Thursday, October 16, 2014

Blog 6

Sunday, September 28

Traveling on tour, the guide brings the traveler to sites of interest, perhaps telling a bit about the monuments and historical sites.  Perhaps one makes a friend with a fellow traveler.  This type of trip is wonderful, in fact, I’ll be doing a guided tour Tuesday and Wednesday before my return to the states.  However, when possible, I prefer to stay with locals, and, if they have time, go to the places they know and love.

My introduction to Marilyn Bassin came through my investment advisor, Lewis Krinsky from Houston.  Marilyn is an astonishing woman, driven to help the poor and underprivileged with a compassion almost as strong for abused animals as for neglected children.  Her ever-present smile only disappears when someone says, “You can’t do that.”  We awoke early today to take a morning walk.  Her neighborhood lies in a hilly area of two lane roads and sprawling homes.  Her particular house, a lovely two story peach granite 4000 sq. ft. eloquence, has three levels of security, beginning with a doubly manned guarded gate entry to the 80 homes in the complex, to her personally walled home and yard, to sliding bars on each patio window.   As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, she told me to leave my camera behind on our morning walk.  We strode up the hills, perhaps a mile walk in all, glancing through gates at ever larger mansions, more elegant yards, and more spacious views of the city below.  Few pedestrians crossed our path, though a group of white bicyclists and two trucks of black security guards rushed by.

Accompanied by her children, college freshman Gina (occupational therapy, determined to help cerebral palsy sufferers as inspired by her mother) and 15 year-old tenor sax player Shane, Marilyn took us out to a scrumptious breakfast at J.B. Rivers, a classy popular outdoor bistro in an open air mall of restaurants.  I wanted French toast, but Marilyn vetoed that and I ordered the vegetarian scramble, a delectable mound of scrambled eggs blended with spinach, mushrooms, cucumbers, avocado (called avos here) to make a sweet taste of green eggs without ham.  Gina and Marilyn enjoyed hard boiled eggs with hollandaise served on salmon, spread across a large thick rye toast, and vegetarian Shane had plain scrambled.  One can judge the psychology of a family by the happiness of the children, and this one glows.
 
Lions and rhinos and deer, oh my!  Wild animals exist only in game preserves, and even in those, their mortality depends on the degree of protection.  Privately owned lands, well fenced, with gun toting guards, offers unique opportunities to witness these animals in a nearly natural habitat.  Across South Africa landowners have created perhaps a hundred of these private preserves, many only a few dozen acres, but most large enough to allow for tourists to enjoy a wide variety of wild animals.  We toured the “Lion and Rhino Park,” a multi-hectares landscape with special areas for wild dogs, brown lions, white lions, and cheetahs, each with separate fenced enclosures and fed a carcass or two at one o’clock each day.  A river area contained hippos and tigers.  In the main range, rhinos with huge horns rambled at leisure, with a plethora of ostriches, gazelles, elands, wild pigs, and the occasional zebra and giraffe.  A lovely day seeing the wilds.

Following that, we headed to the “Cradle of Humanity,” an archeological site where explorers discovered two of the “missing links” in the evolution of homo sapiens.  The tour includes a six-aisle museum, complete with artifacts and interactive video, followed by a forty-five minute climb through the cavern.  At each end markers note where the skeleton of one, and the skull of the other “link” lay, uncovered by archeologists, and from a platform one can see the current excavations continuing in the search for more fossils (so far plenty of animal and fish fossils, no more apes).  The cavern itself has little to offer in the way of beauty as, unlike most caverns I’ve seen in America, Europe, and China, South Africa didn’t prohibit the breaking off and collection of formations, so, consequently, tourists have broken of and collected all the stalactites and stalagmites, leaving a toothless mouth of stone scars.  Still, being in a chilly cavern brings, well, chills, and a fun hour of over-worldliness.

