What a privilege for me to be asked to teach Maasai church leaders, nearly 25 years after leaving work with the Maasai in Kenya and Tanzania! The class I was asked to teach was on the subjects of Missions Trends and Leading a Missions Agency. The Maasai church, with some 100 congregations in the Community Christian Church of Kenya, is interested in sending missionaries. They desire to know about mission strategies, mission theory, best practices, and a host of other topics.
 The four-day class began with 12 students, ending with 20. All of the students are either pastors or evangelists. Some of them receive a small amount of funding from their congregations. A couple of them are in university classes. All understand a level of English, though I was glad to be able to occasionally slip in some of my rusty old Maasai. In the discussion times, pretty much all in Maasai, I surprised myself at my level of comprehension after these many years. I am sure having been back to the area half a dozen times in the last five years, even if for only a day or two, helped with that.
The class took place at the training institute at Ewaso Ng’iro, and the new program is termed the Mission Institute of East Africa. The Director of the Institute is James Sinkua, who was born the year I arrived in Kenya. What a thrill to see him leading the church and the institute.
In my recent trips to Kenya I longed to hear some of the indigenous Christian tunes that had been popular when we worked there. I had only heard one such song in the last five years, and none except for that once since we left. So after one break I made a request to the group to sing a song. They made a valiant attempt, but nobody really knew the words. So I tried with one or two others, and they did know some more words on those. The highlight of the course was when one of the pastors, probably about 30 years old, after hearing the song, looked at me and said, “Wow, my father really loved that song.” Yes, I have aged.
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 as soda ash is collected there. The factory has been in existence for years. The lake floor is scaped and the salts are collected. I think they are used in making cement.
Along the route we saws lots of birds, many of them lifers for me. I’ll post a list in a week or two. The prize of the day was the chesnut banded plover. The bird has markings similar to many plover, with the major difference being that the band across the chest is a brilliant red rather than the usual black and brown. We probably saw a dozen of the birds in a couple of ponds, sharing space with flamingoes, little egrets, and lapwings.
Happy birthday Dad!
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 live with a bit of meat and milk. They sell their goats for some goods.
 When they need water, they dig a hole in the sand and about ten to fifteen feet down, they get water, sometimes. Life is very tough. So when missionary Gene Morden began doing water projects some years ago, the people were ecstatic. Gene has several means of securing water. One is through hand drilling with his team of people (think digging post holes). Once they reach the correct depth, they install a hand pump, and clean water is the result. We got to be there when one of these wells was to be completed. Imagine the excitement and joy among the people as they eagerly waited for the first drips of water. There was singing, dancing, and praying. Lives will be changed, for the better.
Another method is using a block of solar panels, which then run the pump. Lots of sun in northern Kenya. There is enough water that is pumped so that the people can plant small garden plots. Here is a people, nomadic through history, now (of their own will and under their own work) have small gardens that produce year-around. We saw fresh tomatoes, spinach, and numerous types of legumes.
These projects are not charity projects that lead to dependency. The missionaries have lived in the area for more than ten years. They speak the local language, have earned the respect of the people, and the people do the work. In fact, when we were there, Gene was in the States. Everything, from getting us to the areas, digging, installing the pump, and digging, was done by Turkana people.
I will never turn on the faucet again without remembering the joy in those people’s faces when they got their very first pure water in their area. Sure, they will have to carry the water from the pump to their home, but the distance is much closer, and the water is pure. That is what Jesus brings, because He is the water of life. The people prayed to thank Him for providing their water.
Thanks to those of you who suggested some reading material for my three week trip to Kenya. The books I will plan to read include: 1) The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, by Jacqueline Novogratz; 2) How Africa Shaped the Christian Mind, by Thomas Oden; and 3) Microfinance for Bankers, by Elizabeth Rhyne. Those three are on my Kindle, as are a couple of Bibles.
But since you cannot have your Kindle on for take-offs and landing, the hard copy book I will have at the ready is 4) Faces of Jesus in Africa, by Robert Schreiter.
And if I just want to read something light, I also have 5) Confessions, by John Grisham.
