Old and New Friends

Well it’s still VERY warm … the last four days have brought cloud cover and the occasional glimpse of potential rain clouds but, at this point, there is still no rain! Eighteen months ago they planted a little box hedge outside the front of our house, in the shape of H & K. Sadly, like the rest of H&K, it too is distinctly wilted and withering. Today Terry took to his bed for the morning because he woke up with dizzy spells and looked half-drunk as he walked across the compound to the latrines (which is a shame because he’s been pretty much tea-total for the last 13 years.) We also have two male members of staff off sick with malaria, Enoch our janitor and Joseph our carpenter. Joseph, in particular, is a conscientious, strong and fit man so it’s a serious indication of the strength of this particular malaria for him to be laid low and not make it to work. Millie our social worker probably shouldn’t be here either but ‘she’s a woman and a mother’ so she is soldiering on, sticking to desk duties ….. currently covering dozens of new textbooks for the upper school.

It still feels like a drought. We have now used up nearly all 47,000 litres of rain water from our roof harvest tanks and even the bore hole has to be pumped for shorter periods of time as the sensor at the bottom of the hole has indicated that it is not being replenished as quickly as it normally would. Just watering the kale that we harvest and eat, on almost a daily basis, is becoming a serious challenge. We appreciate  there’s a lot of people back home desperate to see the rain disappear but we are also desperate for it to make a reappearance here!

However, on a more positive note we have enjoyed the reappearance of our friends and fellow missionaries, Ian and Hilda, McMillan. Over the last six years they have come to H&K eight times, the first time in June 2007 for just 48 hours and on the last three occasions for stays of up to eight months. During their time here they have worked in a very supportive role with our church pastors  Kennedy and Dorine and spent a lot of time visiting the homes of our church members. They have also made themselves available, during the long evenings, to the children who live in the Home - to help them experience more of a ‘normal’ family life …. spending time in small groups sharing board and card games, doing creative crafts, simply watching a film or preparing a Saturday supper or making a treat to share with everyone - like popcorn or welsh cakes. As you can probably imagine, everyone is very happy to see them back again. In fact, on their first night, Hilda treated everyone to a supper of sausage butties (you can’t buy them locally and we don’t have a fridge so you have to buy them and cook them the same day) and genuine Scottish shortbread to eat with their chai (tea)! Sadly, this time, Ian and Hilda are here for only 3 months. The reason they will leave so soon is because they will be returning to Paisley before the end of May, in anticipation of a very special and exciting event, the arrival of their first grandchild. We are all very happy for them but will need to make sure that we make the most of appreciating them whilst they are still here!

In about three hours’ time we will be welcoming brand new visitors to Hope and Kindness, Robin and Janet Fenner and their 17 yr old daughter Kyla. Robin is a Bible College teacher and Janet has excellent IT skills to share. Their daughter is also doing a long distance IT course. They have been in Nairobi for the last month but today they are doing the long, hot and, in places, very, very dusty and bumpy road journey to Kosele. Kosele doesn’t have very much in common with Nairobi apart from the fact that they are both in the country of Kenya! I’m not sure how much they know about us here or what they are expecting to find, but they are visiting for at least a month and we are really looking forward to having them stay. We hope that it will be a time of mutual blessings for all of us … in just the way God always planned His Kingdom to be. Will close now as we always want to look our best when visitors first arrive …    Continuing to pray for all of you there and for an imminent reversal in all our weather forecasts!

It Ain't Half Hot

Did I mention it was HOT!!! Like most people, I love sunshine, in the past I have been accused of being something of a sun worshipper …. bright, blue skies do it for me! But I’m beginning to wonder if it really is possible to have too much of a good thing! I’ve just been on the internet for the weather forecast, to establish the true temperature, and it says it will continue to be between 30 and 35 degrees for the coming week with no sign of a rain cloud coming from anywhere. Interestingly enough this particular site also includes a ‘feels like’ temperature which suggests that most of the time it will feel more like 32 to 38 degrees!