Home again and a bit later we drove out for dinner at a local deli, Shwarma Co, which specializes in pita sandwiches.  For ten dollars one gets a huge platter of chopped steak (or chicken), and a choice of five “salads” from an offering of forty.  I chose the eggplant, red and green peppers, Chinese miniature corn with cucumbers, tomato and onion, and sauerkraut.  I cut an entrance into the large round pita provided, and stuffed in as much as I could, adding a layer of that delicious white sauce every centimeter or two.  Yummy in the tummy!

Tomorrow Marilyn and friends take me on adventures in shanti town, Soweto and accompanied locations.

Philip










Blog 5 - Johannesburg

Blog 5:  African Trip

Saturday, September 27, 2014

On long journeys some days are devoted to travel.  The day began at 5:30 with distribution of the gifts to the orphans.  When I last visited Pastor’s orphanage in 2012 he had 13 orphans, mostly abandoned girls.  When he told me he now had 40 orphans, I presumed the majority gender remained female.  Wrong.  Most of the new charges, 21 of them, were street boys, homeless waifs now housed in a loving spiritual community.  The gifts I brought, though, were for female children, though one of the Gulfport Memorial Hospital nurses gave me two backpacks of boys clothing, so we had at least one item for each of them.  We also had some sunglasses from a big box of toys another nurse provided.  (Thank you for your generosity, my medical colleagues!).  We distributed the toys and female clothes as well.

Pastor and I left the orphanage at 6:45am, the car’s shock absorbers doing their best to absorb the shocks of the rutted, potholed road.  Our wheels spun repeatedly, sliding dizzily up the four-kilometer road, muddy from the welcomed rains.  Through Keumbu, west up the road to Kisii, then north again towards Kisumu, the countryside of rolling hills offered a flat savanna look, red muddy fields with little vegetation, interspersed by villages, these a run of a dozen concrete buildings, each grouping having one store brightly painted in lime by Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum, their logo prominently displayed.   Whenever plant greenery strived to survive near the roadside, a wiry teenage boy rested under a tree watching the handful of cows or goats he’d staked near the shoulder.  Roads had stretches of pavement, two lanes of black concrete, patched here and there, though more often spotted with treacherous potholes requiring traffic to swerve like drunkards.  The multi-passenger matatus raced past us, only to pull up a hundred yards ahead to eject a rider, pick up a new charge, and zoom ahead again.

We arrived in Kisumu about ten for my noon flight, and Pastor drove all the way to the Lake, that is, Lake Victoria, the largest in Africa.  When I visited in 2011 the lake’s level had fallen dramatically in the previous decade, a dozen feet I think.  However, this problem seems to have slowed, for today the level appeared unchanged, based on the docks of the surrounding buildings.  He hired a man who backed the car right into the lake, up to the level of the mid-hubcaps, and proceeded to hand wash the vehicle as Pastor and I climbed to a second level restaurant to relax and refresh.  Only a half dozen customers sat in the hundred-seating open-air platform, visited every ten minutes by vendors selling CDs, soapstone souvenirs, or electrical do-dads.  I gave the waitress 70 cents to have someone fetch me a paper as we waited on our fried tilapia.  We shared one, pulling off chunks of sweet meat and crisp skin with our hands, finishing it down to the skeleton and head in mere minutes.

He dropped me at the airport in plenty of time for the flight and I settled into my window seat.  Next to me sat down Janet, an American Burkitt Lymphoma researcher from Maryland.  She’d been at a 7a-7p all-week conference, tired and excited by the work she was doing and the joy of returning home.  I have no hesitation in starting up conversations with seatmates, often making new friends, like Janet, an added delight of travel.  In Nairobi I changed from Kenyan airlines to South African, with a clearly substantial upgrade.  Repeatedly voted the best African airline, I relaxed in cushioned seats savoring their tasty meal on this four-hour flight.  In a middle seat this time, I made acquaintance with both of my row-mates, introducing Lydia, a twenty-four year old Nairobian on her first ever air flight, to New York lawyer Steven Levin and his family on safari, so that the latter could lead the former through customs and on to their shared connections to Capetown.  After disembarking, in line waiting for Passport Control, I befriended a beautiful Persian lady who sells nutritional supplements for milk.  We exchanged cards and I’ll add her to my email list.  All over the world one can make friends and gain new perspectives of life.

