Category: Kenya

Community Gardening

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Marc is recovering amazingly well from his motorcycle accident 2-1/2 weeks ago. We had a follow-up appointment at the hospital this week to check on his knee, and the doctor was very pleased with the healing progress. He’ll get stitches out in two more weeks. When I had malaria over last weekend, he started hobbling around on his own (first with crutches and then without) because he wanted to let me rest. So things are looking good–just in time for a training meeting this week!

However, it is planting season here and he was not quite up to that. And I have two brown thumbs, so I’ve always been on the weeding, harvesting, and preserving side of the garden. Earlier this year, Marc attended a Farming God’s Way seminar and wanted to pioneer a FGW garden on our property to show our neighbors that it’s possible to improve their yields and do better for their families. He trained our son, Jonah, on how to do the planting (it involves some precision measurement and he wanted it to be done right), but for us to do it ourselves would have taken quite a few days and a lot of labor.

We were pleasantly surprised and blessed to have several of our friends and neighbors volunteer to help with the planting. We coordinated for everyone to get together this past Saturday at 9:00 AM, and for once almost everyone was on time. We planted maize and beans–some hoeing, some fertilizing, and some planting and covering seeds. We enjoyed a lunch of kitheri (corn and beans) and finished the whole garden by about 4 pm. God is good! Rebekah took some photos while we worked (her primary role was keeping baby Enoch out of the garden and out of trouble–no small task these days).

 

“We were six, now we are four”

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Yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting with three women, who gave up many precious hours of their day and traveled many miles just to get to know me a little. Marc has been going to their fellowship gatherings frequently on Sunday mornings and always tells me how much I would enjoy going. They love Jesus and love each other.

Unfortunately, their meetings go long…many hours…and we don’t want to leave the children on their own at home for that long. And equally unfortunately, transporting the lot of us is not practical or financially possible. So yesterday, they came to me.

I appreciated their words of encouragement and their spiritual support, the promise of continued prayer.

I laughed at their enthusiasm about our family of eight children; they are convinced that Americans only have two children and that is “normal.” But I was sad as we asked each of the women, in turn, how many children they had.

We were six, now we are four.

We had six, now we are five.

We were nine, now we are eight.

We didn’t want to follow up with the question of what happened to the children who are now not with them. These weren’t miscarriages they were talking about (though that is a difficult enough loss), these were children held and fed and loved, for who knows how long a time before they succumbed to…what? Malnutrition? Disease? I can only guess. But the sad thing is, many women here share the same unfortunate reality: we were six, now we are four.

We have two cats and a dog and can buy Front Line for the dog, but there is no treatment for the cats. The best we can do is flea baths when we notice the little critters. Since the cats sit on the couches and sleep with some of us, we all endure a few days of itchy bites before the fleas meet their demise for another season. This week, about half our family has worked its way through malaria, in spite of there supposedly being few malaria-bearing mosquitoes at our elevation. And how did so many end up with it? Marc was both surprised and disturbed to find that fleas carry malaria, just like mosquitoes do. (Made us think of the Bubonic Plague, and shiver). So although we’d resisted chemical treatment for fleas, we sprayed down the carpet, the furniture, and the beds to get a little more aggressive against the disease-bearing intruders. And for us, though malaria has been a discomfort and an inconvenience, it’s highly treatable. With a visit to the local chemist, a few dollars, and a few days’ time, we’re working our way through it.

What do the visit with my sisters in Christ and our recent experience with malaria have to do with each other? Well, I would guess that one or more of those precious children might have suffered with malaria or something equally treatable. But their family didn’t have the money to get the medicine that is readily available. Such cases are all-too-common here.

This morning, I was reading Kisses from Katie by Katie Davis, who serves in Uganda. She gives tirelessly of herself to serve “the least of these.” She removes jiggers, gives baths, provides medicine, offers food, and loves.

I want to do more. I’m trusting that God will show us just what it is He wants us to do next.

