Creaky Cottage

There is a degree to which a true vacation of the soul requires a spot that reflects one’s childhood places of joy, and for this reason the Trout Tree’s Creaky Cottage is a respite for me.  Surrounded by forest and serenaded by a fast-flowing brook which curves around three sides of the property, quirky construction with logs and a porch, in the highlands of Mt. Kenya, it reminds me of West Virginia.  Scott found the advertisement on the internet and called to confirm a vacancy, and otherwise in our hectic lives we did zero preparation before noon Friday when the kids came home from school for their midterm break and we from work and we all threw clothes into bags and food into the cooler and everything into the car and set off about 2 pm.

Almost four hours of traffic and are-we-there-yet later, watching craggy snow-graced peaks of Mt Kenya in occasional partings of the high clouds, we pulled into the deserted restaurant which is the main purpose of the property.  Turns out it’s only open for lunch.  Good thing we had packed plenty of food . . . the workers on the trout farm directed us past dozens of circular ponds fed by a diversion scheme of flowing water.  At the far corner of the property we passed on foot through a little gate, and saw the cottage.  It was constructed around a tree, which still grows right up through the middle.  There is not a level surface in the whole place, and the low ceilings, brick floors, fireplace and glass-paned windows could be right out of a set for Hobbiton.  Julia and Acacia climbed a ladder to a loft with twin beds, Jack had his own double bed on the ground floor, and Scott and I had a king-sized bed at the top of rickety stairs that looked over the porch towards the stream.  We cooked dinner and soaked in the peace and soothing, quiet, background flow of the stream.

Well, mostly quiet.  The roof is intermittently stormed by troupes of Sykes monkeys or Colobus, and the tree hyraxes make shattering screams in the night or waddle around like R.O.U.S’s in the daytime. 

Two kids are in the throes of Junior Year, with multiple AP classes and sports and activities.  One is in the midst of Senior Year with College apps.  I increased my work time by about 25% when my partner-colleague followed her husband to South Africa for a year, and then by 50% again when my other colleague was pinned down to bedrest for preterm labor a couple of weeks ago.  I had worked the last two weekends and my last call had me up from 2-4 with a dying post-op patient, followed by Scott’s dying patient from 4:30-5:30.  We are both scraping for time to support teams, work on call schedules, prepare lectures.  In the last week I have also been emailing back and forth with Luke trying to help him edit umpteen essays for about a dozen med school apps.  We’ve had company, hosting residents, teaching Sunday school . . . in short, our family is exhausted.  Our kids wanted a midterm break that was RESTFUL. 

And this was just what we needed.  The first morning, as we emerged from sleep, Scott looked at his watch.  9:45.  The last time I slept that late was probably our anniversary week over a year ago.  We unplugged.  Read books.  Listened to music.  Watched “Lost”.  Cooked meals and ate by candlelight.  Basked in sunshine.  Prayed.

We did spend one of our two afternoons hiking a barely discernible train inside a little-accessed area on the slopes of Mt Kenya, which was a glorious six miles of forest and quiet.  A few worrisome buffalo and elephant signs, but no dangerous animals (though there were dangerous PLANTS).

This would not be the spot for everyone.  It’s rustic and dusty and quaint.  There is not much to “do”.  The cost is more reasonable than many options for families but not as cheap as camping; on the other hand everyone got their own bed.  You still have to plan your meals and do your dishes. 

But for us, the Creaky Cottage matched a deep chord:  erratic and unique, shady and isolated, breeze and water and sky, time to connect with each other and God.

