Actually, it was more like 5,100 Kenyans. Alright, so maybe they weren’t all Kenyans, but that’s how many people assembled at the starting line for the 21K (half marathon) that Christina ran in on Sunday. For some reason, she thought it would be a good idea to run her first half marathon in Nairobi, which not only sits at about 5,500 feet above sea level, but is located in the country of, um, Kenya. That’s right, Kenya, home to something like 104 records in running events around the world. My wife is pretty tough.
Over 5,100 runner warming up for the 13.1 mile race in downtown Nairobi
Thousands of people line up for the start of the half marathon
Can you spot the mzungu?
... and they're off
Some of Christina's competition
One of the hundreds of men and women who raced over 13 miles in a wheelchair
Around the halfway point... going strong
Christina blew past the finish line in under 2 hours
Christina finished her first half marathon in just 1 hour and 51 minutes. Congratulations!
Thank you for allowing us to be here. Seriously, we would not be here, doing what we are doing were it not for the extreme kindness of everyone back home who has been generously providing for all our needs. We’ve been humbled by your eagerness to partner with us to help impact children in Kenya.
We are excited to be able to tell you though, that the money you’ve given goes to support so much more that just our personal expenses here. Our needs have been more than met. The fact is that, every day, we are able to transfer the generosity that you’ve shown to us to other people here, who need it far more than we do.
Rebecca is a single mother and is HIV positive. Most days she hardly has enough energy to drag herself to work because of all the medication she takes combined with the fact that she hardly ever has food. Her gaunt face and sunken eyes are a testament to her constantly aching stomach. The other day, Rebecca told us that neither she, nor her 6 year old malnourished son Brian, had eaten in three days. Because of a generous donation by one of our friends back in Wisconsin, we were able to get Rebecca and Brian a two week supply of groceries!
Chelsea is a first grader in a local school here in Ongata Rongai. She has the sweetest little round-toothed smile I’ve ever seen. Chelsea hasn’t been to school in two weeks though. Her father is a day laborer and her mother is a houseworker. Between the two of them, they can’t pay the rent, buy food, and afford school fees. So, even though Chelsea is an exceptional student, she got kicked out of school. But because of a generous donation by a compassionate family from our church in Delaware, Chelsea was able to return to school today, and her parents won’t have to worry about school fees until next year!
Eunice is a kindhearted mother of three. The little Eunice has, she is quick to share with others. After beating her for years, her husband left her and the kids. Forced to make her meager living off of washing clothes and hawking maize corn, Eunice can’t afford even the most basic items for her children, like mattresses. They sleep on slabs of chewed up foam. Because of a generous donation by one of my old co-workers and his wife, by the time we left Eunice's house late last night, all three of her children were fast asleep on a brand new mattress!
It may be hard for you to be able to appreciate just how much your generosity means to the people here. It’s hard to understand until yousee the grateful eyes welling up with tears. It’s hard to grasp until it’s yourbody that’s being embraced by quivering arms. It’s impossible to comprehend until you see hopeful smiles spreading across hopeless faces yourself. This is not an abstract reality for the people here. What you give means life for them.
The reality for many families here is harsh, and there are still massive needs in this community. We want to provide you with the means to support the local children here. We have become close with many individuals and families that are still lacking the most basic of necessities. We want to be the conduit though which your continued generosity can be transmitted. We want to help you bless others here in Kenya. The fact is, through donations that we have already received, lives have been changed, hearts have been touched, and hope has been found.
So from everyone here, thank you for everything you do.
(If you have the desire to help a family here in Kenya, click the “Donate” button at the top right of this page. Feel free to specify a certain cause or purpose that you’d like your donation to go towards, and we’ll be sure it gets there)
I’m not sure where the idiom “sticking out like a sore thumb” came from, but if sore thumbs stick out in out in a particular way, our existence here could be compared to a sore thumb amongst a collection of, um... otherwise healthy thumbs.
I’ll be direct about this: we are the only white people in the area we live in. At least we’re the only white people that we know about. Maybe there are others hiding somewhere. And it’s strange, not just in the sense that we’re constantly surrounded by people who don’t look like us, but also in the sense that they’re not used to seeing people like us. We’re a strange sight to the locals here, almost something to be gawked at. It’s innocent and cute coming from children: they stare at us, whisper “mzungu” (literally interpreted as foreigner; culturally interpreted as white person), chase us down and grab our hands, and even, in some cases, try to rub the whiteness off our skin. In other cases it’s not so cute. A popular assumption here is that all white people are rich. This has led to a lot of uncomfortable situations where we are surrounded by people insisting that we give them money. Other times, people will simply laugh and point at us, hurl insults at us from far off, grab us by the arms as we walk past, or just insist on trying to rip us off.
One of the things I hear whispered, muttered or shouted wherever we go is the name, “Yesu,” or Jesus. I guess because of seeing too many bad storybook depictions of Jesus, people think that I look like him. I’m not even Jewish. Last week, while shopping in a street market, I had an old man come up, grab me by the hand, and ask me to heal him. And understand, this kind of “attention” is a constant reality for us here.