25 Cents or Less, in Kenya

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Some things here in Africa are about the same price USD as KSH (Kenya Shilling), and occasionally more expensive–mzungu-style or specialty items in particular. A dozen eggs is about the same price US as Kenya, and we had a homemade lasagna the other night to celebrate Rebekah’s 10th birthday–the cottage cheese and lasagna noodles (both a rarity here) made it about a $40 meal. Not something we would usually do, but lasagna was a special request of the birthday girl.

For the most part, however, things are markedly cheaper here than in America. For example, I remember getting name-brand Front Line in America for over $50 from the vet; here, Marc *finally* found some available in town and I think it cost about $13.  It still amazes me how much cheaper most things are here than in the US. For sure, you often get what you pay for (as our friend Silas has said, “Africans no care about quality, they care about price!”); however, in many cases the quality issues don’t have much overall impact.

The boys do much of our shopping and they had just returned from town today as I was preparing lunch. While we ate, they had fun listing all the things you can buy in Africa for 20 shillings (about 25 cents USD):

4 avocados, in-season

1 orange

2 pens

a 60-page notebook

5-1/2 minutes of air time on a cell phone

16 MB of data on Internet

2 chapati (kind of like small, non-sweet donuts)

a small flashlight (disposable)

a small loaf of bread (1/2 a conventional loaf)

4 packages of biscuits (cookies–a package is four or five)

4 packets of laundry detergent (each packet is for one washtub of laundry and contains 25 grams–almost an ounce)

2 cell phone charges (most here don’t have electricity, so paying to charge a cell phone is normal)

about 6 photocopies

4 lollipops

20 pieces of gum or 20 hard candies

 

Which made me think…what can you *really* buy in America for 25 cents? I think gumballs are still 25 cents. What else?

The Lord Knows What we Need

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For quite a while now, we’ve felt like we really needed to get away as a family. Sometimes living here as the only wazungu in town is like living in a fish bowl.  Just a quick illustration:

In discussing the issue of being home-bound yet again with Marc, suddenly he had an idea. Silas owns a large shamba—several acres of farm, field, and trees bordering a river—not too far from our house. He wondered, why couldn’t we go there, spend a few hours and enjoy a picnic lunch? Silas was agreeable to our going and we decided, to everyone’s excitement, to try out a trip there are a family. I was certain that this would help fill in the gaps in terms of what the children felt they had been missing, and I was thankful for the opportunity for some fun family time. Truth be told, the daily grind and Marc’s busy schedule sometimes leave me wishing for a bit of a “Sabbath rest” for all of us, and I hoped this would be it.

We had fun just getting there. It wasn’t “too far,” but a bit of a stretch for lots of little legs to walk comfortably. Isaiah stayed at home with several of the children while Marc, Micah, Jubilee, and I (with Enoch in the Ergo) zipped down to Silas’s on the motorbike. Marc went back for the girls while Isaiah and Jonah rode down on their little Suzuki dirt bike. Of course we had to greet Silas’s mother (who in Kenyan culture is just called “Mama Silas”). She spoke not a word of English but was happy to welcome us to her shamba.

Silas showed us around and, to my disappointment, the river at the back of the property turned out to be at the bottom of about a 10-foot drop-off. Instead of letting the kids leisurely explore as I imagined they would, I nervously kept a grip on Enoch and watched the littles to make sure they didn’t wander too close to the banks. The overgrown fields were fun to explore for a while, but there weren’t as many good climbing trees as the boys thought—those were closer to the house, so back we trekked.