Creaky Cottage - more pix

In which we reach the 20-year mile-marker on this paradoxical path

October 14, 1993, we touched down on the runway of the old Entebbe airport with 8-month-old Luke as the night faded into dawn.  We stepped down the stairway onto the tarmac, inhaling the smokey air of Africa for the first time as a family.  In what would become a familiar pattern in our life, we felt a bit abandoned for a few hours, because the family who intended to meet us had all fallen sick with malaria and the trusted Ugandan friend they delegated was a bit late.  Sitting on the sidewalk with our pile of trunks, we watched what we thought were lethal mosquitos ( but were in reality pesky but harmless lake flies) swarm over our baby.  The journey of faith had begun.  These were the days before cell phones and internet.  We had no plan B.  Concerned airport personnel offered to get us a taxi, but we had no idea where we would go other than the one international hotel with a phone line to the US where the team had called us from in the past.  Our new home was a two-day drive away.  But just when we began to despair, John Wilson Atwoki showed up to rescue us for the first time of what would probably be dozens where we sat on a roadside with no options, and he whooshed in with a plan.  He loaded Scott and the trunks in the back of a pickup, and Luke and me in the front, and we were off to Kampala.

And so began what has now become two decades of loving the people, the view, the pace, the sheer in-your-face reality of Africa.  17 years in Uganda, and nearly 3 now in Kenya, with connections and visits and friends and ministry in all their neighbors: Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, the Somali border, Ethiopia, South Sudan.

Today we remember hither-by-grace: these 20 years are one continuous story of God's mercy in bringing us to this place.  Mercy to the few people we've had the privilege to work with?  Perhaps, but I mean His mercy to us.

(PS - click on the image of the prayer letter to download and read the original "first letter from Uganda").

Celebrating 17 jeweled years

Julia Kathleen Myhre, age 3, wearing the cowgirl birthday outfit my mom saved from one of my early birthdays, in our yard in Bundibugyo.  14 years later, her joy, her unselfconscious style, her friendly readiness for a party still blessed our October 4.  Julia turned 17 last Friday, and we had a lovely celebration.

The day started with cinnamon rolls at 6:30 so we could all get to work and school.  And just what every 17 year old girl wants:  new flip flops. 

Julia about age 7?  A trip to Mombasa, resulting in braids.

Back to 2013, hugging dear friend Savvy as they make pizza with the Koinonia leadership team and a few other friends.  An amazing group of kids solid in faith and carefree in fun, cooking and laughing and eating together.

We made a tree cake this year, because Julia has always had a special love for trees.  And it symbolized her roots in the Spirit and  her growth in grace, her shade and fruit that bless us all.  Plus she was born in October, and the lovely fake leaves were bought to decorate her 4th Birthday (one we spent on sabbatical in America).  Somehow they are still in our closet in Kenya.  I made the basic shapes and colors but the actual artistry belongs to Acacia who is the best birthday-partner ever, always super enthusiastic and creative.

After pizza and cake, we asked each kid of the 15 or so there plus a handful of adult sponsors and friends, to speak a word of blessing to Julia or share how she had blessed them.  And this was the greatest Birthday gift of all, the gift of seeing yourself in others' eyes, of hearing truth.  They spoke of her joy, her compassion, her prayerfulness, her leadership, her determination, her concern for others, her friendship.  It was truly inspiring to these kids affirm the gifts God has given Julia.

The party ended with us giving her three fruit tree seedlings to plant here at Kijabe:  peach, plum, and ribena (not sure what that is yet).  And we had bought flowers for each kid to take and plant around campus, by their dorms and classes, symbolizing the way Julia's life makes this place more beautiful.  Pictured below she is planting the trees with Scott the next day.

 This is a girl who would rather get a tree seedling than a new dress.  Who would rather dress ready for action than ready to impress. Who can make anyone feel welcome, who is disciplined in her spirituality, who has her heart in absolutely the right place.  Who can hold her own with the boys (including beating most of the boys on her tennis team) but who defers to the needs of others.  Who glows in the love of her distant older brothers, and has a unique symbiotic relationship with her younger one.  Who gets Acacia, and Acacia gets her, in a way that few other almost-sister pairs ever well.  Who loves to eat, loves to sing, loves to plant, loves to read, loves to be with us.  Who is the perfect combination of spunk and piety, of grit and laughter.  She has made all our lives sweeter for these 17 years.  And the hard sinking reality that this is possibly her last birthday at home for a long time, maybe for ever, hit me hard.  Launching a daughter is going to be even more excruciating than launching sons I'm afraid.  But we know she is ready, and we celebrate the girl God gave us for this time.

