Preparation for the trip is progressing well

 We are currently emailing back and forth and there may still be a phone call or two, but things are coalescing.  Each team member gets two checked bags on our Lufthansa flights plus their carry-on.  In the early days of our project, we would take maybe 60 footlockers with us for four or five churches, loaded up with clinic supplies, and we were required to take responsibility for two footlockers each, meaning we lived for 10 days out of our carry-ons.  Easy for a man to do, not so much for the ladies!  These days, we order the bulk of our supplies through local Kenyan businesses, boosting the local economy and meaning we get a little more luggage space for ourselves.  Many of the things we used for the clinics came from China anyway, so they would go from there to America and then come with us to Kenya.  Much easier just to cut out the middleman!

As always, we bring things for our missionaries that are on the ground all year round for our project.  For example, a bottle of shampoo or conditioner is the equivalent of $15, so rather than bring travel sizes, we pack full sized bottles and give the bulk of it to our friends when we leave.  There are certain brands of cereal or candy that folks get a craving for that are not available in Kenya, although much has changed since I first went there in 2009.  They now have KFC and Subway, neither of which I've been to there.  Why go halfway around the world to do something I can do at home?

We will be flying out of Bush International in Houston Thursday afternoon and will arrive in Frankfurt, Germany around 8am local time Friday morning.  We'll be screened for Covid as they examine our vaccination records and online documents we have already uploaded and I'm sure we'll go through a security check before we board our next flight.  We have almost a 3-hour layover, so that should be plenty of time as long as our flight out of Houston isn't delayed.  I don't need any big adventures like the time we missed our flight in London and ended up in Istanbul.  Pastor Kevin always likes missions that are "uneventful" and so do I!  Adventures make for great stories afterwards but aren't so much fun at the time.

Our flight from Frankfurt should arrive in Nairobi around 8:20pm and I hope to be at our lodging by around 10:30 or 11pm after going through Immigration and Customs, which will also include Covid checks of our paperwork or rapid tests for some of us.  

One of my new team members asked how I entertain myself on these long flights.  I mentioned bringing my own movies, music and Kindle books on my smartphone and that newer planes on international flights usually have USB and sometimes power for plugging in laptops, plus an on-demand entertainment system where you can watch a movie and pause it for dinner or a bathroom break.  My best option personally  though is closing my eyes and dreaming!

That's it for now, I'll try to write another post or two before we depart with more thoughts on travel and what we will be working to accomplish through our clinic in Waithaka.  Blessings everybody!

The Adventure Continues, Back to Kenya after a 2 year Hiatus

 At long last, we are preparing to saddle up and head to Kenya next Thursday.  We were all ready to serve again in 2020 and Covid got in the way.  God had a different plan and we ministered to our own neighborhood instead for the last 2 years.  This will be my 20th trip to Nairobi, there just seemed to be something wrong about stopping at 19!  Of course, someone will challenge me to 25 and I'll say yes as long as the Lord gives me the strength and good health to do so.  After that, I'll support whatever mission work Redeemer is involved with.

We have a team of 9, including me.  Half are first-timers and half have been with me before.  It's a great group, no high maintenance people in the bunch.  It's been a blessing to see this team form over the last 6 months or so.  I love the energy and the sense of awe that new members of the team bring and the steadiness that the old hands contribute.  It's a good mix.  Here are some pictures as we were commissioned and prayed over this morning at all three worship services.  Click on an image to see a larger version.

We will be serving in Waithaka at a recently refurbished community center that I have been to twice before.  The nearby Waithaka Lutheran Church, where we will be worshipping next Sunday, is a daughter church of Kawangware Lutheran Church where we got our start almost 15 years ago.  It will be so good to see many old friends and also to reminisce over those that did not make it through the pandemic and are waiting for us now in Heaven.  Our mission this time is to host a vision clinic, providing distance and reading glasses, medications and cataract surgeries to the people at no charge.  I am wondering if there will be a great deal of pent-up demand, since it has been so long since we were there.  I expect that we may see anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 patients during our Monday through Friday clinic.  Each one of them will receive a Gospel presentation in their own language, usually Swahili or English, as they wait in large tents outside the clinic for their turn.  Besides caring for their physical needs, we talk to each and every patient about their lives and pray over the needs that they

express to us, one-on-one.  It's a very powerful ministry.

We will be staying at a familiar convent, the Little Daughters of St. Joseph.  It will be good to see our friends there who have taken such good care of us over past missions.  We will each have our own rooms with our own shower and commode but will eat buffet style as a group for most meals. 

Most of my concerns will fade away once we are in Nairobi.  It is a whole different world today, with differences from one country or airport to another regarding vaccinations and Covid tests.  Please pray for us that it all goes smoothly and none of us ends up in quarantine.  We are flying United/Lufthansa from Houston to Frankfurt, Germany and from there on to Nairobi.  The Frankfurt Airport doesn't require masks now, but when you can't socially distance in the security lines, they will not settle for a cloth mask, it must be a medical grade N95 one.

