CMF Board Meeting

The CMF Board of Directors meeting finished today.  Here are a few highlights:

Rick and Nancy Jett of IDES (International Disaster Emergency Service) were the guest speakers. In the twenty years of partnership with CMF, IDES has contributed $567,996.74 to CMF projects. Both Rick and Nancy were surprised by the total, and so were we!  [...]

Old Friends

The last two weeks have provided quite an opportunity for Robyn and I to connect with several old friends.  We went to Trinity, Florida to be with Greg and Becky Johnson.  Greg and I go back to 1966 as missionary kids in Ethiopia.  We were later missionary colleagues in Kenya working among the Maasai, and [...]

Painting the Mother and Child Wing

The Cy-Fair Christian Church from Houston, Texas raised $50,000 to construct a new wing for the clinic at Ewaso Ngiro in Kenya. The clinic is home to the Maasai Health Services, and is part of a clinic system established primarily by the work of CMF International. The Cy-Fair Church had been involved with Maasai medical [...]

Kenya pipeline explosion

During my recent trip to Kenya I happened to be outside of Nairobi when the explosion occurred in the slums that killed more than 100 people.  The people were resident in a slum called Sinai.  Many of them lived on or in close proximity to a gasoline pipe line that had ruptured.  With gasoline flowing, many took [...]

CMF Wall of History

Wednesday was a super day!  This past year we renovated the CMF Mission Services Center.  We moved a few walls, replaced some of the art work and totally repainted the office.  Rather than one or two colors, we now have half a dozen colors in the various offices and cubicles.

One idea our design team [...]

CHE Training

This week we are offering training on CHE and are pleased that twenty-two people have come for the training, one from as far away as Colorado.  CHE is a kind of Christian version of ABCD, “Asset Based Community Development.”  (Actually, maybe I should have said that the other way around.)  As an organization, CMF partners [...]

Congratulations Allison!

This past week-end Robyn and I drove to Kentucky Christian University for the graduation of Allison Thwing.  She is the daughter of my cousin Patty, so I think this makes Allison my first cousin once removed or something like that.  It was a great family gathering with my aunt Louise and uncle Jerry, cousin LuAnn [...]

Chesnut Banded Plover

What a great day for birding!  We drove from Nairobi down through the Rift Valley, going south to Lake Magadi, one of the lowest points in inland Kenya.  When we lived in Loita you could see Lake Magadi from the Enguruman escarpment, but I had never been there.

The lake is well known in Kenya [...]

The Water of Life

Picture youself in a desert.  There are a few thorn trees, and a few date palm trees.  Other than that, desolate.  The inhabitants of this desert in northern Kenya are the Turkana people, a nomadic people who have herds of goats and a few camels.  They do not stray far from their traditional culture.  They [...]

African Mother

When we were on our first furlough, back in 1983-84, Robyn attended some college classes at Fullerton Junior College.  One of the classes was in poetry.  She wrote the following poem, one of my favorites.  She was encouraged to enter the poem in a contest for a local newspaper, and she won!  I think she [...]