Final Album of Spring Mission Trip pictures ready, just in time to do it again in November!

Here are the rest of the Spring trip pictures, there are a few more Nairobi Game Park pictures to go, but they will be added to these existing albums.

This link goes to pictures of our worship with Pipeline and the Vision Clinic

https://goo.gl/photos/tuyjrVHjfBh2qA9G8

This link takes you to the 2 safaris that we were blessed to enjoy, first at Lake Naivasha and then at the end of the week, at the Nairobi National Game Park

https://goo.gl/photos/kbGfLuUt9mAHEqhV7

I hope you like these!  Stay tuned, we will be saddling up again in a little over a week to conduct a Vision Clinic at Waithaka, the location of a new church plant that our friends at the Lutheran Church in the slum of Kawangware are working on.  We couldn't be happier to be helping in this effort.

Thank you, Jesus!

Spring 2016 Kenya Mission Trip pictures are now being published

It's been slow going, but so far I have my pictures of the worship on the first Sunday, my pictures from the clinic and a few from Lake Naivasha sorted out and edited.  I've been posting them on my Facebook page a few at a time.  I'm still waiting for some pictures from our other team members, but I thought I would get what I have of the clinic posted here and then add albums of our photo safaris and other photos as I get them.  I usually write a summary of what each mission trip meant to me after I've had some time to reflect on it, that should come in the next few weeks after the pictures have been completed, so stay tuned!  This was a great mission trip, there's lots left to write about.  Hope you like these pictures that are found at this link:

Spring 2016 Vision Clinic pictures

Home again, home again!

Pastor Kevin, Cynthia and I arrived in Austin at 3:45 pm today. We got through Customs and Immigration and collected our checked luggage in under an hour.  We haven't heard from Merrilee yet, she flew KLM. We are praying for an uneventful journey for her, since she ended up in Dubai at the start of the trip. We are very thankful for travel mercies on the trip home.  More to follow after I conquer jet lag once again.  Stay tuned.

London to Austin, the final leg!

We arrived just after 6 am at Heathrow.  I got some good sleep on that flight. Dinner shortly after our takeoff was either beef or fish and I heard good things about them both.  I had the beef and mashed potatoes, then put on my eye shade and faded away. I woke up with a slight headache halfway through the 8.5 hour trip. I got some water from the crew and went ahead and took my daily meds, malaria prevention and some ibuprofen for the headache.  Soon I was back to sleep.

We had to go from Terminal 3 to Terminal 5 just as we had on the way to Kenya. It involves several escalators and a 10 minute bus ride. We got through security with little difficulty and began our 5 hour layover.  We each freshened up and then we took turns watching our luggage as Kevin and Cynthia did a little more shopping and I had a large black coffee and an egg salad sandwich. The little box breakfast before landing wasn't the most terrible thing, but it was just a granola and nut bar, a little banana bread slice, crackers and cheese and some yogurt. I skipped the yogurt because I'm taking antibiotics for malaria prevention and am already balancing that with acidophilus.  I got a big laugh when I loudly told a cabin attendant that it had been the best breakfast of my entire life as he was cleaning up the aftermath before our landing.

At Heathrow, I tried and tried to connect my smartphone to the wifi with no luck. I only needed several minutes to publish blog posts and send emails to let Austin friends, family and our church know that we had made it to London OK. Cynthia and Kevin had no issues with their phones, so I finally gave up and had Cynthia send an email for me. Pretty sad, I'm a computer tech and couldn't connect. The cobblers children have no shoes!

We just finally took off around 12:20pm London time. Our flight will be about 9.5 hours, but with the time zone difference we will arrive in Austin around 4pm. I'm hopeful that we can zoom right through Immigration and Customs and ride right home. So far, my new lucky red travel shirt has done pretty well. Come to think of it, maybe it had something to do with our great photo safari yesterday.  Hmm...

We will be served lunch soon. My eyes are already heavy, I'm pretty sure I'll be down for the count after eating.  I've already alerted our crew to wake me up for lunch if I don't make it that far. I've blown it before and meals are quite a ways apart, although I always bring some snacks and International flights usually have a stock of goodies.

