Our Masai Mara safaris

It took about five and a half hours for the drive from Karen to the Fig Tree lodge within the Masai Mara National Game Park.  On the way in, we were blessed to see about 100 Crested Cranes together in a field.  I've never seen more than 2 or 3 at a time in about 40 safaris all over Kenya. I knew it would be a great weekend with a start like that. I'm writing this on my phone as we wait in London for our direct flight back to Austin. One more leg to go!

We checked into our "tents" and had a good lunch. They are tents in name only, with nice beds covered by mosquito nets and tiled bathrooms with rain showers. This lodge ran on a generator,  so power and internet were not 24/7, but it was good enough. After lunch we did an afternoon safari and saw 4 of the Big 5. We saw Elephants, Lions on a kill of an Eland, a Leopard in a tree and a large herd of Water Buffalo.  We were only missing a white or black Rhino. Incredible! We started each safari with a prayer that God would reveal Himself through His creation and He did! Thank you, Jesus!

We had a morning safari Sunday and moved to a much nicer lodge run by the Sopa chain. Because we were there at the start of the high tourist season, our reservation for 2 nights at Fig Tree got messed up somehow, even though Catherine had pre-paid. I'm glad this happened.  The food and the rooms were much better. Lots of highlights on Sunday's game drives too, including getting up close and personal with a large herd of Masai Giraffes.

My Coke in the Nairobi airport. Cool!

Much more to follow as I begin editing photos and remember more stories, so keep coming back to the blog or my Facebook page. Blessings everyone!

A bit about the safaris we go on

 In general, the way the safari lodges work is this. There are 3 buffet style meals a day and the food is quite good. We always book all-inclusive packages that include your room and meals. Soda, bottled water and alcohol are extra, but you can bring your own water to meals. Some lodges only have power or Wi-Fi or hot water certain hours due to being on generators in remote locations.  We drove from Nairobi to Masai Mara this time and got to see the countryside, small villages, larger towns and the Great Rift Valley. The bigger game parks have air strips, and you can reach most of them in an hour or two from Wilson Airport in Nairobi. Your drivers from the city can meet you when you land or there are local guides and vehicles for hire. Flying works well if time is limited.  

The rules at the Fig Tree lodge

You might ask “Why do you finish each mission trip with a safari?” There are several answers to this question. The reason I hike and do nature photography nearly every morning is to stay in touch with God’s creation and sharing my photos is meant to glorify Him by showcasing what He has made. From our mission trip standpoint, when we have been praying over our patients in the slums all week, hearing some pretty tough circumstances, we need to decompress in nature, remembering Him whom we came to serve by serving others. I find it is a healthy pause before we go back to our families and friends.  

Besides safaris, the lodges all have swimming pools, spas, gift shops and other amenities. They also often have little field trips to explore local tribal culture, so any of our team members that don’t want to exclusively go on safaris have other options.  

As for safaris, there are morning and afternoon ones, with a break for lunch and some rest.  In the larger parks, an all-day safari can be better. If you notify the lodge the night before, they will pack an amazing box lunch for around $30 per person.  The guides all communicate via radio and if a target species like Lions is a long distance down dirt roads, it’s better to explore and stay out most of the day. You sleep well that night! You’re dog tired. 

There are three Swahili words I’ve learned to use with our guides and drivers. Simama means to stop right away, something has been spotted. Zima means turn the engine off because nothing ruins a picture quite like engine vibration. The final word is trende, which means get going again. Many times we spot animals and birds before our driver or guide does because we are standing up in the popup roof and are about 4 feet above them. Finally, even without radio contact,  if we see a group of vehicles in one place, the odds are good something unusual is happening.  

I hope this has shed some light on what staying in or near a Kenyan game park is like and on the ins and outs of game drives. I have been blessed to have gone on probably 40 or more safaris of a half day or more since 2009. It never gets old because a new adventure is waiting around the next corner! Thank you, Jesus!

We finished the clinic Friday with a bang!

 From the moment we arrived until we left at 5:30pm, the clinic was a steady stream of patients, ending with a total of 326 for the day and 905 for the week. Being in a new location with a new congregation, we expected to possibly have a slow start. It was an unusual week, Monday was a national holiday and Friday was as well. I think maybe Monday worked against us a bit through Tuesday and I think Friday was helpful. Regardless, we have learned some lessons when doing a vision camp in a new location. We need to have more advance notice to congregations in the area, we need to begin the week with a truck driving around with a bullhorn or speaker, we need to be on local radio, and we need to encourage our patients to tell their friends and family as they are leaving the clinic.

