We're home safe and sound Sunday night

Long, long day and a half of travel.  More stories and photos will appear here shortly.  For now, a hot shower and turning in early!  Blessings everybody, thanks for all of the prayers for us while we were in the mission field...

Friday - the conclusion of the clinic

We had an incredible last day at the clinic.  We saw around 350 more patients.  Pastor Kevin had Linda helping in the triage station, particularly with the women.  She needed a break after about an hour and a half because of the many heart-breaking stories that people had and what they asked her to pray for.   All of us who have ever done this job have had to walk away for some quiet time or to cry for a little while.  This is completely normal, you wouldn’t have a heart nor the compassion of Jesus if it didn’t affect you deeply.  She did some other tasks like helping with the eye chart and then came back to triage on and off.  We’re glad she did.  She prayed a beautiful prayer over a young Muslim woman who then got some reading glasses.  Pastor James, from the local diocese, talked with her and prayed over her and before you knew it, she was a convert.  Thank you Jesus for all of the broken people your Holy Spirit brought to us this week at exactly the right time for them to start a new life in you.

We closed up the clinic around 4pm, got all of our gear stowed in the footlockers and then had a nice closing ceremony in which Pastor Kevin and I handed out certificates to our volunteers.  As each came forward to claim their certificate of appreciation, Linda snapped their picture with us.  Some of these will surely make it onto this blog.  We have had very spotty Internet access this week and have not been trying to worry anyone, since we had daily reports earlier.  I will probably have to wait until Heathrow, where they have 45 minutes of free wifi, to post Thursday, Friday and Saturday happenings. 

We had dinner at Rosa Mystica and the staff brought us fruit, hard boiled eggs and bread for breakfast, since we will be leaving at 6am for a safari and need to be out there early for the nocturnal animals as they come in from their hunting.  Pastor Kevin has been called into meetings with our project leadership and the ELCK authorities, so he won’t be joining us.  We’ll do the safari, maybe the elephant orphanage and then some lunch and shopping at the Veranda complex.  After that, we’ll go back to St. Joseph’s where we stayed earlier in the week to wait for the other teams coming in from the field before leaving for the airport. 

Thursday clinic and other happenings

We had our usual 7am breakfast at Rosa Mystica and then made our way back to the Lutheran Church in the slum of Kawangware.  Linda opened our day with a beautiful prayer over the team and our volunteers.  We had a pretty busy morning once again and were visited by Sam from Concordia University, Irvine, California, whom we had met previously and a biology professor named Ken who was a classmate of our very own Larry Meissner.  We showed him around the clinic and he took a few pictures of our setup.  Later in the day, our Nairobi LCMS missionary Shauen Trump paid us a visit.  He had his two young boys in tow.  He was also joined by our friends Mike and Cindy Rodewald, who head up the LCMS missions in Africa.  They toured the clinic and we were able to visit briefly with them.  We saw about the same number of people as on Wednesday and now have seen somewhere in the neighborhood of 1300 patients for the week so far.  More importantly, at least 30 people became new believers or were seriously interested in learning more about Christ or the church today.  This trip has been absolutely outstanding from the evangelism standpoint. 

We learned today that the first young boy who came to us for help in Kiambu for kerataconitis did get the operations on his eyes and was healed.  Praise God that Robert will now be able to lead a full life!  I pray that the Lord will lead him to make the most of his second chance.

The television crew never showed up to film the clinic for World Vision Day, so I guess we will all have to wait for another chance at fame…

We had dinner at a Brazilian steak house as planned.  We had 10 adults and Shauen’s 2 kids.  The group included our team of four and our driver Steven, Mike and Cindy, Shauen, Catherine and Shara.  It was a real blessing to break bread and eat massive amounts of very good meat with them.  There was a salad bar with 16 different types of salad and there were at least 12 different meats including crocodile, chicken, turkey, beef ribs, roast beef and the list went on and on.  The conversation and fellowship were great, a good time was had by all.  We are truly blessed to have our LCMS people in Africa to smooth the way for our mission trips.  They are a great encouragement.  After all that meat, I will either sleep like a baby or have a rough night.  Either way, it was worth it!

Tomorrow will be the last day of the clinic and so we will be packing up all of our equipment, loading it up on a truck for transport back to our lodge and will say our goodbyes.  More to follow tomorrow.

Wednesday - we're starting to roll!