Unfortunately, by the time we made it to the house again, an entourage of about 30 children was watching us like hawks and trying to meet up with us at various points. It seemed there was no  “getting away.” And once we got back, Silas unexpectedly told Marc that he had been committed to sharing about the Gospel of the Kingdom at a “Christianized” circumcision ceremony at the house of his neighbor. It was expected that he would stay to eat, but simultaneously Silas’s Mom was also preparing lunch—pulling out all the stops and sending someone to get what was, for them, very expensive fish because she knew the wazungu liked it. By now the children were eager to go home, the morning not turning out to be what they thought, but there was no way we could offend Mama Silas. It seemed we were in a “lose-lose” situation. Ultimately, our fun family day ended up with Marc going next door (for as short a time as possible) and the rest of us hanging out much longer than planned at Silas’s. We ate a lunch of fish which, while tasty, was certainly not accommodating to our mzungu sensibilities. (Whole fish, having been dried and left in the sun at the market, often ends up with maggots in it, and we found some floating in the fish broth. Not to mention, the experience of eating fish whole was not quite appetizing.) We were thankful for the hospitality and were truly blessed that Mama Silas wanted to give us her very best; however, we were also glad to return home after an unexpectedly…interesting morning.

 

So you can see, we were all out of ideas when it came to what to do to enjoy some time together as a family.

I don’t want to make a long story longer, so I’ll spare you to details of how our family was connected with a group of Mennonite missionary families here in Kisumu–but of course, it was a “God thing.”

Much to our delight, we were invited to their compound for a few days following Christmas. They said we could stay in a guest house there, be well-fed, and have transportation at our disposal to visit the local museum and zoo. After a long but uneventful ride in a semi-private matatu we were warmly welcomed, fed lunch, and enjoyed the company. There were lots of children for our kids to play with and the adult fellowship was a true blessing to me. I don’t think I had realized how much I missed it.

During our first full day we visited both the museum and zoo, so the second day was spent just enjoying the company of several of the families and relaxing. I even got to do two loads of laundry in a washing machine! Needless to say, I felt incredibly spoiled and it was so nice to get a break from that day-in-day-out manual labor. I was equally blessed that they made sure we ate well for every meal—a much greater variety of food than what we have available in our village and even in the next big town. Not to mention, refrigeration meant an opportunity to have cold smoothies and homemade granola with cold milk! It’s amazing how much you take those little things for granted—and what a blessing it was to enjoy for the short time we were there. Most of all, we were blessed by the obvious love of all of these Kingdom Christians and their willing generosity.

Here we are in Kisumu–a rare photo of the whole family, in which *almost* everyone is looking cheerfully at the camera–and only three takes, I think:

(I’m sure you can’t help but notice Micah’s new haircut in the photo. When Silas told us that “Africans no care about quality, they care about price,” he wasn’t kidding. We bought a set of clippers here and I decided to cut Micah’s hair. He likes it short, so opted for a “1,” which has always been super cute on him. Much to my horror, the comb fell off the razor as I was buzzing by his ear, so he was shaved almost to the scalp in a split second. Convinced that I could somehow rescue it, I put the comb back on and continued, only to have it happen again. So, Micah got totally buzz-cut but he had a super attitude about it, praise God!) Now, for the conclusion of our story…..

I came away truly refreshed from our mini-vacation, the burden of discouragement which I had been feeling at that time greatly lifted. The family was likewise encouraged, and we returned to home and “normal” with a renewed sense of God’s grace and goodness (in spite of another round of illness that hit us almost immediately upon our return!) I share this not simply to relate our experience, but to encourage you to consider how you might spur someone around you on to love and good deeds (see Hebrews 10:24)—even if, to you, what you offer seems small.

We are thankful, and God is good.

 

Kids, Animals, and Bananas

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Enoch and Slightly Unwilling Friend
Mama and Babies

We’ve officially hatched our first set of chicks–they are VERY cute, and we have another set due in just about 5 days. Enoch (who continues to be fascinated by all our critters, especially the bunnies because they are easy to catch) had great interest in the chicks at first. Then he met the pecking end of an unhappy Mama and decided to leave them alone (for the most part). Instead of actively chasing them, he has learned instead to follow Mama while her back is turned and try to do “Nice” (i.e., pet the chicks). But as soon as she catches on and turns around, he runs! Smart kid.