My hostess for this part of my travels is Marilyn Bassin, a vibrant South African civil rights champion.  Her husband, Julian, a gynecologist, died unexpectedly last year, and with one twenty-year-old out of the house, she’s raising her other two teenagers as she pushes N.G.O.s to root out corruption and bring help to the incredibly poor and especially medically needy.  There will be much more of that in a later blog as I spend Monday traveling with her on her adventures in Soweta.  Accompanying her to retrieve me from the airport was her friend Dennis Tabakin, a septuagenarian with roots in the revolution, citing the people he worked with, famous names from those days, many dead, and some still living, such as Minnie Mandela (whose 78th birthday was yesterday).  The three of us traveled to downtown, through well-mannered streets, smoothly paved and brightly lit, a huge contrast from the dark and dirty wildness of Kenya’s.   At a huge three-storied mall, the stores all closed, each level hosted several diner-packed fancy restaurants in the vast central hallways, Marilyn leading us down the escalators and around the bends to the one she’d selected, ignoring Dennis’ recurring suggestions of alternatives.  “Morrows” offered fish, and Marilyn chose for me the sole, good for my soul, and provided by my waiter who claimed to be the sole-provider.   Delectable, served with fries, I picked up the tab for the table, at a price, including bottle of heady South African chardonnay, of only $60.  It turns out the South African rand has been losing value against the U.S. dollar lately, and everything here is about 30% cheaper than it would be in America.  Look out souvenirs!

We picked up her fifteen-year-old son and three of his friends at another shopping center, at ten-thirty pm done with their movie-going, and took them to the Jewish section where they all lived.  Each home and subdivision is surrounded by high electrical wired, spike-topped, stone walls, with metal gated watch-guarded entries.  Violent crime, and not-so violent crime, runs vibrant, so much so that on our next morning walk Marilyn wouldn’t let me bring my camera.  Dennis told a tale of a New York photographer who went into a bad neighborhood to take pictures and came out stripped to his underwear (Marilyn later told me the story was probably apocryphal).

The quiet elegance of Marilyn’s home unfolded in tastefully decorated abstract art, unique African wired sculptures, soft colors and comfortable furniture, including a dining table with seating for twelve.  The three happy dogs she’s rescued from abuse greeted us with doggy passion, and soon Marilyn had me settled into an upstairs bedroom, the patio door and window opened to the singing birds and cooling night air.

Tomorrow, Sunday, we have a day at the wildlife refuge. 

Philip



African Trip - Blog 4 - Keumbu Kenya

Blog 4:

Nairobi in daytime is brighter than Nairobi at night, perhaps the better to show the mud and grime.  Big cities certainly have advantages: opportunities, commerce, culture, social life, and entertainment. I enjoy visiting metropolises, though I live in little Long Beach Mississippi as I prefer the peace of a smaller town.  Jared and Francis met me for breakfast in the hotel lobby and afterwards Brian drove us through the traffic to the downtown bus station.  This is the first time I’ve traveled to Keumbu by air, the past three times I traveled there from Nairobi by bus.  In 2010 the only transportation was by matatu, the 14-seater van that took six to seven hours on medium poor roads.  By 2012 they had full size 50-seater luxury busses that made the trip in five hours on the paved two-lane highway. This trip to the bus station was to drop off my extra suitcase to ship to Kisii, the suitcase full of gifts for the orphans and some for the hospital.  After the usual expected bureaucratic challenges, we dropped off the suitcase and the men dropped me off at the airport in plenty of time for my 10:20 flight to Kisumu.