All right, the food carts are on the way! I guess they won't have to poke me with a stick after all.  Whoops, they nearly ran out of lunches so I could have chicken curry or I could have chicken curry. Glad I like it. It came with rice and peas, a salmon salad, crackers and cheese and a Belgian chocolate cup. Very filling. I had some after meal coffee to try to stay awake a bit longer.  I'd like to get just enough nap time in so that I can go to bed sometime after 9 pm once we get home.  A great idea but not easy to execute on. 8 hours difference of jet lag will take a few days to overcome.  It's harder when you come back than when you go on a mission trip.  I think it's partly because we design our weekend activities on these trips to blast you into the new time zone and when Monday rolls around, ready or not we have to do what we came to do.  Coming home, it's a little easier to be a bit lazy about adjusting, especially if you're self employed like I am.  It is what it is.

That's it for this post.  I'm sure I'll get all of the posts since the last one I was able to publish before our travel out to the blog this evening.  Please keep coming back as I add a photo album, more stories and a final set of reflections on what this mission meant to us and to Pipeline and the community we were blessed to serve.

Saturday Safari and travel to London

We had one last breakfast buffet at Milele, the Presbyterian hotel that had been our headquarters for the week. All of the staff there had been very friendly, from the guys at the front desk Pius and Kevin, to the  cleaning crew, to the chefs and to our breakfast waitress Ann, who was always smiling. I taught Ann the nice custom in Hawaii of saying aloha because it means hello and goodbye, in effect meaning until we meet again.  She liked that and we said aloha when  breakfast was over. 

Cynthia helped Merrilee with her online check in for her KLM flight. Each of the rest of us had set our alarms for 11:30 so we could get our seat assignments 24 hours ahead of time and we each got our preferences without any problems.  It's nice when it works.

We gathered up all of our luggage and piled it in the two vans we had contracted for the day and shared a laugh or two with Edwin and Humphrey, two familiar friends from our previous trips. As I've pointed out here many times over the years, Catherine has always gotten us the best drivers.  Every one of them has been attentive to our needs, friendly and they always have our safety as their highest priority. Edwin and Humphrey are among the best of the best, so we knew we would have a great day.

We got to the Nairobi Game Park and met our friends Barrack, Jordan, Kailey and one of her friends from Texas Tech.  Kailey and Jordan had arrived in Nairobi the night before, so they were struggling with the time difference.  They will be doing different mission work with kids in various locations while they are here. I'm very proud of them, they raised the money with a fundraiser at Texas Tech and both have a heart for service and mission.

From the standpoint of numbers of major species seen, this had to be my best photo safari in dozen or so times I've been to this park. Depending on rainy seasons, drought, time of year and many other factors, you may not see certain animals at all.  We were truly blessed to see lions, giraffes, hippos, rhinos, zebras, hartebeests, impalas, water buffalo, warthogs, gazelles, ostriches, secretary birds, sacred Ibises, herons, superior starlings, Egyptian geese, scissortails, plover and more. We caught a baboon out of the corner of our eyes as well. One bit of excitement came when Cynthia yelled "Leopard!" as she saw an animal crossing the road in front of us. Humphrey stopped the van where it had entered the tall grass on the side of the road and I got several pictures as it went away from us with it's ears pointed rearward at us. The leopard is the most elusive of the big five species in Kenya. I have been trying to get a glimpse of one for years. I had even promised Humphrey a "leopard bonus" if he got me one.

Due to the heavy rains all week, many of the low spots were pure mud on the roads throughout this very large game park. Signs posted at the park entrance warned drivers not to stray from the main roads. We heard over the CB which drivers and park service rangers use to communicate with each other that one unfortunate driver had buried his van up to the drivers side front axle. He had been stuck for over an hour with a Kenyan mother and daughter as his clients. Our drivers showed him professional courtesy and tried to extract him. Humphrey took our van down the side road to survey the situation, while Edwin and the others remained up top on the main road. No sense in putting both of our vans at risk. It looked like the best strategy would be to get around the van and try to pull it out from the back. Humphrey got a tow strap out of the back of our 4 wheel drive van and gave it several tries before breaking his strap. Edwin went and got a chain from our other van and it also broke. I thought we were done trying, but no! Humphrey had one more trick to try.  We carefully pulled back around the stuck van and Humphrey pulled up nose to nose while Edwin put a blanket between the two vehicles to minimize damage.  We proceeded to get stuck as well. No good deed goes unpunished.

Barrack got out to help with the muddy job of pushing us out. I stayed in the van, since all had our very last set of clothes on for traveling back to the States.  A few years ago, Pastor Kevin, Ralph, Charles and I had gotten totally muddied out in a similar situation, but that was on the first Saturday of the trip.  After about 6 or 7 tries, we got back on solid ground and continued our safari. 