Needy Children's Fund

This little one has improved enough from his severe gastroenteritis to hold up a packet of ORS.  He represents one of the hundred kids we helped last year from our Kijabe Hospital Needy Children's Fund (70351).  This is an account within the hospital which supplements bill payment for the neediest patients.  The cost of a day in our hospital is about ten dollars for a child.  Many of our patients have bills in the $50 range.  Some, though, with complex congenital anomalies, HIV infection complicated by TB, severe malnutrition, extreme prematurity, need longer stays and run up bills of hundreds of dollars, occasionally several thousand dollars.  Even though our costs are very low, and the physician services are donated through the generosity of our supporters, the hospital has to buy drugs and pay nurses and feed patients and provide water and electricity and bandages.  So they have to charge modest fees.

Before I came, the Needy Children's Fund had been set up, though rarely used.  In the last several years however, my colleagues and I have tried to keep the fund flowing, so that when we see the poorest of the poor patients in the clinic, people who can't afford a chest xray to diagnose TB or who would rather take their baby home because they can't afford twenty or thirty dollars for an overnight stay with labs and oxygen . . we can go ahead and treat the child with the assurance that the parents will be assisted in the cost.  A trusted chaplain or social worker assesses the family's ability to pay, and in almost all cases we only pay a part of the cost so the family always shares in paying what they are able.  We also use the funds to purchase insurance for some kids whose problems are chronic and will require multiple admissions--for only a few dollars we can enroll children in the National Health Insurance Fund which will in future admissions pay about half of their costs.

We're down to the last couple hundred dollars, having disbursed thousands already this year.  And we have patients on our ward right now, widowed moms, stressed unemployed fathers, babies with complicated illnesses, that we know will need help.

If your group would like to raise funds for these kids, we've worked out a way to transfer the money to Kijabe via the Gessner's (fellow docs) church.  You write a check to the church and get a tax deduction; the church does the administration for free; and the money is deposited in America and withdrawn in Kenya for 100% use of the sickest, smallest, most vulnerable children.

INSTRUCTIONS:

1.  Write a check to "Bay Leaf Baptist Church" with "Kijabe Needy Children's Fund" on the memo line.

2.  Mail it to Bay Leaf Baptist Church/12200 Bay Leaf Church Road/Raleigh NC 27614 (USA)

3.  It helps if you email me to know to look for the transfer (drs.myhre@gmail.com)

4.  The church will send you a receipt by mail within a month.  100% of donated money goes to the Kijabe fund, so the church donates the administrative costs.

Thanks, and hoping this is a way you can respond to the sadness of Westgate by concretely helping real Kenyan children.

Meanwhile, life goes on

In a week of nervous, frequent checks of the news, of edgy unsettled questions, it is sometimes hard to remember that life goes on.  When the Westgate siege began, I was up at RVA in the cafeteria making pizza for "Senior Store", a massive and precisely orchestrated undertaking every month in which the Senior class works for many, many hours on Friday night and Saturday morning to prepare and sell mountains of food to hungry boarding students and visiting parents.  Donuts, egg-mc-muffins, chicken tikka sandwiches, bacon cheese burgers, taco salads, cokes, ice cream, and many other somewhat comforting and otherwise-hard-to-find foods are prepared in massive quantity, and consumed.  Because of hospital duties on weekends, I had not been in charge of any particular aspect before. Thankfully the kids knew what they were doing, so I mostly cheerled and obeyed orders.  It was pretty fun, but exhausting, which added to the emotional exhaustion of Westgate that afternoon.