I guess the issue is that this would be a real treat if we were on our holidays … but we’re not and nor are our children or any of our neighbours … all of whom also agree that right now it is VERY hot! I know that back in the UK, a spell of hot weather generally creates a challenge in schools for both the concentration and energy levels of the pupils and the teachers (very few school buildings were ever designed or equipped to manage our more extreme weather conditions.) I also know that if we are blessed with sunny and hot during the last weeks of the summer term, it is not uncommon for the break times to grow a little longer. Here in Kenya it looks like we are in for more than a spell of just one or two hot sunny weeks. January is the beginning of their school year and there is no time to be lost in pushing on with the syllabus and addressing the needs of some of the children who already struggle with their learning. By mid-morning, walking into some of our classrooms is like walking into an oven - now I can really empathise with one of my all-time favourite story characters … The Gingerbread man! Most of my days are split between the classrooms and a small, stuffy office (iron sheet roofs are just not conducive to producing cool buildings.) I usually wear a loose fitting skirt and a sleeveless T-shirt and I can easily get a ‘wet’ (though not cold) drink and yet …. I’m still pretty uncomfortable. But I’m also very fortunate. For our neighbours it is very hard to find any kind of paid work. What work there is, usually involves some kind of labouring on buildings or the land. This week we’ve had men moving and flattening the mountain of soil that came from digging the foundations for our latest set of classrooms. They have also been digging up and placing retaining stones in order to create the stone path that we will be needing in the coming months - when the rains return and I stop complaining about heat and dust and moan instead about the wet and the mud! These guys are wearing their long trousers and their usually oversized T-shirts and they are working really hard, out in the sun, from about 8:30 through till 4:00. Every morning (to quote a song from a famous musical) they seem happy to greet me and even smile and laugh while they work …. but I still find it hard not to feel bad that they have no choice but to do this really tough work, irrespective of the weather and the temperatures.

As well as the high temperatures, everyone here has to contend with the dust! Some people sound like they’re suffering from a heavy winter cold but in actual fact they are simply congested by the amount of dust that is thrown up into the air from the vehicles that travel along the dirt road in front of our home and school. I remember the first January we were here, back in 2003, when the playing field for our children was right by the side of the road. I would lie in bed at night listening to the children coughing, the kind of cough that sounded like it would never stop and yet the child seemed to somehow sleep through. As soon as the rains returned, the coughing went away.

So, without doubt, this is the DRY season and yet, contrary to past experiences and what I thought was the pattern for mosquitoes, this last, very dry month has seen a serious outbreak of strong malaria. Right now we have three members of our staff and three of the staff’s children, in the local hospital being treated for dehydration and the other unpleasant side effects of malaria. Every day, for the last month, we have had anything between five and ten of the school children come to us with symptoms of malaria. They come to you complaining of a headache, they have a high fever and feel shivery and when they try to eat or drink they soon find themselves vomiting. Sometimes they can be treated with a course of tablets, between one and three big tablets (depending on their size/age) twice a day for three days. But with some of them, the symptoms come on so fast that they are unable to keep the tablets down and they have to receive a course of injections over three days. This is hard because, instead of resting and recovering peacefully at home, they are forced to take three long walks to the local dispensary.

