The Good Life

I received a phone call from Papa yesterday. "Habari," he said. "Nzuri," I answered, quite shocked. He continued, "Jambo," and I answered "sijambo." He was pronouncing the words absolutely perfectly and I asked where he was learning Swahili.

"At the liquor store from the Indian lady who used to live in Kenya."

Keep in mind, this is in South Carolina, and her daughter goes to Harvard - the world is small and fascinating!

I emulated Papa when in Kenya, telling cheesy jokes like he would, always making the first move to introduce myself and smile. He is naturally shy, but goes into pastor-mode when he is out and about, exuding energy and smiles, making connections, building bridges, offering prayers, advice, and friendship. So many times I thought how happy he would be in Kijabe, how he would have love a certain moment or interaction!

I was at my friend Andy's house, watching him separate sunflower seeds from the plant that grew in his garden. It occurred to me that a big part of my happiness in Kenya was because I was living a mirror of Andy's life. They live smack in the heart of Bluff Park - one of those neighborhoods where everyone knows each other and the kids are free to romp every day until dark. Andy is a jack of all trades sort of guy and has about a jillion projects going on - but like me, he looks after the kids while his wife works a normal schedule. Andy is great about never being too busy to have a conversation. . .he makes a big point to get involved in the lives of his friends and neighbors. Part of his method is to be outside: working in the garden or walking the kids to school.  I learned this lesson in Kijabe - when you walk, you stop and get to know people. Our girls love to play with his, and it's a rare day when they don't have 5 or 10 kids playing in the backyard. Andy is also big into renewables and self-sustenance, whether it is the garden or rain barrels, or the plans for solar water heaters. He is about pragmatism and big dreams - we have this or that resource - how could I use it to do something I want? My favorite moments in Kenya were spent when I was living like Andy. . .maybe the best moment was the afternoon I spent with William, googling plans for a solar oven and a rocket stove - both ideas I learned in conversations with Andy before we left.  I pictured Andy there with us, dreaming big and so excited about these little tools to recycle and use natural means as the solution to a need.

Matthew Boyle, one of my favorite people in the world. He was in my Sunday school class, but despite (or maybe because of)a few years difference in age, we have become good friends. Matthew is a tinker - endlessly clever with a love for building, tinkering, and big cool science. He introduced me to Tesla coils and gives me lessons in materials engineering an quantum physics. We had lunch yesterday and I realized that Matthew and my Kenyan friend William are twins born on different continents. Their quick smiles and laughter, love of learning, brilliance and resourcefulness. . .I hope they can meet one day!

In religion classes we used to talk about "the good life." I see a great picture of a life well lived in these and so many of my other friends. It is not necessary to go to the ends of the earth to have the good life. . .but going to Kenya did help me realize that I need to shift a few priorities and live more like these wonderful people, and most importantly that I need to make more time to hang out with them!

SP Interview

We did a whirlwind turnaround trip to Charlotte yesterday to do an interview with Samaritan's Purse/World Medical Mission. We met some amazing people, answered and asked lots of questions, and our heads are spinning with possibilities and sheer exhaustion!  The planning process is a roller-coaster of emotions - we'll have to do our best to be patient and let things unfold over the next few weeks.  Hopefully we'll have a chance to recover from jet-lag and travel soon as well. . .we've flown around 30 hours and driven 2100 miles in the last two weeks, shot two weddings, and Arianna is already back to her normal work schedule!

Winston

We went back to Winston-Salem this week to photograph a wedding.  Taking pictures at St. John's, our old church, is a landmark event.   Arianna and I were married there a little over 11 years ago and we have photographed a wedding there every few years since.  The church is a great measuring stick of our progress as photographers, and it is always wonderful to be back to our old home.

It is always amazing to be back with our family in NC. . .they talked me into "running" a 5k, we hit the volleyball around, the girls were able to go swimming, and as always, ate better than we ever should!

One of the most special parts was that everyone had seen the blog and knew exactly what was happening in our life, or at least Kenya-wise.  There were many days where I sat down to write an update, wondering if anyone would actually read. . .then to find out some of our long-time friends were keeping up with our adventures and praying for us. . .absolutely wonderful!!  "Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a large crowd was coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, "Where are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?" He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he would do. Philip answered him, "Two hundred denarii would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little." (John 6:5-7 ESV)." From the porch in Kijabe, it was easy to say, "lets stay in Africa," but now that we are home, the idea of going back is much more daunting. But we are beginning to realize, in encouraging conversations with amazing friends, if returning is God's plan, he knows exactly what he will do to make it possible!

Back to life

Some more thoughts as we adjust to life back home.  

Just heard about this. . .we received a warning from the state department last week about August 7th, which is the end of Ramadan and the 15th anniversary of the Nairobi embassy bombing.  The embassy was closed due to the perceived threat, and we are glad that we flew out on Monday morning.  Our bags never made it home and may well have burned along with the airport. . .
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/big-fire-rages-at-nairobi-international-airport-flights-rerouted-from-kenyan-capital/2013/08/07/ffba8f98-ff1b-11e2-8294-0ee5075b840d_story.html

Annabelle picked up the cutest accent from her Australian and Irish friends. . .all of her a's are soft, so candy is cahndy and fanta is fahnta.  I'm sure it will disappear the minute she sees her Alabama friends, but it is delightful!  

Annabelle and Madeline were wide awake at 4 this morning, giggling and so proud of themselves for waking up early.  They watched TV and played, and we went back to sleep.  Now they're stamping passports and boarding passes and selling me tickets to New Zealand!  

It's hot and humid in Alabama - it was winter in Kijabe, so 50 at night and 70 degrees during the day, which is my absolute favorite weather.  