To be honest, all this leads me to lose my patience sometimes. I’ve learned to ignore people’s yells, rebuff their pleas, and push away begging hands that are sometimes literally shoved in our faces. The other day, a man stepped in front of me, started rambling incoherently, and refused to move out of the way; so, finally, I pushed him aside. This was justified, right? After all, I have a right not to be harassed, don’t I?
Do you remember those “WWJD” bracelets that used to be popular? Well that question is not hypothetical. We actually have an example to follow in Jesus. He endured the same kind of treatment, and worse, everywhere he went. You want to talk crowds? He had one following him almost constantly, sometimes numbering in the thousands, often they were right up in his face too. Apparently, Jesus didn’t have a “personal bubble.” How about harassment? From what I read about his time here on earth, Jesus constantly had people jumping in front of him (Mark 10:17), getting in his space (Mark 5:24), asking him for favors (Matthew 20:20), inconveniencing him (Mark 5:30), and taking advantage of him (John 6:26). But yet, we get a small insight into his attitude towards these obnoxious people in Matthew 9:36, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them...” *Gulp*. If that’s not a slap in my face I don’t know what is.
Being here has been a big adjustment for us. We’re in a new culture, experiencing new challenges. But this has also been a great growing experience. Learning how to move in a space where we are complete foreigners has taught us a lot about patience, gentleness, and love. God is adjusting our attitudes towards hurting people. There are growing pains, but we appreciate the journey.
By the way, we’ve starting to keep track of how many times each day people call me Jesus. The count today is four. And we only went left the compound once!
“To this (suffering for doing good) you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps. ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.’ When they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats. Instead, he entrusted himself to him who judges justly.” (1 Peter 2:21-23)
(Disclaimer: the ideas and opinions expressed here are based on our interactions and experiences here in Ongata Rongai. They are not generalizations about all Kenyans, or Americans.)
Today is our three-month mark. I can’t believe time is going so fast. We’re halfway through our stay in Kenya already!
I think, looking back on the time we’ve spent here so far, one of the things I’ve come to love the most about Kenya is the community feeling. In America, it’s so easy to isolate ourselves, to cut ourselves off from the rest of the world. We can do everything from the comfort of our homes. We have surround-sound entertainment centers, self-cleaning backyard pools, workshops stocked with every power tool Home Depot sells, home gyms complete with unused treadmills, and, of course, Amazon.com. Essentially, were World War III to kick off, we’d all be okay with staying in our houses for probably a few years... at least.
We used to have to go to book stores to buy books, car garages to get our cars fixed, and public parks to swing on a swing-set. But in this age, we’ve basically created our own individual self-sustaining environments within the confines of our own 2,500 square foot homes. Everything that we used to have to go into a public setting somewhere to do, we can now do without ever having to see or talk to anyone else.
We have home-theaters (equipped with reclining couches, Netflix, and microwave popcorn), home-gyms (even our personal trainers have been substituted for the internet), and home-offices (fax machines, printers, computers that allow us to be productive without being bothered by other humans). We have deeper conversations with our iPhones than we do with our own neighbors. We have car-bubbles that we drive everywhere in. We walk a few feet from our cars into Super Wal-Mart, and are met by hundreds of faceless, nameless, emotionless people rushing around with their grocery carts, stocking up on enough food to allow them to re-isolate themselves in their house-bubbles again so they can avoid human contact for another several months... at least.
I’m not saying that any of these things are bad in and of themselves, but it is true: we live in a culture of convenience. Every resource must be available at our fingertips. And in affording ourselves these conveniences, we have paid a great price: the price of real, neighborly, face-to-face, human interactions and relationships.
This is not the case in Kenya. I swear, we couldn’t live longer than a day without leaving the house to resupply. And even then, we can’t get more than one or two items at a time. We have to go to one shop to get phone credit, another to get papers printed, another to find hand sanitizer, another to buy toilet paper... the list goes on. Even buying food is a multi-stop excursion. One street vendor for eggs, another for vegetables... wait, the prices on your onions are too high, we need to make another stop, then another for bread, another for milk. It’s like the super-market exploded into a hundred little, ill-stocked mini-markets.
And for Kenyans, this way of existence is even more extreme. There are no food cupboards, chest freezers, or walk-in pantries here. From our experience, no one here even owns a refrigerator. Instead, people just buy what they need for each day. If a certain food item is needed for dinner, they just go buy it from the closest street vendor. This means daily interactions with neighbors, shopkeepers, and peddlers; so neighbors actually develop meaningful relationships... even with their local tomato hawker!
And even in buying from vendors, there is engagement in conversation. There are no empty-eyed cashiers staring off into a space where they’re not being inconvenienced by having to ring you up. No, not here. Marketplace pleasantries consist of us exchanging extended greetings, uncomfortably long hand shakes, small talk about Kenya, and endless haggling over paying 18 cents or 24 cents for a mango. All this before even picking through the produce to find a ripe avocado for dinner.