You may have noticed the tendency of towns starting with the letter K.  In Kenya, every name starts with K, M, N, or O (Obama for example).  At the hospital I always wondered how they kept their medical records straight, since they had no file cabinets, unreliable birthdates, changing names, and no social security numbers.  Yet, they always seemed to find the files they wanted.
  
The flight to Kisumu took thirty minutes, and the landscape change incredible.  Kisumu is a resort city on Lake Victoria, the landscape green and verdant, small farms and pretty white stoned buildings prominent on the descent.  The cloudless cartoon-blue sky brought late morning temperatures in the 80s, pleasant breezes as it took me five minutes to pick up my bags and step outside.  No Pastor.  Another twenty minutes, and still no Pastor.  I borrowed a phone and gave him a call.  Car trouble … he’ll be there.  So I sat outside and wrote on my blog and enjoyed the respite until he showed up.  He’d rented a small black hatchback to pick me up, no air conditioning of course, and we enjoyed the two-hour road trip over mostly paved roads towards Kisii Town.  

Kisii Town is the capital of Kisii County, one of about 20 or 30 Kenyan counties, each named for and with boundaries based on the original tribes. Kisii are friendly, happy, and peaceful.  When the 2007 riots occurred, following disputed elections, Kisii was one of the few counties without any violence of any kind.  The Kisii are an industrious people, laboring long hours, tolerate hardships with smiles, and are clever honest businessmen. Sidewalk vendors sell socks, backpacks, electric widgets, roasting corn, or stacks of oranges.  They are not artists.  They do not sell beads, drawings, sculpture, musical instruments, handmade toys, or books.  The walls of their businesses and homes have no photos of relatives, pictures of elephants, or clever witticisms.  No rugs decorate floors, no frills adorn light fixtures or footboards.  A checkerboard linoleum flooring is about as fancy as it gets. (Actually, Pastor’s main room does have some decorations: a lace head lining, a handful of photos, a calendar, and a map of Russia.)

We finally got into Kisii town at 3 pm, with our first stop at the bank where I gave Pastor $1500 to change into Kisii shillings to spend on the orphanage.  As I think I mentioned in a prior blog, 100% of the money from sales of my Ndovu and On a Mission books go to the mission.  Then we went to a restaurant Pastor wanted to try, a new one with an Indian sounding name.  A loud generator grinded outside and inside everything was dark.  The wall menu offered some awesome looking pizza and Indian food.  However, the reason for the generator was the lack of power.  They could only serve items not requiring cooking.  We elected to go elsewhere.

Across the street from this unsuccessful eatery stop, Pastor entered a wholesale distributor where he spent the $1500 on sundries.  We left the order with plans to pick up the supplies later.

Further up the hill we found Zonic Café a spot that used to be a cell phone shop.  Again, bare walls, they had a TV and two soft drink refrigerators, one each for Coke or Pepsi.  They had a big ice chest advising, “Eat Fish Today for Healthy Living,” so I was in the mood for fish.  They had no menu, and said the dinner choices were beef with rice, fish with rice, or chicken with rice.  We both ordered the fish.  The waitress left and came back in five minutes.  No fish.  We chose the chicken.  This is typical of Kisii restaurants.  They often have lovely elaborate menus, but don’t have anything on the menu available.  Eventually our plates came with a quarter roasted chicken (white for Pastor, dark for me), accompanied by rice, greens, and slaw (see the photo).  We ate with our fingers.

As we finished our meal, the weather changed. First wind, howling, bowling, buckling wind, bowing the ten-foot conifers nearly to the ground, creating flying missiles of plastic bags, Daily Nations, and fruit peels.  Then the rain.  Beginning with three-pound pellets smacking my shoulders like a bully’s greeting, proceeding to a deluge, overflowing the gutters and turning the mud roads into brown soup.  We struggled back to our car and drove through Noah’s wrath to the supermarket, watching the cobblestones tumble with the flood down the hill, smacking into their brethren at the base of the hill.  We dashed into the store, our shoes muddied, our clothing soaked.  (The Daily Nation is the most popular Kenyan paper.  80 cents an issue, at 120 pages, it’s full of amazing stories, such as murders, political corruption, sports news, and living features.  When I’m here I try to pick one up daily.)

