I can swim, well, really I can float and simultaneously kick my feet and move my arms. That may technically be swimming but when Iwatch people that can really swim, even my 8th grade son’s swim team, I realize just how pathetic what I call swimming and what they do really is. Today was the first day to change that. Today was my first day of taking a master’s swim class and it was hard to find the serenity of the whole sport when you are trying NOT to breathe in water. This morning was a morning of many firsts….. up at 4:30am to go swim, wearing my tri shorts, that I got so that I can swim and bike and run in the same pair of pants, as a swimsuit, taking goggles out of the package and trying to fit them on my head and eyes, trying to watch the other swimmers at 5am so that I could not look like such a newbie, not finding a regular clock on a wall to tell me the current time versus elapsed time and trying to read swim jargon off of a white board like 4x 25, IMO and other cryptic symbols reserved for the people that have been swimming/training for more than one day. In the end…. I was better at the end of the hour than at the first part. I only tried to inhale underwater twice (both times were unsuccessful) and I didn’t need to be rescued out of the water, so it was a great start I’d say.

And then we began a conversation that covered the next couple hours. Pastor Chad was a man of strength that came from a different background than me but his heart to reach out to others was the same as mine. His calling was to the very mission field he once was a citizen of, the streets. Ministering to a group of people that sadly most churches would frown on if they entered through the front doors was his calling. So, Pastor Chad did what he was called to do, he created a church whose doors were open and through that obedience he has been a part of many remarkable life transformations.

I could have sat quietly in my own quiet corner of that Starbucks but I met a man called to serve Jesus Christ, had a great conversation, and was encouraged to always be obedient to where and what you are being called to do.

Thanks Pastor Chad

Chinese teen sells kidney to pay for iPad

 

What do you do when you have two kidneys and zero iPads? Sell a kidney, of course—you only need one anyway.

A 17-year-old boy in China fessed up to his mother that he hocked a kidney on the black market for about $3,000 in order to get money to purchase an iPad 2. The boy found his organ buyers through an online advertisement and traveled to a hospital in the city of Chenzhou in Hunan Province for the operation.

“When he came back, he had a laptop and a new Apple handset,” his mother told a Chinese television station, showing off the boy’s bright red surgery scar, “I wanted to know how he had got so much money and he finally confessed that he had sold one of his kidneys.”

 

I was up at 7am and in the shower ready to take on the day, until around noon when it was time to kick back and sleep for a couple hours. But then, I was back up and ready to take on the second part of the day.

Other than laughing hard at the odd masked character on the season premiere of the Bachelorette and feeling like I’d pop a stitch – (yep, I watched the whole two hours and kept thinking that surely that dude was going to take off his mask). I did pretty good. I’m trying to move into a regular routine as best as I can and I’ll continue that tomorrow.

But tomorrow will not be just another Tuesday, or even a Tuesday that comes just 5 days after a kidney was removed, it will be a hard day to say goodbye for a final time to Jack – who is finally free from his cancer at the age of 9. But he had to die in this world to be free from it. I’ve had the opportunity to know the family for many years starting way back with their first trip to the Lighthouse Family Retreat and I’ve seen them at other times like when I got to take his picture with his sister and Santa at the CURE/Cup Of Joy Christmas party. Jack was full of life and I hope to touch as many people in my life as he did. He will be terribly missed. His celebration of life is tomorrow, May 24, at 4pm at Buckhead Church in Atlanta, GA.

I have been prayer through these many weeks that God would use this story to bring honor to His name and not my own. This journey has created several conversations with medical staff personnel that are interested in the donation. Since I did not know her, it was called an altruistic donor, and it created a bit of interest. I have been humbled by the outpouring of support and prayers and am grateful for them all and for you all.

I will be down at Emory at 6am and right now the surgery is scheduled for around Noon. It will take about 3 hours and then who knows how long for recovery to make it back to be admitted into a room at the hospital. A 5star room I am sure. And tomorrow night will probably be a pain in the “side” I guess. Friday and Saturday to be back up on my feet moving around and maybe discharged from the hospital Sunday (Saturday if I’m lucky – I do have grass to mow). Anyway, I wanted to send a quick note and say that I definitely appreciate your prayers for Peggy who will receive my kidney and for me and my family.