As of this weekend, we’ve also welcomed a new puppy to the family. Don’t know how old he is for sure, but he’s not little and not big. His name is Simba, and he looks like a cross between a German Shepherd and a Yellow Lab. He has integrated into our family surprisingly well. He was a little skittish his first day but now is learning to come when called and already barks when people come into the yard. Isaiah has taken charge of dog training and baked up some dog treats to use as rewards. Unfortunately, we had to make another batch in not too much time because everyone decided that they made really good snacks! (It’s not as gross as you might think. They’re just corn meal, wheat flour, beef broth, egg, and salt–a tasty cracker substitute.)

Spoiled "mzungu" dog. You'll never catch an African dog sleeping on a chair!
Can't wait to eat these!

We’re all excited also for our first harvest of bananas. There are two varieties here: sweet and starchy. The sweet bananas are what you’d expect (smaller than what you’d get in a US grocery–kind of like the ones they try to sell you for a higher price because they’re so small that they must be “gourmet” or something). The starchy bananas are eaten while still green  and they’re boiled and mashed or cut and fried. Of course we prefer the sweet variety but we have both in our back yard. It’s been interesting watching the baby bananas form–not what we expected. The flower is HUGE and the bananas literally unfold row by row and eventually the flower falls off.

And, totally unrelated to the “new developments” featured in this post, here’s a photo of Enoch “helping” Rebekah do laundry this morning.

Happy and Cute!

Thanksgiving

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I hadn’t made any big plans for Thanksgiving (in spite of its being all over Facebook) because, you know, Thanksgiving is an American holiday and we’re not in America any more. Not to mention, a turkey is totally unheard of here.

However, last night Marc finally figured out that today, everyone in America would be celebrating–giving thanks to God AND enjoying a feast as well. He determined that we needed to keep some vestige of American tradition and announced that he would go into town this morning (Thanksgiving day) to gather supplies for an evening meal. Chicken and mashed potatoes seemed the next best thing to turkey, but the boys weren’t too excited about the prospect of slaughtering our celebratory dinner. And all the kids piped in with their opinion: if we were going to splurge on a meal, it might as well be pizza. Nothing beats pizza! Marc suggested seeing if our neighbors had a duck they wanted to sell, but that was quickly shot down and a second vote taken for pizza.

The two adults conferred and agreed that bacon cheeseburgers were a reasonable alternative to turkey, but the children unanimously overrode our suggestion once again with pizza. So it was decided that today, we shall give thanks and celebrate, with bacon cheeseburgers and french fries for the adults and pizza for the children. (Though the adults will probably have to at least *try* the pizza. It’s a rare treat!)

So today, Marc and Deborah are off on the motorbike to town. I hope the market has cheese! (Sometimes they don’t.) We are thankful for how God has been working in our lives and in our community. We’re thankful to be feeling more at home here. And certainly we are thankful that we will be eating cheeseburgers and pizza, while many of our neighbors only enjoy meat once a year and sometimes don’t have their daily ugali. Count your blessings, and pray for those who aren’t feeling so thankful today. See how you can reach out and touch someone else’s life. Be blessed today!

The Lord Helps Those who Help Themselves

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We have a good-sized garden, largely planted with sukuma (greens) which are a staple here along with ugali. Trouble is, we mzungus don’t eat that much of it and as a result, many of our neighbors have been invited to come and pick greens at will. And they do. But the plot has become rather neglected and overgrown, frankly, because the daily labor of wash, food preparation, schooling, and such is quite enough to fill my hours. I haven’t made the garden a priority.

But yesterday it came to my attention that the condition of our little shamba (farm) is bordering on shameful, and folks are talking. So, today I sent Isaiah out with the slasher to cut the overgrowth along our back fence, Rebekah stepped up to do laundry while Jonah cultivated around our various fruit trees and Deborah and I grabbed some hoes and weeded in the garden. I decided that two rows would suffice for today, and then we’d call it quits and move on to school.

