Monthly Archives: June 2013

Teacher Lectures – Saturday (Return from Machakos)

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Hey Peeps! Todd here – I will leave you a brief instruction and clarification on my last post.  The Loitoktok day 1 is first, Loitoktok is (I believe) second but the continuation is in the reply/comments.

Sorry, novice blogger at work!

Yes,  M&J, I too will look forward to dinner with you all as well – thanks for the note.

Yes, we are a bit disappointed with our ability to keep you all up to the latest happening and events. If we were blogging while we were riding on the bus. . . . there would be reams of blog pages to review!  But this is East Africa, things are a different pace, smell, connection – and the nature of these sorts of things is adaptation and adjustment and flexibility.  Some of us are better, all of us are learning.   🙂

We pray for Linda(we miss her and know she misses being here), for the connected debrief of our team over this weekend, for the passage of info from our teachers to the BOH teachers, continued health, for management of our expectations on return trip and after.

We are thankful for the cohesiveness of the team, the sharing of tasks, for our health (even with little coughs, gut stuff, headaches – nothing appears to be lasting) for our understanding of these people, for the blessed light that BOH is in so many ways right here (number of people touched, consistent approach by the teachers and health workers, effectiveness of the triad of managing and teaching health, vocational training, education of their children – to start the list).  We are thankful and blessed for All the people who bless us and enable us to be here.

I understand as well that this afternoon and evening (Nairobi time) that there will be a nice down load of pics – but I wish we could just sit and tell you about the context of each of those pics! The People in those pics! Our collective impressions/perspective of those stories.  ( I reserve the right to be wrong about that tidbit if the pics somehow don’t materialize – aka read “failed wifi!” ) Note to self “is there a solution for next year’s team?”

Yesterday’s clinic was slow to come together. Bumping up the mountain in the district of Machakos – it was dusty.  God blessed us with an amazing driver – we had taken a wrong turn . . . does one ever plan to take a wrong turn? . .  .   .    .     the ‘road’ narrowed perceptively and with it the steepness of the mountain was many hundreds of feet down with just peering out the window.  Quite disconcerting, but Anthony (our driver) was right on it – took the next opportunity to turn around – Think for a moment – the road is Just wide enough for the tires, the Body  of the bus is hanging Over huge washout on the uphill side (read ‘hole’) and Over the edge of the washed out road on the Downhill side . . . Whew.  A little y-turn and we get to go back up that road. The y-turn involved a fully loaded bus spinning dual rear tires backing up a considerable hill! Go Anthony!  Btw, he got to do that again to get on to the correct road once we had traversed the one lane washed out road with cliff sides . . . . We made it.  4:30 pm Lunch.  Still have to set up the clinic . . .   🙂   . . . flexibility . . . bending our western thinking and priority of lists and a time schedule to work . . . here.  We are working together.  PTL.

– Todd

A Few Days In

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“If you leave here having learned only how deep your ignorance is you’ve probably had a good trip”

This was a comment that I (Tyler) heard in our group today, and after only 2 and a half days here I have to say that I agree.  I’m not sure what American assumptions have been hiding in my mind, but I am sure that most if not all of them been defied in our short time here. Continue reading →

Loiotoktok Clinic Day 1

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Hey Peeps!
Todd here to write in place of one of our Teachers as they are on the hot seat at BOH school.

Yesterday was astounding, precious, cool, hectic, intense, (how many more word)…. Seeing 712 people in the clinic. But, alas I get ahead….we had arrived Monday afternoon after long somewhat harrowing haul through Kenya south. We arrived to meet our hosts….greetings are special times in this culture and our ‘monochromatic’ team was somewhat brought up short feeling the pressure to get the tasks ahead of us started…..with seeming little time to be had available. After greetings we had tea (recall this is a British colony) and more greeting and meeting. Lovely. 🙂 Continue reading →

Hello from Nairobi!

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Hi everyone! I’m sorry about the brief update before, but hopefully this will work better 🙂
We got into Nairobi airport late Friday night, and had a bit of a scare when we were waiting for our luggage…and waiting…and waiting… But it turned out that they were just on a different carousel! We knew God was watching over us when we saw all that luggage gathered up: THIRTY SIX BAGS IN ALL!!! We were allowed 2 extra checked bags each (thank you, British Airways!) to bring books, art supplies, medical supplies, and stuffed animals. Continue reading →

Learning and Preparing

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We have had lots of meetings and get-togethers in preparation of our journey.  One of the things we’ve been blessed with is a team member who is pretty well versed in HIV and the AIDS virus.  Todd put on a great presentation for us on May 18.  What made it even better was the humor he snuck in 🙂 pictured is a photo of his sweet Basset Hound! I think his name is cowboy, but I’m probably wrong! Continue reading →