical school in the last week of his five-year course, unjustly, should not surprise any of us.  The forces of evil are at work to prevent a competent compassionate doctor from arriving.  And to sideline those that do arrive, like Travis with his cancer.  Rejoice, Peter says, because this is the path of the cross, and it leads to redemption.

But rejoice again, today.  We got news that the University Senate read our letter and met, and decided to reinstate Monday Julius as a student, provided he repeats one year.  So yes, we have to pay for an unnecessary extra year.  But for one extra year's tuition we get a doctor for Bundibugyo, rather than five years' tuition for nothing.  We are grateful that your prayers changed hearts, that a semblance of justice has been done.  We also got news that Dr. Travis' cancer has responded to the chemotherapy, and his recent CT scan is clear.  Two excellent gifts from God, answers to prayer, that will allow these two men to bless others. 

We thank those who have given to the Kule Memorial Leadership Fund (see sidebar).  You are also suffering as you sacrifice to make these funds available.  This is an extra 4 thousand dollars that we had not budgeted, but we trust God will provide through you.

And while we're on the subject, when we asked for prayer for Monday Julius, we asked for two miracles.  Still waiting on the second.  Caleb's knee is not doing well.  But perhaps he understands 1 Pet 4 better than I do.  On the phone he always says he's doing OK, even when it hurts.  Life is dangerous, he told us, so he is learning to buckle down and push through.  He does not complain.  This past week he's been sick, been gassed with tear gas (part of his training), learned to take an M16 apart and put it together again quickly, practiced warfare, and studied survival tactics.  I don't think that trials surprise him.  But I'd still love for that knee to be healed.

Bundibugyo - home to 66,000 Congolese refugees

-water courtesy of our WHM engineers
-photos courtesy of one of our summer interns (Jeff Hosan)

Refugees enter Bundibugyo

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/07/14/congolese-fleeing-to-uganda-top-55000-red-cross/

The ADF, the rebel group that chased us out of our home in 1997, is back in action in our old neighborhood, supposedly with new support from Khartoum and links to Al-Shabbab and Al-Qaeda.  Thursday they attacked a town in Congo across our Bundibugyo border.  In response, the Ugandan army has moved to protect the border in force.  And the Congolese population has moved over to the safer Ugandan side.

It is odd to see the same lines of refugees with kids and pots and mattresses and chickens that we walked in 16 years and one month ago, moving in the opposite direction.  Only this time the road, newly widened and graded, is a lot nicer.  Our team in Bundibugyo is safe on the Uganda side.  But they are overwhelmed with work to assist the district in hosting tens of thousands of refugees.  In a place with minimal infrastructure, when ten or thirty or fifty thousand people arrive, water and sanitation, health and food, shelter and safety, have to be constructed out of nothing but space and grass and air.  Josh our engineer spent 15 hours today setting up a camp on WHM/district land along the airstrip where he could pipe in water from our mission's water project.  The same project Michael Masso finished only a few months before the first ADF crisis.

Please pray that the people would be spared the disasters of measles and cholera.  That the Congolese forces would restore order that would allow their people to return home.  That the Ugandan officials would act with wisdom and charity in caring for their cousins.  That our team would have stamina, safety, creativity, and even joy in serving as the hands of Jesus for the neediest.  

permission to suspend time: thoughts on sabbath

I believe the Burundi team recommended this book to me (The Sense of the Call: A Sabbath way of life for those who serve God, the Church, and the World).  This week I hit a wall of weariness and sickness, and when the fever ebbed I started delving into the pages.  Marva Dawn is a thoughtful scholar, a beautiful writer, with the credibility of a person who has suffered.  I first read her book about Revelations and strength in weakness when my Dad had ALS, and have been a fan ever since.  I'm only on the third chapter of this one, but it comes at the right time.  Spain and back with the whole mission, son #2 come and gone all-too-quickly, Uganda and back with crises there, the end of the school year with goodbyes to staff and students, impending changes in our department as people move on, and a two-day bout with a nasty infection, well, it is just all a bit too much.  What is God's call, in all this traumatic mess, and can I possibly follow?  Dawn takes us into Scripture to look at the concept of sabbath:  ceasing, resting, feasting, and embracing.  Taking a step out of the confines of accomplishment to taste the timelessness of eternity:  no pressure to perform, no schedule, a day of being.  Of restoration and refreshment, of community.