Don’t even get me started on transportation. In the States, we are used to and comfortable in our car-bubbles that we move around in from place to place. In Kenya? Forget about it. Riding on matatus, you’re making new friends whether you like it or not. That’s what happens when there are 20 people crammed into a 14-passenger tin can. That gentleman in the business suit who you’ve never met before? He’s now sitting on your lap as you fly over speed bumps at 30mph.
We are constantly interacting with other people. And we love it. We are in a real, live, people-based community here. Our friends aren’t limited to the few people who we may have welcomed into our home. We have random friends on the streets, friends that ring us up in the grocery store, friends that bag our produce in the street market, friends that find us deals on matatus, friends whose names we don’t even know but treat us like family.
I think I could spend a long time here. A few more years... at least.
Hanging out with Grace and her family
I'm about halfway through my Maasai training
Taking a lesson from the locals on "swag"
Christina playing with the children at Beacon of Hope Academy
This movie has nothing to do with relationships; unless you count the relationship between our clothes and Kenyan dirt.
Rachel lost her child on September 26th, the same day that she had him. They had only a few precious hours together before he died. Today, October 5th, all the Beacon of Hope staff went to her house to see her. When we arrived, the mood was uncomfortably festive. Rachel was nowhere to be seen. All the neighbors had brought over their couches and they were lined up in the alley leading up to Rachel’s front door. Everyone sat outside drinking chai and eating mandazi. People were laughing and telling jokes. I sat awkwardly in my seat, fidgeting. I looked up at the clouds; they looked like a herd of fluffy sheep standing in a big group.
Rachel suddenly appeared, and nothing changed. No one stopped talking or laughing. I was shocked. She walked down the line of couches shaking everyone’s hands. Shaking their hands. I may be the culturally insensitive American in this situation, but I stood up and gave her a hug. I looked into her dark puffy eyes. Sadness suddenly hit me and I almost choked on my mandazi. After downing two cups of chai, everyone abruptly stood up and started to sing. The song was in Swahili, but from my limited vocab, I could tell we were singing a song about being thankful. That seemed strange. Then another coworker stood up and said a few words about being thankful. He quoted a few Bible verses, “Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances.” And “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.” This seemed mildly inappropriate to me. You’re talking to a grieving family and you won’t let the word “thanksgiving” stop coming out of your mouth. From where I’m sitting I can’t see Rachel’s face but I can’t imagine that it’s radiating “thankfulness.” Then he got to the point. He looked at Rachel and her husband and said, “Your child isn’t dead. He’s alive. He may not be here, but that doesn’t mean he’s not alive.”
I no longer have mandazi in my mouth, but I’m choking again, wiping my eyes. Looking around I can’t help asking myself, “Am I the only one crying?” After someone closed in prayer, everyone just stood up and left. And that was it. We walked out into the street, and people are laughing and joking with each other again, like someone didn’t just lose a child. So I started thinking: Maybe people don’t seem overly mournful because losing family members is just a way of life here. Maybe it’s so much the norm that it doesn’t really faze people. But then I realized this was stupid thinking. How can I possibly think that just because death is more common in this country than in ours that it makes losing someone somehow “easier” here? That’s ludicrous. And then a verse popped into my head. Romans 12:12, “Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.” People here aren’t “unfazed” when they lose a family member because death is common in Africa. People here experience the same feelings that we do when we lose loved ones. We all experience the same emotions; we all grieve. But I think that a part of death being such a prevalent part of every day life here is that people have realized, perhaps more clearly than we have, that joy can still be found inside of their sorrow. Because the fact is, life here sucks sometimes, but we have hope. We have a great hope of an eternal glory that far outweighs the light and momentary troubles that we are now experiencing. “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal” (2 Cor 4:18). Rachel is looking forward to an eternal hope. Her baby might be gone now, but she is going to see him again.
This isn’t in any way meant to minimize the suffering that her and her family are going through. The fact is, Rachel lost a child and she is in pain, and this loss will never cease to be a reality for her family. She got to hold her newborn boy for a few hours before hospital staff had to take him away and bury his body. But there is a happy ending that she is looking forward to one day. Life is fragile and full of suffering, but she is not focused on this temporary reality. Rachel, her family, and everyone else who sat around us in that alley tonight, have their eyes fixed on what is unseen, what is eternal. And that is cause for great joy.
I enjoy watching BBC’s Planet Earth, learning about Ethiopia’s gelada monkeys and the rare environments of the Andes Mountains. I like flipping though National Geographic Magazine, studying stunning photos of Mt. Zion’s slot canyons and the elusive snow leopards in China.
But nothing compares to feeling the wind whipping through your hair, to caressing the volcanic rock, rough and sharp beneath your fingertips. You can’t experience that inside a TV screen. Hearing an eagle scream in Dolby 5.1 does not compare with the notes that reverberate through your ear canals when one is soaring on plane with where you’re walking. Sitting on the side of a mountain watching a herd of zebra graze, while it may not be in 1080p, is a holy experience.
For whenever I may question the Creator, I need only to “ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this? In his hand is the life of every creature and the breath of all mankind.”
Thanks for the reminder Job. I will try to spend more time outside.
a.JPG)