Every visit I buy presents for the orphanage, what would seem necessities to us are luxuries that change their lives.  After paying to have electricity installed in 2011, in 2012 I bought Terry a two-burner electric range top, to get her out of the smoke filled out-building she used for cooking with coal.  Last year the burner broke and she was back into the outbuilding, breathing soot and relying on reused burnt charcoal to make fires for cooking.  Today I bought her a two-burner gas range top, (at Pastor’s request).  It cost $50 and will save her lungs and make cooking SO much easier.  I also bought her an electric kettle for quick liquid heating.  For Pastor I bought a DVD player.  Someone else had donated a television, and once back at the orphanage he hooked the DVD player up and delightedly put on one of the stack of Kenyan music DVDs he’d accumulated.  His Kenyan music, by the way, consists of religious tracts (he is a Pastor after all), in which groups of women in bright native outfits dance and sing praises to the Lord.  All songs are sung in Swahili, with English subtitles.

The rain had stopped by the time we checked out and we drove to the wholesale grocer where they began loading the purchases.  $1500 buys a lot of supplies.  There were dozens of toilet paper rolls, cartons of cooking oils, napkins, sugar, salt, and spices … you can imagine.  The trunk and back seat had no more room.  The grains will be delivered tomorrow, fifty-pound bags of flour, rice, and cornmeal.  With the car as stuffed as it could be, we headed down the road to Keumbu. 

When I first came in 2010 a pot-holed, terrain challenged road connected the two.  The third Kenyan president emphasized road building as part of his agenda, and by 2012 that stretch offered smooth asphalt, cutting the trip from about 50 minutes to roughly 20.  However, only the main road is so carpeted, and to get to Pastor’s place requires a 4-kilometer singe-lane dirt road hilly challenge, made slippery and messy by the rains.  He negotiated the course well, with only the occasional sideways spinning, and soon we pulled into the most amazing transformation!

In 2010 Pastor’s abode consisted of three buildings, the main home, a second structure for the girl orphans, and a small cooking shack.  He also had the use of his brother’s land next-door where the three male orphans lived in a small mud hut.  There was a well, but no running water and no electricity, and they counted on what they could grow to feed themselves: avocados, eggs, maize, bananas, and milk straight from the cows.  At one point, after I had paid to have electricity and plumbing installed, he told me, “You’ve raised us from poverty,” and there was some truth to that.  That spark has ignited a fire, and today his place is a beacon of achievement.  

Pastor began adopting orphans about 2008 when a homeless waif wandered into his church one day begging for food.  By the time of my 2010 visit he had nine, and by 2012 thirteen.  Today he has forty. I asked him how he got so many so quickly, and the answer was as complicated as the children’s cases.  The need is huge.  Because of its reputation as a safe haven, it’s a popular place where other churches refer their outcasts.  Some children just walked in.  Pastor picked up street children and took them home.   One came in after having been pistol-whipped, the bruises and cuts still bleeding.  At forty he had to call a halt, though if some leave, he replaces them.  They leave in different ways.  Two just disappeared, probably ran away.  Most finish eighth grade and are ready to go on with their “adult” lives.  Five have found sponsors to pay for them to go to prep-school (what we call high school) at a cost of $1400 a year.  If any of you readers belong to a church or charitable organization interested in intervening in a really good way, please keep Pastor’s orphanage in mind.  Seriously.  100% of any donation goes to the children, nothing for administration or advertising.  Even a few dollars a month would make a world of difference.   (Western Union, Pastor Robert Nyamwange, Kisii, Kenya.  If they ask for a test question use something with the answer – orphanage – or buy one of my books, whose sales go to the mission work).