I’m off to Kenya for three weeks. Help me out. What reading material should I take? Long plane rides, waking up in the middle of the night for 2-3 days, and time after teaching. Plenty of time to read a few pages now and then. Waiting to hear you suggestions.
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 received $50. Prior to the furlough, we had lived for four and a half years in Kenya, most of it amongst the Maasai people. Here is the poem.
African Mother
Kilimanjaro sits on bone-dust earth, her bare brown back supporting a skeletal wall.
Thorn-bush children chase and scrape as skinny chickens scratch ashes, snatching yesterday’s maize.
Broken beads and hapless thatch decorate the dirt, tin lids and cast-off cardboard lie waiting.
Kilimanjaro sits, strong fingers thrusting thread and color through lifeless leather,
transforming the dried hide to a wedding gown awaiting rain.
In a couple of weeks, I’ll be back in Kenya, and some of the time will be amongst the Maasai yet again. This time it involves teaching a class in addition to a Board meeting. I can hardly wait.
I preached on “Good News to the Poor” recently and heard that a study group was using the sermon and discussing poverty and what to do about the poor. The verse about “always having the poor with you” came up in the conversation as it often does, which led me to do a little studying.
The passage is found in a couple of places in the New Testament. Matt. 26:11 reads, “For you will always have the poor with you, but you will not have me.” (NRSV)
The other passage is Mark 14:7, which reads: “For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me” (NRSV). I underlined the section that is not included in Matthew, because I think it is critically important to how we interpret this passage.
Many people have taken the phrase, “The poor you will always have with you” as a statement of fact. Some then go on to reason, “Since we will always have poor people around, what is the use of trying to help them? We’ll never be able to help them all, so why even try?” Therefore, the verse ends up being used as a sort of rationalization for not helping the poor.
But I believe this passage is saying just the opposite. 1) Since you will always have the poor with you, you will be able to help them anytime (or always). 2) But since you will only have me (Jesus) around for a while, it is OK that this woman used her ointment on me, even though it could have been sold and the proceeds given to the poor.
I would venture that Matthew’s point in the passage was not about how to deal with the poor, but was about the kindness of the woman and then Jesus’ comment about not being with them much longer.
I would venture that Mark included it, making the same points as Matthew, but also adding the extra phrase to emphasize how we should interact with the poor.
It is likely that the phrase, “the poor will always be with you” that Jesus uses comes from Deuteronomy 15:11, “Since there will never cease to be some in need on the earth, I therefore command you, ‘Open your hand to the poor and needy neighbor in your land.’ ”
Do you have any thoughts? Please comment.
The following quotes come from an article in Time magazine, Feb. 14, 2011. The article is written by Nancy Gibbs and is titled “The Best Investment” (page 64).
“In sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than 1 in 5 girls make it to secondary school. Nearly half are married by the time they are 18; 1 in 7 across the developing world marries before she is 15. The leading cause of death for girls 15-19 worldwide is complications from pregnancy. Girls under 15 are give times as likely to die while having children than are women in their 20s, and their babies are more likely to die as well.
“An extra year of primary school boosts girls wages by 10-20%. An extra year of secondary school adds 15-25%. Girls who stay in school for seven or more years typically marry four years later and have two fewer children than girls who drop out.
“When girls and women earn income, they reinvest 90% of it in their families. They buy books, medicine, bed nets (to prevent malaria). For men, the figure is more like 30% to 40%. Investment in girls education may well be the highest return investment available in the developing world.”
The CMF/Hope Partnership project in Nairobi, Kenya, allows girls (and boys) to be sponsored so that they can go to school. Over four thousand children are being sponsored. In the last two years, the first years the project had kids old enough to reach the eighth grade, 96% of the eighth graders passed their high school entrance exam, more than doubling the national average of 40%. Both girls and boys are going to high school.
The project also has a microfinance program. Currently there are 1144 people who have loans. The repayment rate for the loans is 98%. Two out of three who receive a loan are women.
I don’t have to tell you what would happen to these girls now in school or these women if they were not able to receive loans. This project is doing much to end child slavery, sex trafficking, and prostitution in the slums of Mathare Valley, one of the poorest places on the earth.
I’ve asked my friend LeRoy Lawson to share the following comments:
“It’s a miracle!”