Lo and behold, as we finished our second row (surprisingly, a good two hours’ work), my neighbor–one who regularly comes to pick our greens—sauntered over and grabbed Deborah’s hoe. So I kept on working a third row alongside of her. Not more than ten minutes had passed when a large group of teenaged girls came by and began loitering along our fence. Apparently the sight of a mzungu hoeing is amusing. Well, Christine let them have it and,  after a barrage of Bukusu (the local tribal dialect), most of the girls came into the yard. Several took over the hoes we had, a few started toward the back yard with the wheelbarrow full of weeds, and the rest headed for the swing set. It seemed they traded off play for labor amongst themselves and Christine made an excellent overseer. I finished up the “hard laundry” that Bekah couldn’t manage to scrub, and then went in to clean the kitchen floor (which had also been on my to-do list for this morning).

By the time noon rolled around, there was more play than work going on and some of the neighborhood “bad element” had snuck in under cover of all the activity to glance surreptitiously (and not so surreptitiously) at some of the kitchen things that I had moved outside in order to clean the floor, and into the kitchen itself. I ended up chasing everyone out of the yard, but not before about 3/4 of the garden had been cultivated.

Although “The Lord helps those who helps themselves” isn’t exactly a Biblical statement, it sure was true today. I’m praising God for a community of hard workers and glad to have gotten so much accomplished!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Water, Water, Everywhere…

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…and not a drop to drink? Yes, such has occasionally been the case in the last six-plus months here in Kenya. To say that water has been a challenge would certainly be an understatement.

It started with carrying water…and complaining.

Then, the blessing of a rainwater collection tank (and piping to a spigot right outside our back door!) followed by a catastrophic failure that required major re-investment and work.

Then, later, digging a borehole and developing it into a well–with no little trouble of its own. And finally, INDOOR RUNNING WATER at the kitchen sink and the hand-washing sink in the dining area! If you knew my sweet Uncle Bud (my grandfather’s brother), you’d smile like I did when I heard his response to that major advance in technology: “That’s an answer to a prayer I didn’t even pray yet!” But even gaining that involved its own time, money and stress. Plumbing (especially of the indoor variety) is not, as you can imagine, very common here, and there’s no Home Depot or Lowe’s for one-stop shopping. The local hardware store is barely adequate to the task. We’ve had fittings that don’t fit, hose that exploded under pressure, and leaks innumerable. We’ve disconnected and re-connected, tested, and replaced things too many times to count.

Icing on the cake? The loss of our American-bought well pump after a torrential rain somehow muddied the crystal clear well-water and the pump couldn’t keep up with continual use as we tried to clean out the system.  Glenn Roseberry (who visited us before moving on to Tanzania) graciously brought us a new pump in his luggage, and we recently got everything up and running once again.  Not sure why, but the water is no longer crystal-clear, so we’ve reverted to bleaching our drinking water again (after the failure of our brought-from-America Berkey water filter…sigh…)

All that to say, given our history with water, I’m not sure how long this will last–but we’re all very excited to have a HOT WATER SHOWER!

 

 

African Old Wives’ Tales

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  • If a baby boy wears diapers, he will have fertility problems as an adult.
  • If you wear glasses you will damage your eyes, but carrots will “wash” your eyes.
  • Chameleons are dangerous and mzungus who handle them must put special chemicals on their hands when they do so.
  • If you sit on cooking stones, you will grow a cow’s tail.
  • Men and women who are interested in becoming more fertile should run around naked at night.
  • If you have joint aches and fever, it must be malaria.
  • A baby who does not wear a hat during the cool of the afternoon will not grow hair.
  • Chewing sugar cane cleans your teeth.
  • Ugali (and only ugali) makes you grow strong and healthy.

Immunizations, Prescription Drugs, and GMO

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While in America, we ran in some pretty conservative homeschooling circles. Although we never did go the “no-immunization” route with our children, I certainly was swayed toward that position, and Marc and I had many conversations about it. We did “delay” some immunizations for some of our children and refused the chicken pox vaccine almost across the board (although our oldest got it). I won’t deny the stranglehold that the pharmaceutical industry has on many facets of life in America, and I would even give some credence to the link between immunizations and autism.