Talk to you soon.

Up at 1am so I can call home at a reasonable time back in the US (6pm). Robin and I talked and shared a few minutes together. We talked about the drought here in Kenya and the flood and resulting road and school closings. 8,000 miles apart and worlds apart. Quick breakfast at the Sportsman’s Arms (I brought my own instant grits and oatmeal to compliment the food), checked out after our one night stay, and headed back to Segera to finish up a few things. As we turned off of the main road toward the mission, two small children were waving us down for a ride. They were in their school uniforms and were obviously late for school. I would guess that they were still about 3 or 4 miles away from the school when they climbed into the car with us. It was probably around 9am and Andrew had said that they would leave around 6am to begin walking to school. After a couple questions we learned that Gladys was their teacher and that they were neighbors and one was about 4 and the other 5 years old. I don’t know what kind of picture comes to mind if you let it consider letting your preschooler out of the house for a 4 hour walk to school. But this is as common here in Africa. When we rolled in I noticed my good friend James who was the concrete foreman leading the concrete flooring job we did at the Eilile school back in June. And then as I was getting out of the car, his brother Alfred, the one I had worked  so closely with, came up and gave me a big hand shake and a hug. This kid did the work of four or five of us back in June and never broke a sweat. It is always a huge pleasure of my to run back into friends when I revisit communities but it means the world to me that they recognize me. It always reminds me of how important relationships are and teaches me to never take them for granted. Alfred told me that he had been working at Black Tank where the water pump was and they were building a house and putting up the necessary framing to house the solar panels that would run the pumps that were now being run from generators. I noticed a mzungu at the mission and went to meet him. Scott was from Charleston, SC and works for a construction firm there. An opportunity came up for a three month volunteer assignment with Water Missions International to work on projects in Kenya, including ours and he was finishing up his last week on this project. Scott and I talked for a bit, enough to find out that he is a Clemson graduate  as well but the dates differ between his graduation and mine by 19 years, ouch! Seriously, I don’t feel that old but when you do the math it just creeps me out. Before our final staff meeting, I wanted to venture down to the shallow well again to see the progress. I was joined on my walk by a  little girl of about 10 in her school uniform and carrying her gerry can.  Two guys that were working on it were walking my way but when I asked about it, they turned around and wanted to show me. This hole was just about a perfect circle from top to bottom and I am just amazed at how you accomplish something like that by hand. The guys lowered a five gallon bucket and hauled up  some “life giving” water to fill the little girl’s container and she turned to be on her way. The guys’ English was about as good as my Swahili so the conversation and understanding between us was not very good. They interpreted my question of how they dug below the water line as a request for a demonstration and one guy sat on the edge of the top of the hole, stretched out his legs to reach the other side and as if he was lowering himself to sit on a chair, he was suspended in the hole, back against one side and legs extended with feet firmly planted against the other side and began “walking” himself down this hole. It was no simple feat but he made it look easy. When he reached the bottom he was standing in a few feet of water and started showing me how he would dig from the sides and bottom while the guy up above would hoist out the water and loosened soil. We finished in the “upper room” at the mission with the staff and prayers and left – headed back to Nairobi and the Heart Lodge. But on the way, we had two stops to make. One was out to Black Tank to see the progress of the solar panels and housing that Alfred and James along with Chris and Scott were working on. And I got to see the pump working to pump fresh clean water out and the people coming from out of nowhere to fill up their buckets and head back out into what we would call a vast landscape. I met the man that lived right beside the pump on a previous trip and now he was eager to come and shake our hands as an unspoken “thank you” for the water that was pumping out of the ground. We checked out the house, great concrete work, and the tank stand and the welding that was going on on top of the house that would hold the solar panels. Scott said that they would be pumping from the power of the solar panels tomorrow but we’d already be in Nairobi. We left and I said good bye again to my friend Alfred and we headed to our second stop, the community of Karigoto. There is a water pump here as well and a sand filter was recently installed so we got to see that. We walked to the sewing training facility on one side of the road where a teacher was working to train local women on making school uniforms with the knitting machines. Across the street, we saw other women that had graduated the training program and were making the uniforms. They would make the pieces, like sleeves, and those pieces were handed off to another lady with a sewing machine that would assemble them into the final product. The community recommends the poorest women in the community for the work that would otherwise not have any means for an income to feed their family. They are looking for more machines and that will be an ongoing project to obtain funding for the machines as a micro-enterprise project for this area. The road back to Nairobi always seems longer than the road out for some reason and we were in the final miles of making it back to the Heart Lodge, the same place we had just left the day before. The traffic slowed and we assumed it was a crash of some sort up ahead as the cars divided some to the left and some to the right of what was in the road. Kurt was the first to say that it might be a body. As it turned out, that is what it was. a body lay still in the middle of the road with many people surrounding it so that it would not be disturbed. I don’t know what happened to cause the accident, but the result was pretty clear. We continued in a somber mood in one direction away from the body as the emergency vehicles were making their way through the traffic toward it. A few feet down the road from the accident, people were unaware of the accident and continued as normal. I was reminded of the funerals of my father and nephew and that as our procession drove by house, people and shops, people went about their lives while ours had been devastated. Life is fleeting.  But both the impact of a life and their death can be felt for a long time after we are gone.  What impact for God’s kingdom will we make while we are here?We reached the Heart Lodge within 30 minutes after that.