If you had been with me, you would have wondered. Several of us Americans were standing in the second story room of a toilet building in the midst of Mathare Valley, one of Nairobi’s—and the world’s—largest slums. The plaque on the building’s exterior honors Alan Ahlgrim, pastor of Rocky Mountain Christian Church in Colorado, because his congregation provided the money to build it.
The toilet building is fairly new, but looks old. It’s a sound but humble two-story structure; a community room upstairs (where a church has been started). Downstairs is divided in the middle (men’s side, women’s side) with four small cells each, two toilet rooms, two shower stalls. There is no indoor plumbing. If you want to shower, you bring your bucket and shillings, pay the attendant and draw water from an outside tap, then step into the stall and bathe. The toilet is a hole in the concrete floor, a convenience familiar to third-world travelers.
The building, inside or out, simply doesn’t look miraculous. When it was built, though, it was the only such facility for 80,000 people. The previous one was a ramshackle outhouse perched over a tiny stream. Most people resorted to “flying toilets,” recycled plastic grocery bags into which they made their deposit, twisted the bag, and tossed it. To have a decent building for their personal use, one which they never could have raised enough money to build, seemed to the community leader standing next to me to be, well, nothing short of miraculous.
That was my first visit. In planning this Nairobi excursion with some other ministers, I had wanted to see what we teasingly dubbed the Alan Ahlgrim Memorial Toilet. Alan was my student at Milligan College many years ago, a leading minister among our churches, a really good friend—and very much alive. It was fun to tease him about his honor.
On my second trip to Mathare, though, the teasing stopped. Alan and his wife Linda were in this group. We visited the toilet building because on that day the community leaders were hosting a special event: planting young saplings in the area around their building. It was not clean work; the ground consisted of some soil plus decades of layered garbage. The trees would offer a welcome change of scenery.
The Americans and Kenyans were introduced to each other. When these grateful residents of Mathare Valley learned that one of their guests was Alan, it was as if the rest of us weren’t there. A celebrity was in their midst. They were in awe. They embarrassed Alan with their response. This man whose name was on their toilet building, this generous benefactor whose gift had changed their lives, had come to see them, and now they could thank him personally.
I’ll never forget that day.
LeRoy Lawson
International Consultant
They say that you can’t teach an old Doug new tricks, and I am proof of that. We went to get something for our cell phones only to be told that our phones were so old that they did not even make them anymore. OK. Time to upgrade. So now I have a Blackberry. But I discovered that unless you take your Blackberry with you, you cannot call. I didn’t, and couldn’t. I was in Florida for five days with no cell phone. And since I’ve been using a cell phone that saves peoples numbers under their names, I couldn’t remember anybody’s number. I was lost, even though I knew exactly where I was.
It was really snowing in Indianapolis, so the people who were to be waiting for me in the cell phone parking lot at the airport, could not come and get me. That wasn’t so bad, because had they been there, I would not have been able to call them anyway since I had no phone, and even if a Good Samaritan let be borrow a phone, I didn’t know their number anyhow, just their name.
So, I got a ride home (on the expensive side, but since the temperature was in single digits and snowing, the money was not worth freezing [sweating?] over). Since Robyn was in Kenya, I had figured out earlier in the day that most likely our house would be locked when I got home. Since I did not have my keys (Robyn took me to the airport last week and then drove the car home using my car keys, including my house key), I expected Robyn would not have even thought that I had no keys with me, and I would be locked out. Just as I expected, I walked up to the garage; it was locked. Then the house door. It was locked. And it is really cold outside.
I had thought I can probably call my daughter Andrea, but I don’t know her phone number even if I could borrow a phone. So I went two houses away (we live in a condo, so that isn’t very far to walk), rang the door of our friends, and they let me in. I had figured out that I would use their phone to call a mutual friend, a phone number they likely had, who would then call her daughter who is a friend of Andrea, and ask Andrea to drive over after her commitment for the evening, and get me and unlock our house with her key.
But due to the foresight of Robyn, we had let these friends, years ago, have a key to our house. They still had it!!! I walked back home. The key worked after all these years. Home at last, smarter and wiser.
And today. Yep, you guessed it. I went to work without my phone.
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