Rather than speculate any more, just stay tuned right here every day and I'll do my best to report on our travels and on the clinic.  I will be posting here as often as possible as we do our final preparation for the trip and as I can during the mission.   I always try for every day, but Internet and even power can sometimes be spotty, especially if there are heavy storms.  Blessings everybody!

The last day of the clinic was non-stop and a good finish

We went continuously from the time we started this morning until 5 pm when we were loading our equipment and supplies into a pickup truck.  We saw 426 patients and the day literally flew by.  We said our heartfelt goodbyes to our old and new friends after a challenging day of figuring out what to do for the people as our stock of lenses, frames, reading glasses, etc. dwindled, as they always do at the end of a trip.  The last half hour of the day was filled with taking inventory of our various supplies, packing a locking up our footlockers and making sure we had not forgotten anything.

I am currently packing up for an extra 4 days here in Kenya, mostly doing wildlife safaris with a concentration on birds, first at Samburu, which has nearly 700 species and then at Nanyuki, another good game park.  We hope to have dinner with Catherine on Tuesday afternoon before heading to the Nairobi airport for our flights home on Lufthansa.  I may or may not have good Internet for the next few days, so don't quit looking here.  I will catch up and begin posting again on the journey home and will get a nice album of pictures together of the clinic and then of our nature subjects as my time permits.

Cynthia and Alex will be going to Lake Naivasha with one of the teams from Trinity Klein tomorrow and will fly back ahead of us on Sunday night.

Blessings until I can post here again!

After a rainy start, the Thursday clinic picked up steam

Here is what greeted us when we arrived after rain overnight:

I wouldn't have given us much chance of a good day at that point, but it usually dries out pretty quickly after the rain stops.  It stayed pretty muddy but we made due.

This is Alex with his new friends.  All of the young men of the congregation are first class and have a great sense of humor.  They need to because I fire each of them three times a day or more just to keep them on their toes.  It's a running joke.

We begin each day with some wonderful a Capella praise and African songs. It is very moving, the harmonies are delicious.

Bill, Alex and I each gave a personal testimony to people in the tents waiting to get into the clinic on Wednesday. Today, Bishop Bakari Kea asked her to share her gift of music with the clinic and the whole place came to a stop as she did a full on rendition of two verses of Amazing Grace. Thunderous applause followed.... Bishop is filming it with his phone and I'm sure she's gone viral by now and a recording contract can't be to far behind!

Alex helped this Muslim man get some pretty powerful glasses and he was very happy with the results.

This patient got some glasses with some of our most powerful lenses and was overjoyed!  

The day actually turned out about the same as the previous two day's clinics with around 320 patients being seen.  I've never seen such regular numbers, but we did have a Muslim holiday, rain and other complications that probably held our numbers down.  But we did serve everyone the Lord brought us and that's the best goal to have.

Well, it's been a long day and we have the giant task of running a clinic tomorrow, performing an inventory on our supplies and then packing everything up to be shipped across town to our storage facility.  Bill and I will also be packing up for our extra days here on wildlife safaris, we head out Saturday morning for Samburu, a national game park with nearly 700 species of birds.  I guess I had better get to bed for some rest, I'll need it!  Thank you Jesus for such a good clinic to this point!

Wednesday Clinic and a word or two about our prayer ministry here

I am very happy with our clinic today, we saw almost exactly the same number of patients as yesterday even on a national holiday and with the Muslims celebrating the end of Ramadan.  We only saw 8 Muslims for care, so my feeling is the clinic would have been much bigger without those factors.  I am bracing myself for tomorrow, it may be very big and we are running full blast all day as it is.  Pray for strength for us and for us to continue to treat every patient as if they were the only person in the world.  These clinics are great for teaching you the discipline of living in the moment.

Speaking of prayer, each of our patients is prayed over individually before receiving the services we provide, such as custom made distance glasses, reading glasses, eyedrops or medications for their eyes or even being referred for cataract or other surgeries.  Once we determine the physical needs that we might be able to address, we ask our Christian clients if there is anything we can offer up in prayer for them.  For people of other faiths, we usually ask if they have any questions about the Gospel presentation they heard before entering the clinic.  Many do have questions and we tell them about our faith, many times with personal testimonies of what the Lord has done for us.  After that conversation, we offer to pray and almost no one, regardless of their faith walk, refuses to be prayed over.  They feel it is special that someone has come halfway around the world to pray for their specific needs.  You hear many heartbreaking cries for help ranging from whole families without jobs, sickness in the family, failing marriages, parents that worry about their college educated children that can't find work, the list just goes on and on.  Almost everyone over 40 years of age that comes to us needs reading glasses and always describes their eye problem as "I can't read my Bible."  That just recharges me, could you imagine hearing almost everyone in our country being as hungry for the Word of God?  For those folks, I always also include a prayer that their faith may be strengthened by being in the Living Word and that they may be a light to their families and to their communities.