So when we had been in Africa only a few months and two nice doctors showed up in our yard telling us that we needed to have all children under 5 given an oral vaccine for polio because there were some confirmed cases not too far away, I was adamant that WE DID NOT NEED THEM. They’d already been vaccinated in America, and no further intervention was necessary (for our protection or theirs). They were equally adamant that THEY ROUTINELY RE-VACCINATED ALL CHILDREN UNDER FIVE WHENEVER THERE WAS A CONFIRMED CASE OF POLIO IN THE AREA. Seeing that they would not be moved, I summoned Marc and he told me to dig their immunization records out of the file. Done. He showed the nice doctors our paperwork and they retreated.

An hour or so later, a couple more nice doctors came. These were higher up the supervisory chain, I think, and they would not be deterred from their mission. Marc conceded, and three of our littles got some drops in their mouths. I made a weak protest to Marc after they left, but all he said was, “You can’t blame them. Polio IS a really scary disease. I’ve been into Kitale more than you, and I’ve seen several people crippled and laying on the sidewalk begging. That’s all they can do. I’m pretty sure that’s from polio. They have to take it seriously and they don’t want us to be a risk.”

Good point. I suppose in America, we have the luxury of choice. Here, where the disease is not eradicated, they are trying to get to where we are–a total population free from the fear of a crippling disease. I  had not thought of it that way.

Ditto for prescription medication. We were on the path toward total natural remedies–in fact, I’m thinking we actually had arrived there. We haven’t been to the doctor (other than children’s preventative visits) or gotten a prescription for…a long time. I preferred oregano and grapefruit seed extract to any artificial antibiotic and believed they were equally as effective. For coughs, a rub of eucalyptus and thyme mixed with a carrier oil or a homemade cough syrup would do the trick. Immune-boosting supplements kept us healthy enough not to need further interventions, as a rule.

Then…Africa.

Water-borne amoebas stubbornly resisted all oregano and grapefruit seed extract, probiotics, and whatever else I could throw at them. So, in defeat, we talked to the neighborhood chemist, who have us some pills and some oral meds for the littles. We’ve all taken them multiple times, and each time I choose to be thankful for the relief rather than suspect of the chemical processes behind it. Many of our neighbors who routinely get malaria are grateful for cheap anti-malarial drugs–who can blame them? And when our 11 year-old had a bad cough that kept him up for multiple nights, unresponsive to our homemade cough syrup and chest rub, well…I took as a blessing the allergy medicine and cough suppressant from the local chemist.

And despite the evidence against GMOs (with which, by the way, I generally agree), I can see why the locals here use it without any second thought. Where a child reaching the age of five is a monumental milestone (due to disease and, yes, starvation), getting twice the yield (or more) from GMO versus heirloom corn seems pretty appealing. Better to be able to feed your children then potentially have them die of starvation, even if the GMO stuff does give them cancer…or sterilize them for life…or whatever *might* happen from a lifelong exposure to such an altered food source.

We’ve never been the type to make a stand over any “debatable” issues. The Gospel of the Kingdom is where we stand firm, and in all other things we do have an opinion, but unless asked we try to keep it to ourselves. If we do share what we believe, we try not to be dogmatic, but give room for freedom to our Christian brothers and sisters. But in these areas–immunizations, prescriptions drugs, and GMO–I recognize that I did have very firm convictions. And now, while I’m not second-guessing that, I do see how sometimes, we don’t have the luxury of conviction. And unless it involves obedience to Christ, maybe our opinion is, in the final analysis, irrelevant.

Oh, and yes, raw milk is best and people should have freedom to choose between that and the pasteurized variety. Here we have that freedom, but until the day we get our own cow…I’m boiling my milk, thanks.