The tent full of patients waiting for an eye chart exam

There were blessings to having a slow week, we got to know our volunteers very well and it was sad when we were finally forced to leave today. We got to share in a fair amount of their music, I just love African harmonies and the call and response songs. 

Children from a local school for the vision impaired were treated

We also got to serve the least of the least in the community with love, dignity and respect. This included about 15 children today from a nearby school for the visually impaired and their matron, which is what they call the principal. They would have clogged up the clinic, but this is not our first rodeo. We ran them though each station of the clinic as high priority special guests and got them back to school quickly. 

Our team as we gathered to head in for the last day

I am packing up for a safari with four others to Masai Mara this weekend, a world class game park that is one end of the elephant, zebra, wildebeest and water buffalo migration. We will be leaving our large suitcases at Little Daughters and will be each taking our carry-on and backpack. My backpack is all photo gear, of course! More to follow as I am able, we fly back next Monday night from Nairobi to London and then have a direct flight from London to Austin. Please pray for travel mercies!

Thursday was a good day - June 5, 2025

We had a steady drip, drip, drip of people all day and by the time we were done, we had seen 171 patients. Our best day at this clinic. We sent a truck out with a loudspeaker in the afternoon and more people trickled in. Many people we asked said they heard about the clinic from friends and families we had already seen. That was heartening. We continued to cross-train on different jobs. This allowed us to make new friends and we can mix and match as situations change during our last day tomorrow which may be huge.

Our Internet at the convent is sketchy, so I'll wrap it up for now. Long plane rides starting next Monday night will allow for more stories. Blessings everybody!

A long Wednesday from the clinic during day to our team dinner

 We had a better day at the clinic, which was due in part, to Catherine hiring a truck to drive one of our volunteers around the vicinity of the clinic with a megaphone, or as they call it here, a bullhorn. As the day finished up, we had seen about 145 patients and there were more stories of the Lord brining us people who truly needed his care. Things are progressing already on pursuing the screen reading device for our blind woman I talked about yesterday and for arranging to have free or inexpensive surgeries for people with unusual conditions.

Tonight was our traditional team meal, when we go to a nice restaurant as a thank you to our team members and close friends of the project that help us be more effective on each trip.  We went to Talisman, a very nice restaurant featuring wonderful entrees and incredible desserts. It is now nearly 10pm in Nairobi, so time to get some rest before we start another day. We didn't have Internet when we arrived home from the clinic, so sorry for such a short post, sometimes power failures and other outages get in the way. More to follow as the week progresses! Blessings everybody!

Tuesday at the clinic June 3rd, 2025

 We made it to the clinic in only about 40 minutes using a shortcut Catherine had recently found. All of the heavy traffic was going the other way and our lane looked like the parting of the Red Sea. Cool. We greeted our volunteers, and the clinic was ready to go in what seemed like an instant compared to Monday. We had a brief devotional time with Scripture, a couple of songs and me thanking the team for the good start on Monday.  I stressed that we needed to continue to handle each patient with love and caring from the first one of the patients in the clinic on Monday until the last one when we finish this coming Friday. I also mentioned that we could see a large number, since word of mouth from our Monday visitors would spread very quickly.

I turned out to be wrong about that. By 1pm we had only seen 51 and we ended the clinic at 101 for the day. If this was my first effort at leading a team, I might have panicked and caught the next flight home! This is the only time in 22 previous vision clinics that each day was not bigger than the last. Perhaps the holiday made Monday a little better, maybe people were back to work today, perhaps our location which is a little off the beaten path was too hard to find or maybe enough advance advertising had not been done. I did find out that another group had done a successful vision clinic in March nearby, maybe the market was not ripe for another one just yet. 

I was able to meet with Catherine for a while after dinner tonight and we may be able to use a truck with a speaker to canvas the neighborhood tomorrow, inviting everyone to the free clinic. Free is a powerful word. As a first resort, rather than the last thing we try, we will all be praying tonight that the Lord would bring us many more people, in my experience devout prayer is an incredible thing.

As always, there was good camaraderie during the day, the congregation at Ongata Rongai has been very hospitable, everyone is friendly and quick to laugh, and all have a deep faith. Our doctors and evangelists are first class, and we have had wonderful lunches of native foods prepared daily by the women of the church. Breaking bread together is a wonderful tradition that leads to many good things.