This was the first time I would eat dinner at Heart Lodge. We were met by Charles who we had a chance to meet back in April before my family was moved to the overflow house. And now another friendship and recognition was displayed when Charles saw me again. We went back to the same rooms we had left the day before and waited for dinner. Power was out and I debated whether to shower in the near dark or run the risk of taking one in complete darkness if the power did not get restored. In the time it took me to debate myself the dinner bell was literally rung calling all guests to dinner. In typical family fashion, we waited for everyone to join before we asked the blessing together and lined up to fill our plate with carrots, broccoli, fried fish, rice and a strawberry pie for after the meal. I met Jessica, a writer for Business Weekly. She had come on her own by securing some grant money to do a story about the land in Africa that is being bought for farm land by other countries that did not have land of their own. Africa was being sold off to foreigners as farmland. I had heard that China was doing this a lot but her research found that the biggest purchaser in Kenya was the middle east, where oil money was plentiful but farmland was not. Oh, I forgot to mention that on the road between Nairobi and the Segera mission I noticed signs for rice production and for sale and sure enough there was an area that was farming rice. I always knew that the land was rich enough to grow anything here but rice surprised me. I can understand why someone or some country would find it attractive for purchasing. I also got to meet Vickie Winkler the founder of Heart based out of California and the owner of Heart Lodge. She had many stories of how she had been involved in getting recognition and funding for her ministry serving others with HIV/AIDS and helping prevent it through education. She was a joy to meet and listen to and was filled with much wisdom and offered plenty of great advice. She is one of those people that you could just sit and talk to for a long time and be enriched on many levels just by being in her presence. She even had hotel recommendations for The White Sands in Mombasa and The Big Tree in Masai Mara. We said our good nights and headed back to our rooms. Power had been restored so my shower was lit and I laid across the bed and faded off to sleep. It had been another long day. 

N the social world that we live n it is not uncommon to feel like I need to update FB and TWIT so others can stay n touch with me. (10)

It is a way to stay in communication with one another without actually having a conversation. (47)

It’s a blurb – a blast into what’s going on. (95)

It’s a question tossed out into the digital media hoping for a response from someone that might respond. (36)

It’s any number of things that the sender is trying to get across but anything other than a deep conversation that evokes an ongoing meaningful relationship. (-17)

How would my marriage work if we only communicated in 140 character sentences? (62)

How could I ever expect the relationship to grow, blossom, be fulfilling if I was just shooting out little blurbs out every now and then? (3)

Then why have my prayers tended to go that route? (91)

Could I excuse it by saying that I want to pray unceasingly? (1 Thess 5:17) (65)

