Notes from the Mission Field: 5/5/2010 Wednesday in Kibera

We had a heavy thunderstorm overnight and the power kept going on and off at fairly regular intervals. One very good thing about it was that the Internet connection is fine now. That’s one way to reset your cable modem, take down the whole neighborhood several times within a few hours. I’ll have to remember that the next time one of my computer repair customer has a balky Internet connection. I’ll just find the Austin Energy substation for the neighborhood and turn it off for awhile!

We had our usual early morning breakfast and I led a brief devotion and discussion based on Psalm 36. Our ride to church was uneventful, but it was obvious there had been quite a bit of rain, since water was still flowing in the ditches and it was still misting when we arrived. Our Vicar, Paul led a devotion and we began seeing patients around 8:30, since there were not many people waiting in the bad weather conditions. This was to be our first day without our Pastor from the Kawangware church helping us to work with the heavily Muslim clientele we are encountering at the clinic. The team providing the “second touches” of Ralph and Louise, Pastor Meeker and his Vicar Paul proved to be up to the task. Even though it rained most of the day, we all stayed steadily busy with a trickle of patients that never stopped. By day’s end, we had once again seen over 400 in the clinic, 407 to be exact. There were a number of heartwarming stories as there always are. In one case, an 84 year old man needed the strongest prescription for distance glasses I have ever seen. When he put on the “Coke bottle” glasses, he was able to read the tiniest line on our eye chart with no mistakes. I can’t even do that. He was all smiles and we got several pictures with him. I insisted that he take his new glasses off before he went down the steps of the church and we walked him down. The last thing I wanted was for his new found happiness to end in a tragic tumble only a few minutes later. At another time during the day, a young man named Vincent dropped by and said a friend from the UK had given him a bag of reading glasses to donate to a good cause and wanted to know if we can use them. I said we’d find a good home for them one way or another and he walked home and brought them back. What a blessing to receive such a gift from someone in the neighborhood. We also had some fun. We set up Jacob, the small son of our volunteer Jacqueline as if he were assembling distance glasses, complete with a light on his little head, a screwdriver in his hand and some glasses for him to work on. I got several great shots. The whole idea was to show Dan Zieschang that our littlest worker could perform this job in the clinic at a high level, because no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t get Dan up to speed on this particular job. We would still be on the mission trip to Kawangware last November now if we had to wait for the first pair of glasses to roll off of Dan’s assembly station! We love and miss Dan a lot, and wish he were here with us. He’d truly be in his element giving his powerful witness to people of all faiths and praying with them for any heartbreak in their lives. Finally, speaking of Dan, we got a surprise visit from his buddy Mosah, the youth leader at the Kawangware church. He wanted to say hi to us and especially thank Howard and Martha for sending teaching materials over to him via the Pastor. It was very good seeing him again, he is an incredible young man with a real heart for making the lives of the youth he shepherds better. There were many other touching and funny moments throughout the day that we’ll all share with our friends and families when we return to Austin. It’s getting to be time for lights out, so I’ll conclude this report by asking the Lord to bless all of you who are with us here in your thoughts and prayers.