The sounds are different in the States, especially at night, a cacophony of crickets and cicadas, mosquitos buzzing everywhere, weeds exploding in the yard, frogs croaking.  Kijabe had the squack of the ibises, roosters crowing, and dogs barking. . .but the insects were silent.  

I feel almost superhuman now that I'm at normal altitude, down from 6500 feet. . .I should run a 5k before my body adjusts!  

America is expensive. . .I was astonished when I looked at our bank account and saw how little we spent in Kenya.  We went grocery shopping at ALDI this morning - I'm going to have a hard time going back to Publix prices.  Also, when you are walking 15 minutes to the store and carrying everything by hand, you tend to buy a lot less!  

Here are a couple of videos that I wasn't able to upload until we came home:  

These little guys were dancing like crazy before church started.  

The African Inland Church version of the wobble. . .I was walking by the hospital and heard music coming from the church up the mountainside and popped in to watch for a few minutes.

Jumbled thoughts

The flight home is long and anxious, as if I'm going away from my heart and calling, back to a holding pattern for the coming months. It's not that I'm not happy at home. . .but I want life to be significant, to make the dent in the universe. I want to see God work in amazing ways and to be in the midst of that work. I do love taking pictures, but it's the sixty hours of drudgery afterwards, of feeling like life is passing me by while I stare at a computer screen pushing buttons. I need times of solitude, but I also need to be out in the world, out of my front door, to be a true friend, a father, a husband. I thirst for adventure, for life, for newness and sacrifice and passion. But to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. . .maybe this is the time to sow an prepare a little longer even though I long to be enjoying the harvest. . .

I sat next to a delightful pair of Irish ladies on the plane ride who spent three weeks in Karen, near Nairobi volunteering at an orphanage. They told stories and shared pictures, as people do, but one story was astonishing. A little boy, named Moses, had been abandoned in the forest and quite literally raised by monkeys. The women occasionally saw him, but the monkeys carried him, fed, him, and treated him as one of their own until he became too large. . .and he was found and take. To the orphanage. He is now 11 and doesn't speak and has strange mannerisms that they describe as birdlike, he is very detached and distant, unable to use his jaws properly and refuses to chew food, swallowing everything whole. They had one picture of him smiling, and in the photo he looks like the most normal, beautiful boy. So strange and fantastic I can hardly believe it, but who makes up a story like that?

The plane ride from Nairobi to Amsterdam was fantastic, across the Sahara, over the Mediterranean, over the Italian/Austrian Alps. If I only had a parachute. . .:)

The Sahara (aka, the world's largest Sandbox)

Moses

The Alps

Heading home

We drove from Kijabe this afternoon, and looking out the car window Africa is still as big and scary and crowded and intimidating as when we arrived. But there is a little village of in the midst of a huge continent where in such a short time we carved out amazing friendships and astonishingly quickly felt at home. As I looked back over the mountains, I felt like we were leaving a place of light and joy, and I am already nostalgic. The boys taught me a simple phrase: rafiki ni rafiki, which means a friend is a friend. Just as we did in the little town of Pingtung in southern Taiwan 9 years ago, we left a little bit of ourselves and our hearts in Kijabe, and whatever the future holds, we can proudly say of the people we met and loved, we are friends.

Day 20

My last 10 days in Kijabe were in the intensive care unit. . . it's a five bed unit that is shared between the adults and the children with 3 nurses to five patients - and it is always full. For the last two weeks, it has been mostly pediatric patients.

The nurses on this ward are fantastic - they reminded me so much of our nurses in the ER at home. They know how to set up the ancient vents,  how to maneuver and manipulate the pulse-ox probes and temperamental oxygen, but most importantly the subtle moments in medicine where a patient goes from bad to worse or worse to better.  They care for their patients with compassion and develop relationships with their patients and their families. They witness miracles of medicine and miracles that defy medicine daily and they approach their work with a deliberate joy. I loved working alongside them.

They had early chai and mandazi for me yesterday morning to say goodbye - with nurses on shift and those that had come in or stayed late for that moment.  It was a time of friendship and laughter, of joking and learning more about each other even as we said goodbye. And they prayed  for me and our family - that God would bless us and multiply our joy and that He would bring us back to Kenya- and that I would remember to bring more pens when I returned (apparently my ability to lose pens spans continents). I loved every minute.

Then I rounded on my ward patients one more time.  I collected email addresses to follow the carers of the sweet residents who have taught me so much and work so tirelessly - taking call for surgery, OB, and peds in the midst of their busy rotations.  I said goodbye to the sweet moms with their babies - some who have been at the hospital the entire time I have been in Kenya. Smiling at the ones who are better because I have played some role in their journey - and puzzling one more day over the ones who are still mysteries. I feel like we have been here so much longer than three weeks.

And then we said good bye to Mardi and her kids as they headed to the duka, and cleaned the house to have 20 people over for dinner  ( Because that's what normal people do the night before they leave for America, right? ) We asked them to bring plates and forks, because we didn't have enough, and people arrived one by one. David's friends came over - Jeremiah and Robert and Zech and William. And all the visiting doctor's we knew came as well- the neonatologist from Montgomery, the visiting radiologist and his wife with the newly arrived short term internal medicine doctor, and the 3 kids the girls have spent so much time with in the past three weeks with their parents, and Abigail, the Kenyan girl who comes most afternoons after school. And we ate spaghetti with sauce David made from scratch from the market with chocolate cookies and curry that someone brought. And we laughed and watched worlds collide. And it was good. A bit crazy, a little loud, but overall very good.

Today we pack up, with a few more trinkets and a few less medical supplies in our bags - we begin our journey back home with anticipation and excitement. But knowing that  we leave a bit of our heart here , and will be anxious to return.

Asante sana (thank you so very much) for taking part of this journey with us. Stay tuned for the next chapter :)

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