We were also hosting Nathan and Sarah that weekend--they had come on an overnight bus from Uganda where Nathan is doing some research in his final year of med school.  Purely wonderful to see them on this side of marriage and (nearly) med school, the people who poured into Bundibugyo and our kids and whom we love.

Then, of course, as we recovered from school activities, visitors, and non-stop following the siege, life went on at the hospital, and sadly, death as well.  

I had struggled to keep baby I alive all the week before after she was born with a severe and difficult-to-survive-in-Africa congenital anomaly where her bowels were outside her abdominal cavity at birth.  She finally had surgery on the Saturday of Westgate, but when I came in Monday the doctors on call for the weekend told me that she was dying.  They had been unable to stop her slow and steady descent towards death, as it turned out, from a terrible infection she acquired along the way.  

Her dad asked me to take a photo as he held her in her final moments, and I was struck by the peaceful quirky little smile on her face.

In the context of all the death and loss of last week, Irene's passing was concrete and immediate and hard.  I had not cried for a baby's death recently, but this one got to my heart.  My own daughter had been praying for her and I felt like we were so close to saving her, but we just couldn't.

So I was pretty excited today to discharge the next severe-congenital-anomaly post-op surgical baby from ICU after he also nearly died.  Baby S, partly because of our experience with baby I, got powerful antibiotics the minute he began to deteriorate, and he responded.  He was born with his esophagus ending in a blind pouch so that he could not swallow, and there was a connection between his lower esophagus and his lungs.  It is a privilege to work closely with excellent surgeons who can actually save the life of such a baby.  Just now I was in the hospital admitting TWO (!) babies born with problems on the other end-imperforate anus, so there is no outlet to the GI tract.  They will have surgery tomorrow.  I have no idea why we got two at the same time. (Look at the xray and see the ng tube curling up in the neck instead of passing down to the stomach)

Baby S's mom was SO HAPPY to finally hold him after a week of being attached to too many tubes.

Though I've been working in ICU I pop into the outpatient clinic regularly to help.  One day I picked up a file and had a happy surprise:  Baby Patience, who had been one of our smallest survivors after months in NICU care, back to visit now that she was over a year old.  So happy to see her.

These are the moments that make the nights worthwhile.  

And lastly, we are blessed with three residents in Paeds, an unexpected bounty and a provision of God in our time of stress.   They have been a delightful breath of fresh air, and I hope God calls them all back to Africa.  Two are a husband/wife couple from SC and the other one is med-paeds and married; his cute-as-a-button daughter is pictured below with Scott who it turns out is exactly 50 years older than her.  They have birthdays coming up in November.

So there you have the rest of life:  activities and cooking, Bible studies, prayer, visitors, mentoring, patients, nights of struggle, death and life, defeat and victory, football and tennis.  Jack has had two games so far with "hat tricks" (3 goals in a game) and is a formidable force.  Julia has won her doubles matches so far.  Acacia is coaching elementary school kids, and has her own team that plays others intramural.  

And in the background, the uncertainty of the mall, the rubble, the findings, the bodies, the escaped terrorists, the next attack.  And deeper than that, the reality that God sees, knows, loves.

An Alternative Script

This was my daily reading for yesterday, Psalm 94.  There is an end to evil.  We ask HOW LONG, but though it delays, justice comes with surety.  There is a God who created all the earth, who knows all the thoughts of terrorists and mothers alike.  And there is no other safety than in such a One whose MERCIES hold us all up, even when our foot seems to slip.  Those from any nation who plot against the innocent will be stopped.  Read Psalm 94 here:  http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+94&version=NKJV

The Script

In the wake of Westgate, we have understandably heard the attack reported along the lines of a Muslim/anti-Christian script.  The majority of Kenyans are Christian.  The articulate news sources which dominate our feed are from Western countries where this script plays well in a post- 9/11 world. Witnesses reported the attackers announcing that they would let Muslims go free, though they subsequently shot some of them.  The group claiming responsibility, al-Shabaab, uses Arabic and Q'ranic verses and religious overtones in their pronouncements.