She looks at the story of Abraham and Isaac on Mt. Moriah, one which has been central to my heart since it jumped out during preterm labor with Caleb in remote Bundibugyo and the possibility that faith and calling meant hard, permanent, disastrous outcomes for our kids.  Dawn sees the story as one of provision:  God will provide.  God took Abraham right up to the climax of horror, right into the heart of common religious practice of his day, to show him that the LORD did not operate that way.  That our God provides the sacrifice, requiring the ultimate only of Himself.

Because faith in God's provision is the necessary foundation of sabbath.  Six days of labor, six days of collecting manna, six days of scramble and struggle and thoughtful hard work, plowing and reaping, reading and diagnosing and meeting and teaching.  The only way one can cease and rest on the seventh is to believe that God can provide beyond what another day's labor can accomplish.  That in fact, He ordered things this way, and wants to.  "Not by our own efforts will we best serve the Church and the world.  Sabbath ceasing teaches us how useless are our society's exertions, money, power, fame, gimmicks, and glitz.  Sabbath ceasing instead immerses us in the presence of our benevolent and extravagant God and in the LORD's provision for our future." (Dawn)

Today is Sunday.  And I am on call. This is one dilemma of medicine, the inability to completely set aside a specific day. So it is not exactly a full Sabbath.  But after a much-interrupted night, and an hour of problems in the early morning, even an on-call Sunday has offered some rest.  Worship and coffee cake with the family (in which I made them listen to a handful of pages from this book).  Nothing more restful than a dog and a blanket and a Psalm, this time 50, another reminder that God does not need my Paediatric skills to save patients just as He doesn't need more cows sacrificed.  He can be pleased with both, offered freely, but He can raise up cattle and doctors at will.

This truth about God's independence from our sacrifice must be held in tension with the truth of God's call to us to sacrifice.  The generation following mine is all about boundaries, rest, rhythms, saying no.  I learn a lot from that.  But I honestly don't completely buy it.  Abraham got the provision AFTER he climbed the mountain and raised the knife.  I know I have been grumpy and faithless and discouraged, but I don't think the solution is to risk less, plan safety.  I still think we're called to the edge where we are thrown upon God's provision or death.  And that we climb Mt. Moriah all-out six days out of seven, then take a complete breathing rest.

Which is easier said than done.  At our WHM conference, friends Joel and Cindy Hylton led a seminar on sabbath rest.  As we met in our small groups I got this mental picture of why our life can be so stressful.  Four competing massive good circles of life, all with their own independent agendas and schedules.  The tiny darkened overlap is where we try to live, the place where Kijabe Hospital Medical Life, RVA School/Kid Life, WHM Teams and Colleagues Life, and USA family and supporter Life, all intersect.  I take Yale's and USAFA's and RVA's school schedules and put them into my calendar, overlapping 7 Africa-team locations, central mission requirements, and then try and plan coverage for three Paediatric services at the hospital 24/7.  Sometimes it isn't pretty.  I think my prayer this year is to live in that small dark center with a six/one rhythm.  To climb up for sacrifice when called in any of the four spheres, in faith that God will provide time with my kids, and sleep and food and exercise and joy.

Sabbath is essential to life, and yet we can't stay in sabbath all week long.  Like everything else in life, truth is in the paradox rather than the compromise:  The four spheres will spin on without me while I am called to sabbath rest/ The way of the cross is to lay down our life in each of those four spheres.