I asked how he could possibly provide for all these children?  He told me donations come from local churches, and there are friends, like me, and from other volunteers who have come through.  Many of the volunteers are students.  The biggest problem is feeding the children.  Imagine you have forty mouths, three times a day, at thirty days a month, that’s 3600 meals a month.  Even at only 50 cents a meal, that’s still $1800 a month in food costs.  My $1500 donation helped for this month.

Pastor took me on the tour of his campus, showing incredible changes.  There’s a large boy’s building in the lower grounds, a huge new cowshed, a goat pen, several new chicken cages, holding 40 chickens, and a new rabbit pen.  A freshly created fishpond has 300 minnows, with projections to be ready-to-eat in four months. On the top of the hill they’re building a new home for the volunteers, one room will be a kitchen (currently Terry cooks in the hallway of the main building, which has 3 bedrooms, a main room, and a bath, total space about 800 sq ft).  This new building will have 5 rooms, 3 bedrooms, a bath, and the kitchen.  The foundations and early walls are present.  Unfortunately, just as I arrived they received bad news: the fellow who promised them $8000 to get them started on the building decided to only provide $2000.  Now they’re stuck, for the foundation, if left uncovered, will be destroyed by the rain. 

The biggest change is their water project.  I have no idea how he managed this, but Pastor raised 1 million shillings, about $12,000, to install a process that filters water from the creek, runs it to a collecting cistern for further cleaning, pumps it up the hill to the top of his property, where it’s chlorinated and changed into drinkable water for the whole camp.  As a side issue he created a walled spot next to the creek of filtered water for his neighbors who, until this time, merely filled their buckets from the community creek.  It must be true that God helps those who help themselves, for God has certainly blessed Pastor and Terry, and all their charges.

As we unloaded, out of the main house stepped a white face, the first I’d seen since leaving Nairobi, catching me completely by surprise.  Pretty Lebanese/American Mirna graduated college in Connecticut, and, working as a waitress, happened to overhear one of her customers talking about volunteering in Kenya.  She was intrigued, and now is on a six-week volunteer stay at Pastor’s, teaching at Terry’s school and helping around the house.  I’m occasionally asked by people reading my “On a Mission,” if I’ll take them with me to Africa.  I won’t.  However, you can come on your own here, and I’ll help you plan it.  It’ll cost you round trip airfare, (about a thousand dollars) and spending money.  Pastor will arrange for your pickup in Nairobi’s airport and you’ll live in the orphanage compound and have a truly life changing experience, including seeing as much of Africa on side trips as you can afford.  For example, a nice safari through wildlife country will run you about $500.  Or you might fall in love with Africa.  Brian, a mid-twenties business major also from Connecticut, came in May 2013 and sleeps with the boys, helping with all sorts of projects, and doesn’t have plans to return to the U.S. any time soon.

By the way, driving at night is pretty scary.  The streets are dark, pedestrians crowd the edges, matatus will weave past you and suddenly swerve to the side or out in front of you, as do motorcyclists, and the dirt roads are full of ruts and slippery patches.  One danger one doesn’t have is wild animals darting out in front of you.  People have killed them all off.  No deer, no rabbits, no squirrels.  No wild animals of any kind, except for the occasional bird.  “Really?” I asked.  “None at all?”  “Well,” Pastor granted, “perhaps an occasional snake.”

As we sat down to dinner, I handed Pastor a gift copy of my On a Mission.  I should have waited until after the meal, for he was too fascinated to eat.  A large part of the book is about him: his orphanage and his church, and of the 200 photos, a good portion feature people from his town he recognizes.  Great fun.  Our dinner fare included the typical Kenyan servings of boiled potatoes, lentils, rice, served on flattened maize cakes.  We haven’t had Ugali yet, the typical corn mash. We drank chai, the milk/tea combo served warm.  It’d been a long day and I drifted off to the sound of voices speaking Swahili at the other end of the hall.