We saw a few more people today, around 325 total.  More importantly, Pastor James, Pastor Kevin and our evangelists from Nuru (the Lutheran Hour Ministries team in Kenya) had 32 people come to Christ or express an interest in the church or in counseling with the pastor.  It was a very good day by that standard.  We took a shortcut through the slum and knocked about 15 or 20 minutes off of our commute, which can be stop and go in heavy traffic on the main road around the periphery of the slum.  That was the upside.  The price you have to pay is one intersection with no traffic control that we have to cross while everybody and their brother is coming from every direction, wanting to turn, etc.  It is very safe, the conductors from the matatas (vans) jump out and do their best to make sure that things keep moving, since it is in their best interest to keep moving, picking up more passengers and arriving at their destinations on time.  We will get some video and pictures of this mayhem posted when possible.  I actually tried to upload 3 photos last night and it failed after 25 minutes.  It will probably not be possible to get many, if any, pictures linked to the blog until after our return.  The good news is that we have power plugs on our flights now, so during my waking time on the trip home I can be sorting through, selecting and organizing the first batch of pictures to be posted shortly after we get back home.

We got back to our lodge, showered and had short naps before dinner.  It was served buffet style, with beef, fish, rice, potatoes, vegetables and a fruit salad for dessert that included watermelon, pineapple and bananas.  It all tasted good, and we all ate our fill, since we didn’t get any lunch again, but subsisted on snacks and beef jerky.  This is an off night where we will app catchup on our rest for the final push Thursday and Friday.

Tomorrow, a television crew is supposed to come to see us in action at the clinic.  It is World Vision Day and the Kenya National Health system wants to highlight what we are doing in partnership with them and the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Kenya to help eradicate preventable blindness in the near future.  We may get our 15 minutes of fame in Nairobi!  Pretty cool, huh?

That’s all for now, time to call it a night.  Blessings everybody!

Tuesday clinic went well

We had breakfast at Rosa Mystica and were on the road around 7:30.  Traffic was heavy and it still amazes me that you almost never see even a fender bender with the crowded conditions, no stop lights or stop signs, occasional police directing traffic as best as they can at some major intersections and roundabouts being the chief traffic control system.  This is why the best cab drivers in the world come from Nairobi.  Linda seems to be more relaxed and just laughs a lot at all of the close calls we see between anything from a big bus to a matata (van), car, motorcycle, bicycle or pedestrians.  I guess I’ve gotten pretty immune to it and feel very safe in the hands of our expert drivers and the Lord. 
 

Pastor James started off the clinic with a prayer and we had a pretty steady morning, with around 200 people having gone through by noon.  The afternoon was a little slower and we ended up a little ahead of Monday in terms of raw numbers.  Pastor Kevin reported that the triage station, our pastor and our evangelists combined had around 15 people receive Christ as their personal savior, which is probably the most important statistic, particularly for those individuals.  Thanks you, Jesus!

We never were able to stop for anything resembling a lunch, but snacked on granola bars, beef jerky and candy to keep going.  We got back to our lodgings around 5:30 and I was able to shower and get a brief nap before joining the team for 6:30 dinner.  The cook served us individually with a meal of chicken, French fires, slaw and pasta.  It was good, but we were so hungry anything would have been fine.  We all headed to our rooms for some quiet time.  Billy and I downloaded his pictures from his camera, since it appear to have died.  Luckily, I always bring a little extra Nikon point and shoot camera, so he’s still in business for the rest of the trip.  This is not the first trip that I’ve had to use my “loaner” camera.  Probably not the last either.

I’m going to spend some time trying to get a few pictures out onto the web for this blog.  My Internet connection in the room is too weak tonight, so I’ll be working from the main building of the compound where the signal comes from.  More to follow if pictures are available today.

Kawangware vision clinic is open for business!

We had a wonderful day from start to finish.  We had a hurried breakfast at 7am because we needed to be on the road at 7:20 to setup the rest of the clinic.  Our cook, Kennedy, made some good fried eggs with sausage and we had bread and fruit from a buffet.  There was hot milk, but no hot water, so I made my Nescafe with hot milk and it was actually quite good.  Our ride into the slum was uneventful, but it was fun to see the looks on Linda’s face as she saw new things and got a taste of a weekday rush hour in Nairobi.  It’s pretty much like a high speed video game, but you get used to it pretty quickly.  We had a nice surprise when we arrived at the church. Our old friend Pastor Zedekiah and his wife Karen were there to greet us.  They had an 8:30 commitment, so we could only visit for a minute or two.  We hope to see them again before the end of the clinic. 