By this time, it was too late with the wet and muddy road conditions to make it to the Elephant Orphanage, something at least half the group wanted to do. Oh well, another reason to come back! 

Once we finished with the game park around 1pm, we lunched at the Veranda,  a nice restaurant and souvenir shop. I gave Barrack a refurbished laptop for his ministry with Fikisha that mentors orphans and street kids.
He was very glad, and so was I, since I had been instrumental in ruining his previous computer and he had been reduced to doing social media with his smartphone for the last 6 months.  I'll expand on that story soon.

After lunch, we made our way to the Little Daughters compound where we saw our friend Sylvester for a few minutes and were waiting for the Salem team to arrive when we found out that there had been a bad traffic accident between the Rift Valley and town. They needed to turn  around and go back to Lake Naivasha and try to work their way around the east side of town, so they were heading directly to the airport.  We visited with Catherine a little more, got to go to her friend Hannah gift shop and then it was off to the airport.

Now that new terminals are being built, and since the Paris and Belgium attacks, security is obviously at a heightened level.  Humphrey took the van through a checkpoint outside the airport and each of us was screened before we were allowed back in the van for the ride to our terminal.  We said what we thought was farewell to Merrilee, since her plane would depart from a different terminal.  We got checked in with no incidents and had about 3 hours to visit with our friends from Salem.  We boarded our 777 and headed for London.

We are in London now waiting for our direct flight to Austin.  One more leg and we are home! Stay tuned, more to follow!

Some stories from the clinic

I am beginning to write this as we wait to board our flight from Nairobi to London.  We should be on the plane in about half an hour.

During the clinic work week, there's not much spare time either before breakfast or after dinner to do justice to the many things that occur on a daily basis in an operation of this size. Over the coming days, I will try to fill in the blanks that were glossed over the first time around in order to give you a more complete picture of what this past week has been like. I may tell about a small detail or something that is much bigger in scope.  I hope you like my second go at it!

My first post clinic reminiscence is from Friday afternoon around 1:30.  My evangelist friend John Karanja was outside for a minute when he saw a young toddler of about 18 months walking in the muddy water near the entrance to the health clinic. Her mother apparently had left her for a minute to use the restroom.  He saw her suddenly disappear from sight as she fell through an uncovered manhole. He sprang into action.  She had gone in head first and was completely submerged.  He reached into the coffee colored water and pulled her out by her leg.  She was OK. She surely would have drowned if he had not been aware of what had happened. He told us about it as we joined the Pipeline ladies for a lunch of ugali, kale and cabbage.  We were all amazed at how matter of fact he was right after such an experience.  The health clinic was made aware of this incident and action was taken immediately.

I am proud to number John among my friends. He has a gift for leading people to the Lord and is like me in one regard. Neither one of us believes in accidents or coincidences.  He was in exactly the right place at the right time, doing exactly what he was intended to do. Thanks be to God!

A Wonderful End to the Clinic

It rained ed most of the night Thursday and it was pouring as we pulled into the clinic parking lot. Pastor Kevin and I had resigned ourselves to cold, wet feet for another day. We pushed the tent tops up with plastic chairs to remove the water that was threatening to bring them down.  Rosemary our driver went and bought "gum boots" for Merrilee and Cynthia which is what the Kenyans call rubber boots.

The clinic was slow, but steady all day, even with the terrible conditions. When we had finished, we had seen around 280 patients, our best day of the week.  We ended up with 1190 patients and 90 people coming to Christ for the clinic. With better weather, I'm convinced we could have easily served over 2000. A very good week in the mission field anyway.

There are many stories still to be told, and I will continue telling them over the next few weeks.  A picture album is high on my list as well. It just hasn't been possible to do much with photos this time due to spotty Internet and the constraints of time.

We are going down for our last breakfast at the hotel soon, after which we leave for a photo safari at the Nairobi Game Park.  We hope to see the feeding of the baby elephants at 11am at the Elephant Orphanage adjacent to the park. We will then lunch at the Veranda, a nice restaurant with a good gift shop.  Finally, we end up back at Little Daughters of St Joseph to freshen up, fellowship with our other teams and then head for the airport. We fly out around 11:30 local time.

I'll be writing more posts on the plane rides and publishing them as I can. Please keep us in your prayers for travel mercies.  I know the difference can be quite large between a smooth, uneventful trip and one with lots of excitement!

Thank you Jesus for sending us to serve in a clinic where many regained their sight or improved their vision. But most of all, thank you for sending us many who did not know you before and now are your sheep. Amen.