After lunch, I was told I needed to see someone out in the Evangelism Tent. I arrived to see a woman I had met in the clinic. She was totally blind as a result of glaucoma. She arrived at our clinic on the back of a "bota bota" which is a motorcycle that you hire as a taxi. That alone was amazing. She had seen our doctors already and understood her situation well, but she wanted to make a request of me. Using Braille on her smartphone, she is able to send text messages but needs a specialized screen reader to read replies to her. I called for my friend Carol who works with our doctors and is very diligent in helping the least of the people navigate the health care system. There is company in the USA that makes such a device and they had shipped some to Kenya. Their shipment was stolen, and the phones were for sale online. She is a serious Christian and did not want to be a part of the thievery, so she has not tried to get one yet. It nearly brought me to tears when I thought of the selflessness this woman of faith has. She had the phone number of the company representative, and it was a 214 area code, telling me it is in the Dallas area.  I am going to pursue procuring one for her when we get back to Texas and will likely send it over with the next member of our project rather than take a chance on another theft. Lord, please use us in a mighty way to help her and to glorify your Holy Name! Amen.

There was also a family that had several members who need cataract surgeries as well as one family member who needs cataract surgery and breast cancer surgery. Carol will shepherd them so that all of these moving parts happen in the right order so that they can care for each other as they heal.

I can't say that I am happy with the numbers of people we have seen, but they are the ones God has sent us and His plan is perfect. Perhaps these two stories, among others were part of his purpose for us today. Lord, continue to keep us in your will, that we might overcome all obstacles that are put in our path. Amen.

Four of our team, Amanda, Elizabeth, Sarah and Arron went with Catherine out to the school in rural Kongasis today. They were well received by the church and presented our gifts of the solar generator, two laptops and a printer that we had purchased with the help of Redeemer friends and a generous $10,000 donation from Sara and Dick Rathgeber. Teachers will be able to be paid more; students will be able to do the distance learning that the federal government requires and construction on the school office building will be able to be completed. Thank you, Jesus! Many pictures and video of this happy day were recorded and much of that will be posted, probably after we get back. The group arrived back in Nairobi in time for dinner and shared what a wonderful day it was, how thankful all of the teachers and students were and how much the children loved them. Amanda took cards and hand-written notes from our students to theirs and read the heartfelt letter that one little Redeemer girl wrote to all of them. There was not a dry eye there!

Well, time for bed, more to report as time permits. We are having a nice team dinner tomorrow night, so the next post may be rather short. Blessings everyone!

Let the clinic begin! 6-2-2025

 I was able to get the convent to have a light breakfast of cereal, milk, hot water for tea or coffee and some fruit put out for us for the rest of the week. They normally won't agree to a time before 7am at the earliest. I let them know that while we liked their hot breakfast selections, I understood the schedule of the cooks. This little compromise was a good thing for everyone. We left for the clinic around 7:25am and were there at 8.  This won't be the case for the rest of the week, since today was a national holiday that celebrated some freedom under British rule before Kenya gained full independence. Traffic should be much worse the rest of the week.

                                            The clinic location before we set everything up

We had a host of setbacks at first, our tents and tables had been delivered to our convent instead of the clinic and we were missing some key items needed to run an eye clinic such as eyecharts and spiral notebooks used for registration of patients. We worked through all of this and our dear friend Catherine worked behind the scenes procure everything that was lacking. It didn't really matter because a handful of people had showed up. There was a great deal to celebrate, however. We had a large number of volunteers from the local church and Catherine had arranged for extra triage workers as well as our friends Billy and Alison to help get the clinic up a running. On the first day, the morning always looks like a trainwreck, the afternoon gets a little better. You never know what to expect on a holiday, we have had them falling them middle of the week and seen huge numbers of people. Being on the first day of the clinic had the advantage of giving us valuable time to cross-train our volunteers on several jobs, since it is good when we are busy to be able to move people around to fight bottlenecks.

For example, Deborah helped with the eyechart exams which we had setup on an outside wall of the church, since the building is corrugated metal without any lights. That's a position that requires standing. She began helping in the triage station in the afternoon where you get to sit a lot.

Deborah praying over one of our patients

By the end of the day, we had seen about 170 people, all of whom will go home and tell their families and friends about the free vision clinic that really is free, where they experienced the love of Christ. I wouldn't be surprised if we see 500 or more patients tomorrow once word of mouth goes out. Time for bed, need some rest before another big day. Blessings everybody.