We got all of our footlockers situated and other last minute details taken care of, had a morning devotion led by Pastor James and then got to work seeing our first patients.  We only had a few minor first day glitches which included getting the right lighting and technique down to work the autorefractors and the usual getting used to each job in the clinic.  With a small team, it was remarkable how smoothly things were running by noon, when we had seen about 180 people.  This was due to having seasoned volunteers like Barrack, Paul, Max, Frank and others with us again, the excellent work of Nuru (LHM in Kenya) and our driver Steven helping in many, many ways from crowd control to translating to anything else that needed doing.  By the time we ended the day, we had seen nearly 300 people, pretty respectable for a first day.  We had Max out in the neighborhood twice during the day with a megaphone.  Tomorrow we will have our driver Steven take him around a little larger area to drum up business for the vision clinic.  Word of mouth spreads quickly among the concentrated population in the slum and if our clinic holds true to form, the number of patients we will see will increase daily.

We went to Catherine’s mother’s for dinner tonight right after the clinic closed with the whole team including Steven.  Our friend Shara, who works with Catherine in the Nairobi LCMS Mission Office, was also there.  Mama, one of her best friends Margaret and Catherine's other brothers and sisters were there as well.  Not an empty seat or stomach in the house and lots of love and laughs.  Kenyans really know how to fellowship over a good meal.  It was a great night and we felt particularly honored to have been invited into Mama’s home.  Each day just gets better and better!

Well, it’s almost 10pm local time, I will sleep the sleep of the exhausted and we’ll get up and do it again tomorrow.  More to follow and some pictures soon since we will have 2 free nights in a row before a possible nice dinner, probably Thursday night, maybe at a new Brazilian steak house.  Thank you Lord for a day in which people came to know you and for letting us be your hands and feet.  Amen.

Sunday worship in Kawangware

We got up early and breakfasted with the other teams that were heading out to do vision clinics all over Kenya, some had to go 6 hours or more to reach their destinations.  We got a big group picture in front of the beautiful compound we had stayed in the first 2 nights and then we helped the other teams load up and head ‘em on out.  We were the last to leave, as we only needed to be at church by 10am.  Pastor Kevin was prepared to preach, having been asked the evening before.  The local pastors are very gracious with giving our pastors the opportunity to preach and teach in their churches wherever we go.

We arrived a few minutes late to a packed church and had a wonderful worship service, with all different styles of music ranging from traditional hymns to Swahili choirs to praise music and everything in between.  All the elements of a Lutheran church service were there including confession and absolution, the Apostle’s Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Benediction, etc.  Pastor Kevin chose the passage from Luke 4 where Jesus returns to Nazareth, reads the scripture from Isaiah pointing to Him as the Messiah and is rejected in His own home town.  The theme was “Is God here in church today?” and Kevin did a wonderful job of involving the congregation in answering this question.  After nearly 3 hours of worship, which flew by as it always does, we went outside where the choir did one more song and then Pastor James gave the Benediction.  We spent about half an hour greeting old friends and introducing Billy and Linda to everybody.  We then rearranged the church for the clinic and this took some brainstorming on our parts, since the flow of the clinic has changed a little since we first started doing clinics in Kawangware.  This took about another half hour, so we left the church around 2:30pm and had a nice lunch at the Java House restaurant (think Starbuck’s with a full menu!) with Catherine and Sylvester at the Junction Shopping Center, a block from where we will be staying the rest of the week.  After lunch, we walked to the Nakumatt and were glad to see heightened security.  Guards were running wands over everyone coming into the mall and they were also present at every turn.  We thanked them for their service and told them we felt safer due to their presence.  We bought snacks for the week and supplies for the eye clinic including hand sanitizer, toilet paper and other essentials.  We are blessed to be staying a block away from such great shopping and restaurants, knowing we can stock up on anything on any given day.  They even have the first Subway in Nairobi, which was just opened by an American entrepreneur.  As Billy stated it so eloquently “I didn’t come 8,000 miles to eat in a Subway!” so I doubt there will be any group meals there anytime soon.

All is well, we are raring to get started on the clinic tomorrow and are now in our rooms around 8:30pm.  Internet access is sketchy in the building where we are staying here at Rosa Mystica, so I may have to walk down near the office to post this.  If I had a better signal in my room, there might already be the first of the pictures for you to see.  I have a wireless repeater with me, but I can’t reset it to factory condition to make it work here without a paper clip. My BIC ballpoint pen won’t do it, so hopefully a paper clip will appear in the next day or so.  That’s all for now.  Keep a safe and effective mission in your prayers, we’re ready to serve.