One of the most powerful prayers I was part of on this trip was a man that asked the I pray for the hatred he had in his heart for someone.  It was really troubling him and we talked about how hate just eats at the one who hates, many times the other person doesn't even know anything about it.  I prayed fervently with him, laying hands on his shoulders and when we were done, both of us had moist eyes.  I feel that the Lord moved in his heart during the prayer.  Thank you Jesus!

We just got back from dinner at a Mediterranean Restaurant at the mall across the street and it was a very relaxing meal with a lot of good conversation around the table.  Even though we are small in number, I love this team and how incredibly focused each of us has been at the task at hand.  We always keep it light with humor and there is a good chemistry to this group.  I would serve with them anytime, anywhere again.

Just about time for bed, we need to keep our strength up to finish the week strong before Bill and I leave next Saturday for four days of wildlife photography, mostly birds.  Please continue to keep us in our prayers that our mission lead many to the Lord and heal many of their eye maladies.  Praise God!

Tuesday clinic was bigger but...

Our volunteers opened the day up by singing several hymns and praise songs to set the mood for the day.

The volunteers sing praises

We got a good start this morning, but then quickly realized that it was the last day of Ramadan, so it looked like our numbers of patients would not increase dramatically on the second day of the clinic as has historically been the case.  Tomorrow is a national holiday and that will either be very good or very bad for us, time will tell.  Anyway, we were blessed that several nearby schools sent children over for eye chart screening and we were able to squeeze a pretty large number of them in, which might not have been possible on a normal clinic day.

By the end of the day, 340 people had entered the clinics and 331 of them got treatment of one sort or another and almost all of them were prayed over individually.  I worked several different jobs in addition to trying to do the usual team leader stuff.  The day goes quickly when you don't stop for anything!  One of my favorite moments was when I was working in our triage unit and a 75 year old man who appeared to be about 50 came to me for treatment.  He said that our project had done cataract surgeries for him 2 different times over the years and now he needed glasses, which we were able to provide.  He was a joyful gent and it really lifted up my spirits to know that we do has had such an impact on one life.  Bill Goodoff handled a large share of the triage job during the whole day and I know that I also worked with and prayed with well over 100 people when I could chip in.  It's an amazing experience to be used in this way by the Lord, it's almost an out of body experience in which you feel like you are observing what the Holy Spirit is doing through you as if it is another person you are watching praying over people.  There really aren't adequate words for it, but it multiplies your faith in leaps and bounds.

That's about it for now.  We are all well and making sure we get plenty of rest and are getting hydrated as much as possible.  Stay tuned for more tomorrow!

The latest Kibera vision clinic is up and running!

We arrived at the Springs of Life Lutheran Church grounds a little before 8 am and proceeded to rearrange pews for about 20 minutes to match a diagram that I had drawn for the team Sunday night to give them an idea of the setup that had been successful there in the past.  Pastor Kevin and I had tweaked it over the years to minimize bottlenecks, keep noise to a minimum and generally create an environment for an effective mission, both from the vision care perspective and to enhance our  intentional presentation of the Gospel in our acts and words.  Next came arranging all of our supplies and tables where they belonged for each station.  Even with a small team, we were in pretty good shape in about an hour.

Bishop Bakari Kea summoned the team and the local volunteers to the outside of the church where our first patients had been patiently waiting for over an hour.  A choir from the school and a youth choir from the church each performed for us.  Then the Bishop shared several scriptures with the crowd stressing the urgency of living in the Lord and how fleeting our present circumstances are.  I was blessed when he asked me to pray over the people and the opening of the clinic and the wonderful ministry that will be done over the coming week.  I won't soon forget what an honor and at the same time humbling experience it was.

The school choir

The youth choir

The first hour and a half of the clinic was functional, although several pieces were not up and running right away, such as the autorefractor station where we use battery operated devices to examine patients for distance glasses if they have failed an eye chart exam.  It didn't matter because our experienced team of Kenyan doctors was able to keep up quite nicely until that section was operational.  

We worked steadily throughout the day and it threatened to rain but never did, possibly holding the crowds down.  Nevertheless, by day's end we had seen 275 patients and all were given the best eye care we could muster, had the saving grace of Jesus shared with them and had been prayed over individually.  

Considering we have only 4 team members from the US, the smooth start of the clinic is a testament to the dedication of our local volunteers, our Kenyan doctors and our wonderful workers from the Lutheran Hour Ministries in Kenya who are called Nuru.  Thank you Jesus!