Or is it more likely that I just don’t have time to sit, be still, and pray? Ouch!  (58)

The British Airways flight was smooth and the landing in Nairobi was on time. I was the fourth in line at the “buy your VISA here” line and British Airways had already given us all the forms needed at the airport so I was in line and through the line quickly. I headed to the currency exchange counter since everyone was at the baggage claim carousel and exchanged a few dollars walked to the carousel and found my bag already traveling the familiar belt at the Nairobi airport that it has seen so many times before. I retrieved my bag and headed through customs greeting the customs agent a heartfelt “Jambo” and headed out to meet Kurt and Andrew. The air was crisp and quiet and there was not much traffic on the road so the ride to the Heart Lodge was quick. We passed one accident in one of the round-a-bouts and it made me wonder after seeing so much chaos in these “circles gone mad” that I haven’t seen more accidents. Joash (biblical king of Judah at the age of 7 – I always find it amazing the Christian names the Africans take for themselves when they are saved) greeted us and carried my bag to my room. Kurt and I talked about the Tuesday schedule and headed to bed. After sorting through my stuff and setting the alarm for 5:30am Tuesday, my eyes were racing my mind to sleep and they won and I drifted off to sleep. It seemed like a very long and deep sleep and I woke up ready to start the day until I saw that watch “laugh” as it displayed 1:11am. So I rolled over and went back to sleep, I even had a full dream. Not one of those snippets of a dream where you wake up somewhere before the ending of the dream. I had a full dream and the watch showed that only 12 minutes had passed. I would do this  another 4 times before 2am ever came and between that and 4am my eyes were definitely more open than they were closed Now that it had reached 4am, it signaled the birds in the area to swoop down and broadcast their voices. One of them sounded like the “caw” of an eagle, it was loud and screeching and he would screech three times and then rest for a few seconds then start the triplet screech again. In an effort to conserve water the water pumps were only turned between 5:30-8:30am but when I tried to turn on the shower – it was not giving up any water so I used some bottled water and washed my hair and face in the sink and just about the time I had my face and head soaped up – the pumps started and the water started running in the shower. So as I was hearing about extreme flooding back home in Atlanta including downtown roads and local school closings, here I was trying to take as short of a shower as I could to conserve water in an area that is suffering from drought. Not like we’ve “suffered” in past years from drought where we could only water on odd or even days or boat docks had to be let out further into the lake because of the water lever. I’m talking about drought conditions that are causing deaths due to the life that water brings for crops, herds, people all in that circle of life. It’s just hard to believe. Can’t we seed the clouds or something like the Chinese were trying to do for the Olympics? This is more serious than the Olympics! 

A quick breakfast and we headed out for the Segera mission. We stopped at the Sportsman’s Arms hotel in Nanyuki and dropped our bags and picked up pastor David Sigili who would travel with us. 

When we arrived, we greeted everyone and would soon gather for a staff meeting but we went down to see the river on the mission property. On two prior trips this year the river was flowing, down but flowing, but now it was dry. Dry! It was sad to see. The timing of the recent repair of the nearby Black Tank water pump/bore hole repair was all too evident. Where the river had been the only source of water for quite a distance since the pump had not been working, now it was the other way around and the pump at Black Tank was now the only water source around.

In order to help get water on the mission property, though, they were digging a shallow well by hand and I was curious to see it. They had reached the water table and now needed  or wanted to go 10 feet below that but how do you dig underwater? It sounds like a riddle but the simple reply was – hold your breath. As crazy as that sounded though I wasn’t prepared for the size of the well. I was expecting some sort of hole that would allow for someone to maneuver as they dug but this hole was not much wider than the 5 gallon bucket they were lowering into the hole to withdraw some of the water. How in the world could someone be lowered into the hole and work to dig it out? That is something I am going to have to see to believe – maybe tomorrow.

The cool breeze at Segera, the kids in their uniforms attending school and the people lined up for medical help at the clinic reminded me of the oasis that this mission is and how thankful I still am that Pappy originally built this place to serve this area. What a blessing and I pray that it always will be!