I awoke the next morning and enjoyed breakfast of manosy, (three-cornered fried bread), sausage, and chai.  Temperatures of about 60 felt invigorating for a morning walk and picture taking, including my favorite subject here, the Keumbu market place.  I’m always amazed at how cheerful and bright are the people, their goods spread out on blankets or on a small table.  The salespeople sit there all day, hoping to make a couple hundred shillings, maybe $2. 

Later in the morning Pastor and I visited Emmanuel Light Academy, the school where Terry is headmaster, which means, I figure, they own this school.  When I last saw it, three years ago, it had 3 buildings to provide schooling for about fifty kids, grades one through eight.  Now there are three levels of preschool, and maybe 120 children in five buildings of classrooms.  Their school scores number one in the district of 53 schools, and, as can be seen by the photos, have happy determined students.  I asked them if they made a profit off the school.  Well … they could except they give free tuition to orphans, or, basically, anyone who asks, so they only have about 30% paying customers, just enough to make teacher salary and property rent.

We followed up that visit with a trip to the hospital.  When I arrived in 2010, Kesumu District Hospital was a level 3 (out of 6) and had three nurses and no physicians.  They had no running water, no x-ray, no surgical suite, a choice of twenty lab tests, 3 IV antibiotics, and one old rickety ambulance.  By 2012 they were still a level 3, had 7 nurses, one physician, a bore hole I had paid for, and associated running water, a half-built x-ray, a completed unused surgical suite, and the same lab tests and antibiotics.  They had had a better ambulance, though it was wrecked.  The people present in 2010 were roughly the same as those n 2012.  This year everything seems to have changed.  The hospital is now a level 5, a fancy new ambulance, a completed x-ray building and surgical suite, and a staff of two physicians and twelve nurses.  Everyone is new, the only remaining staff from the past I knew, Walter the pharmacist, Agnes the lab tech, and Matron the OB nurse, were all off duty.  The CEO, physician, medical records chief, central supply lady, head clinician … all the people I had known, were all gone.  I presented the gifts I had brought, medications, pulse oximetry, and a copy of my book, and they all went into a bottom drawer, probably only to be seen again on the black market.  A bit of a disappointment.  Neither the x-ray department or the surgical suite have been used.  I wasn’t given an opportunity to see or treat patients.  The well I had placed has collapsed, though the rest of the water supply works, so they have rain water from the system I set up and the new cistern and pump providing water for hand washing, the lab, the pharmacy, OB needs – everything but the kitchen, which needs cleaner water I suppose.  We did go out to get a picture of Pastor and me with our trees.  We planted the trees two-feet tall in 2011 and now, as can be seen by the photo they’re about 12 feet, providing shade and beauty, if little in the way of memory of what we did there. 

What makes a missionary?  One decides to go somewhere on a mission. One shouldn’t expect to change the world, to receive gratitude or even remembrance.  The sense of accomplishment is the reward.  I’ve traveled to rural Africa to help the people, setting processes in motion, water in the hospital, development in the orphanage.  Peter is one of the orphans I supported, and dedicated a poem to him in On a Mission.  Now he’s in prep school (see the photo).  David, Pastor’s son, I started supporting in 2010 and he’s now a senior in Prep school, thus a twelve grader.  He’s consistently in the top three in all his studies and will no doubt go on to university and great achievements.  Pastor told me the money I’ve given to the orphanage and the work I’ve done at the hospital have helped hundreds.  But what he’s most grateful for, what he believes has made the most difference in the world, is the education I provided for David.  This will be a lasting legacy.

Tomorrow I leave for Johannesburg.  It’s a full day of travel, leaving the orphanage at 7 am, driving to Kisumu, boarding the plane by 11, flying to Nairobi, changing planes and off to Johannesburg, arriving about 7pm.  There I’ll be met by Marian who has promised to take me on tour of some of her charity projects.  More on that in my next blog.

Philip