But is this script really true?  The majority of Muslims in the world would not identify with the ethos or tactics of al-Shabaab, even the majority of Somalis wouldn't.  Even the al-Shabaab themselves have had infighting about the violent brutality of some of the leaders (which is probably why there was a publicized attempt to appear to spare Muslims).  If a radical sect in the hills of rural America has a shoot-out with law-enforcement and quotes Bible verses, we don't present them as representative of "Christians".  Secondly, watching the funeral news, it appears that many of those killed were Hindu, Jain, Sikh, and even Muslim, not exclusively Christian.  Thirdly, the most prominent hero story to have emerged in Kenya is that of Abdul Haji, son of the former Minister of Defense in Kenya, who as a private individual citizen with a handgun joined with four others to rescue many of the trapped shoppers.  As a Muslim, he did not for one second consider these attackers to be on his side.  Lastly, the location and timing seems designed to attack Western commercial values which much of the world associates with Christians, but which are probably further removed from the Bible than the attackers are themselves on many issues.  If they wanted to find Christians, they could have taken down one of Nairobi's mega-churches.

So what is the script?  I really don't know.  I think we need to be asking the question:  why are we fighting over Somalia?  Is it about religion, or resources?  Who and what pays for all those machine guns and bombs and get-away cars and military-grade gear?  Does this have anything to do with natural gas and oil reserves under East African nations and off the coast?  Who stands to benefit from Somalia, whether Somalia in chaos or Somalia ruled by a Kenya-friendly force?

I'm sure there are sincere young people who join extreme groups out of deep conviction and even a willingness to martyrdom.  But is that what was happening at Westgate?  The facts are trickling out.  The attackers rented a space in the mall where they could stockpile their weapons and gear ahead of time.  Some were seen changing clothes and walking out.  They could have blown the whole thing immediately into a roaring mass of destruction, instead they carefully crafted a 4-day siege that brought terror and publicity on a deeper and more unsettling level than ever.  The killings were executionary and somehow more horrific than the anonymity of a bomb.  It is possible that they all walked out before the end; Kenyan news is speculating about a sewage tunnel escape.  This sounds like sophisticated planning with a political agenda, not a gesture of protest in the name of religion.

There are so many unanswered questions, and in a culture of information-is-power, need-to-know only, I hope we learn the truth.  In the meantime I think a more political and less religious script makes it less stressful to see Somali patients all over our hospital, and puts less pressure on missionaries to worry about "denying our faith" in a Westgate scenario.

Elegy

This was written as a group in the Senior English class:

A Cry to the Heavens

An elegy by the Senior Class, Rift Valley Academy

Scattered shoes and broken glass

Strewn on sparkling marble floors,

Sounds of trickling fountains

Drowned out by thunderous gunfire

Exploding from men with dark intentions.

Lives lost in senseless slaughter

Leave the hallways of our hearts empty.

Our spirits are heavy,

Minds full of fear and doubt.

Finding peace in the valley of the shadow of death,

To the Lord we cry out

with every labored breath –

For meaning, answers, forgiveness, hope,

Healing, and REDEMPTION –

Come before tomorrow

for we need light in the darkness,

a darkness wrought with sorrow.

We cry out to the Heavens for

An answer to the madness.

Restore to us the gift of peace,

The promise of life free of fear.

The days go on and on

Healing cannot happen fast,

But through love and strength and unity

The cowardice of evil men will not stand.

We can hope for another day,

A sky filled with joy and not with blackness

And the laughter of children

Will restore our halls to gladness.

It is with love and unity that we pray for all of you who are grieving and shaken by this horrendous act.  We stand together with you.  You are not forgotten. RVA Class of 2014