Re-enter, re-adjust

**NOTE that Scott put photos on Flicker--click on the sidebar to see the changing landscape of the road work in Uganda, as well as some reunions with familiar faces**

We're back in Kenya after a full and strenuous and wonderful week in Uganda.  The first thing I noticed, in the taxi from the airport, was the sky.  The sky in Kenya is endless, distant, blue, clear.  Perhaps because the landscape has less to distract one.  After the jungle green profusion of Uganda, Kenya seems muted.  But the sky is amazing.  And it's good to be home.  Or sort of home.

Because this life is continuously a journey of the paradox of belonging and alienation.  We embrace Kijabe and are embraced by this life, these students, this hospital, this work, these friends.  But I also feel the rub of being outsiders in a way that I didn't in Uganda.  Not easy to explain or put one's finger on.  A matter of time (we've invested less than 3 years here now, out of 20 in Africa), or of sheer complexity (so many more families here, more activity, that one is inevitably out of sync).  Of an ordinal matter, does it become progressively more difficult to bond with each new home?  Or is it just the melancholy of graduation hitting, the fact that alumnae are back and seniors are leaving and life just feels transient in this season?  Only one more year until our next child leaves us, and my heart crumples a little more.

We pulled in Thursday evening and went to work.  A week away felt like a month.  A missionary friend had moved in to be near the hospital while recovering from severe Dengue Fever.  Luke's friends pop in and out, alumnae here for visits, sometimes there are a dozen kids around the table or draped over couches making popcorn and watching sports.  The weekend has been filled with non-stop events, Rugby finals and alumae friendlies, Junior Store food and art shows, concerts and church services.  The entire MUN group is about to come over for pizza.  Goodbyes loom.

So we turn from the malarious majesty of Uganda, from the teens we have nurtured as best we could for two decades, from the school we helped found, from the hospital and nutrition programs we helped build . . to the dry highlands of Kenya to more teens and a long-established school and hospital where we know God has called us for this season.  And we keep trying to hold both places together in our hearts.

Requesting two miracles

Requesting two miracles for two young men, and for the unknown future impact their lives can have.

Monday Julius completed all five years of medical school successfully. He passed all exams, ran for office, was well liked and competent. In the last week of his last semester, the last set of exams, a student asked him for help. He said no, but the proctor only caught a glimpse that Monday was speaking. In spite of the fact that there was no evidence of cheating by comparing papers, in spite of the fact that the other young man was repeating an entire failed year and re-failing three classes and subsequently committed suicide while Monday was passing everything with good grades, in spite of a request and plea to explain .... Monday was dismissed from school. Within days of completion, after many thousands of dollars and hours, his results were invalidated. Of course we only heard his side of the story, and can be wrong, but we believed him. There were some political reasons he may have been targeted. And after Dr Jonah and Dr Travis we know there are spiritual forces in the heavenly realms that constantly try to keep competent dedicated doctors out of the district. We tried to make phone calls, have meetings, and write letters. We have been advised to appeal to the University Senate. This is in process. PLEASE pray for a miraculous reversal of his dismissal.

Another young man dear to our hearts called us today, after an appointment with his orthopedic surgeon. Caleb is back in Colorado and wanted to be cleared to participate his scheduled summer survival course. Instead the doctor was very concerned that there is too much abnormal movement in his knee due to laxity of his MCL ligament, one of the three that was repaired. A surgery and year of recovery seemed hard enough, now be may be looking at a second surgery and second year. We and he though he was processing well. He has tried so hard. The PT had not picked up on this problem so we wonder if it is new and due to his travel to see us. PLEASE pray for miraculous healing. He is back in a brace.

Monday could save hundreds, maybe thousands of lives as a doctor in Bundibugyo. No one knows what plans God has for Caleb, but he has also laid down his life in willing service. Some trust in chariots or lawyers or surgeons, but we trust in the name of The Lord our God whether he works through human means or through supernatural ones. Please pray that God would be glorified by a major turn-around in both these stories in the next few weeks.

Thanks.