According to some of our staff who were visiting others in the hospital, there is currently a conspiracy theory going around to suggest that it is the Americans (leading all the research on malaria and possible future cures and treatment) who are responsible for this unusual outbreak. The theory is that they have introduced a new species of mosquito that likes to come out in the dry season … just so that they (the Americans not the mosquitoes) can still make money when the rainy season mosquitoes have been eradicated! Seriously though, malaria remains a big problem in this part of Kenya. As I sit here at my desk, trying to resist scratching the more than half a dozen bites that I‘ve just received on my legs and ankles, I can’t help but think of that famous quote from Anita Roddick the founder of The Body “If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.”  At the risk of sounding like an advertisement for mosquito nets, the facts remain that there are still more than half a million people who will die this year because of malaria . 90% of them live in Sub Saharan Africa (which includes Kenya) and most of them will be children under the age of 5 yrs. Even after all the great work to get nets out into peoples’ homes, it is estimated that less than 5% of the children are sleeping under any type of insecticide treated nets. The reasons for this are many. For most, their homes have just one simple partition. One third of the house space is allocated to a sleeping room and storage and the other two thirds is used as a simple living room. It is very rare for children here to have a bed of their own let alone their own room. In reality, most children sleep on an assortment of mats or wooden sofas or chairs in the area that is the day time ‘living space.’  Purchasing and arranging nets to cover every member of the family is not a simple affair and, because it is dark by 7:00pm, most of us are still up and active (not hiding under our nets) at a time when the mosquitoes, like the ones living under my desk, wake up hungry and ready to bite! The bites can be unbearably itchy but that is nothing compared to the misery that malaria brings. We have said many times that “Kosele is a really tough place to live in.” The children grow up pretty tough and it is very rare that you will see any one of them cry. But in this last week, as children have come to the office to tell us they are sick, I have seen a lot of big, silent tears trickle down their faces. Back in England, at my last school, a sick child would be taken to the office where he or she would receive sympathy, kindness and lots of reassurance from our lovely school administrator, Mrs Milward. She would phone their parent and either mum or dad or grandma or granddad would usually appear within the hour to take them home (if necessary via the doctors surgery) to the comfort and love that we all need when we’re feeling poorly. But many of the children in our school have only one parent, most don’t have any. The relatives they stay with struggle to meet the basic needs of their families on a ‘good day’ (i.e. when no one is sick.) So, just like every other day, when the children here are sick, they take themselves home. When they reach home they will simply curl up in a corner of the room and hopefully sleep until the worst of the sickness passes. No chicken soup, no curling up on the sofa in front of the T.V., no sweet sweeties to take away the taste of the nasty medicine, no mum to just sit and cuddle and be with them. Please pray that this latest outbreak of malaria soon disappears, that there are no fatalities amongst the children here or in the homes of our neighbours and that each one of us here, working under the name of “Hope and Kindness,” will not miss the chance to speak a kind word or demonstrate some simple TLC to a child that needs to know God’s care and love.     

Eeeeehhhhh, after the initial eeeek moment as the first splashes of cold water hit your warm dry skin, a cold shower under starry Kenyan skies is a real treat at the end of a hot and sunny Sunday. And ‘Yes,’ you would be right in guessing that it’s NOT raining here (I’ve just looked at the BBC UK headlines and seen that the rain is still falling on most of you!) If it wasn’t so tragic for those caught up in the worst extremes you would have to say it’s kind of funny that everyone back home is praying for the rain to stop whilst everyone here is desperate for it to start! To be fair, we haven’t actually started the official rainy season yet and I’m sure many people here will also be praying that they don’t get the volume of rain that they had for their first growing season last year- when the fields became so water logged the new plants simply rotted in the ground.

As many of you will know, after more than ten years of having to be satisfied with just two short visits a year (and sometimes even less than that), God has been kind enough to allow me a second chance to return for a much longer stay. Although we’ve only been back for four days I cannot describe just how good it feels to be here and to have the time to think and to pray before I rush off to ‘fix’ and to ‘do’ the ‘busy stuff!’ Those of you who know me well will know that I am, by nature, much more of a Martha than a Mary (see Luke10:38-42). For everyone else’s sake as well as my own, I am hoping that this will become my season for being more like Mary!

Having said that, a lot of the things that made me so ‘busy’ in my last two short trips do appear to be bearing fruit and the Home feels like the very happy place I remember when the children were all very small (the majority of our children had become teenagers and it was important for us to find positive ways of adjusting to that fact!) I’m hoping that tomorrow we will see the same positive experience in both of the schools. Unfortunately, because of a few personal family issues and the government’s practise of last minute ‘teacher absorption’ (it takes about 5 years for newly qualified teachers to be offered a post in a government/public school) we began the year with four less teachers than we had when the school closed last November. I guess it was what you call ‘a baptism of fire’ for our Head Teacher Madame Josephine – she had only agreed to step into the role at the end of last year! Fortunately she resisted the temptation to run away and, even though she was competing with many other local head-teachers who were facing the same predicament, she was able to successfully recruit replacement teachers before the beginning of the second week. We have already had one day of teacher training with them and are very optimistic about the year ahead.

Tomorrow I’m heading for the ECD Class (the equivalent of a combined nursery and reception class,) without doubt the best and most important class in any school. Though we’ve had some very famous names through our school so far, names like Princess Diana, Vladimir Putin and Will Smith ….. I think tomorrow could top all of them when I finally meet our new children two of whom are little boys called Barak Obama and Fidel Castro! How awesome is that!