FedEx
I felt homesick, a bit, this week.
So much so that I wanted to hug the FedEx guy when I saw him in our lobby. “FedEx!” I said. He said, “Yes, we’re here.” I restrained myself from hugging him. I do still have some common sense.
It takes me ten hours to find anything in the grocery store. “Tomato sauce – do you have – for cooking?” That’s how I ask. And some strange Swahili accent comes out of my mouth and helps the Kenyans understand me. I am led to the “ketchup” (remember, the stuff that’s not really ketchup). I stand forever reading packages and labels in Arabic, Italian, Kiswahili… feeling lost.
I saw post-it notes for sale in the grocery store. That made my day. Homesick.
The culture still shocks me. I really don’t enjoy walking through the streets by myself. I feel as if a giant spotlight follows me. I feel white and rich and vulnerable. I put my game face on, trying to look comfortable and unperturbed, though I’m praying to God to be walking beside me.
I want to invent a new word for homesick, for how can you be grieved over a place that is no longer home? Home is here and now. Home is wherever I am.
Easter
My first holiday without family and friends is approaching. I’ll be house sitting for an acquaintance from the embassy over that weekend. Hanging out with her brown labrador. I said I would do this, but then got depressed thinking about Easter here without my family.
I need to do zero backwards glancing right now. “Let your eyes look straight ahead, fix your gaze directly before you.” (Proverbs 4:25)
I’m past the two month mark now. I am home. I am in the home of God’s choosing. And I do love it. But I do still struggle with some things.
cross-cultural chameleons
Two little boys caught a chameleon – a pregnant one – and brought it into my house. (Isn’t that thoughtful? ) I was sitting there pondering my stressful walk home from the Ya-Ya Centre and the fact that I’m called to assimilate as best I can. Sort of like this chameleon – changing colors to adapt to her environment. Short of painting my skin, giving away all of my money, and living on a dollar a day, there’s only so much assimilation that can happen. I’ll always be, in a sense, a foreigner.
street children
I went last weekend with a church group to a home for rehabilitating street children. It was 90 minutes out on the road to Mombasa. Rural. Desolate. Poverty-stricken. The kids wearing rags. The little girls wearing what looked like tattered Easter dresses for their everyday wear. There were 90 former street children living dormitory style. It depressed my spirit.
What’s depressing me? The enormity of the situation. The children wearing rags for clothes. Dust on their faces, dirt on their clothes. And the donations we bring? One pair of pants fell out of the bag – it was all shredded and messed up. I guess that I’ve never seen or imagined the children who would one day wear the clothes that I donate to charity.
I wondered, Do I bring tattered rags as an offering to You, Lord? I know that sometimes I do. Sometimes I am not sacrificial at all. It’s me first. New clothes for me – my old clothes for God’s children – and ultimately for Him. Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for Me… I love what Mother Theresa said about the lepers and dying people whom she served – how it was like discovering Jesus in “His indescribable disguise.” God is in the children whom we dress in our old rags. (Matthew 25:37-40)
good-bye outfits
They dressed toddler Eunice up in a pretty new dress and patent leather shoes and little girl lace socks. Her good-bye outfit. The people from the Rafiki Foundation (a home for older children who have not gotten adopted) came to get her. She’s legally their child now, with no hope of adoption. She followed Mary (founder-director) around and didn’t want to go.
The passing of children from one set of hands to the next…It’s a bit painful to let them go into another children’s home.
I don’t know why this grieves me so deeply, but it does.
I know that I’m not the solution, but something in me (ego perhaps?) wants to hold Eunice and tell her it’ll be alright. And that same something in me wants to go back to that home for street children and give them a list of foundations and corporations that might help.
But I can’t fix the mess, the mess, the mess. It’s a God-sized problem.
dust & ashes
Last Sunday I went with Shosho (Grandma) Mary to the slum church in Mtumba that she serves in. There were about 70 people meeting in a little shack of a building. Singing their hearts out. Seventy-five percent of the congregation was children!
People burn their garbage on the sides of the road, and in the dirt alleys. They cook and congregate in alleys, out in the open. They scoop up water flowing through the streets and boil it. Every time I turn on my faucet and clean water comes out, I am cognizant of the fact that my running water separates me from 70% of the people in Kenya.
“He raises the poor from the dust
and lifts the needy from the ash heap;
He seats them with princes,
with the princes of their people.”
Psalm 113:7-8
There’s something comforting in the fact that these words were thousands of years old. The poor were down-trodden in the dust then, and they’re down-trodden in the dust now. The needy were crouched in the ash heap then, and they’re still crouched in the ash heap today. But the promise of God stood then and it still stands today. God will seat the poor with the princes of heaven. God will raise them up from the dust, lift them out of the ashes, and give them the riches of heaven. The poor on earth who seek Him will not suffer poverty forever.
Daybreak
“Have you ever given orders to the morning
or shown the dawn its place,
that it might take the earth by the edges
and shake the wicked out of it?”
- Job 38:12-13
I love the idea of God taking the earth by its edges and shaking the wicked out of it. I wish He’d do that here! I feel terror, wicked, and evil descend in greater force with the night here. It’s so strange. We go from one guard to two. The noise level on the street does not decrease. The prostitutes and their clients come out. The slums don’t sleep, for there’s no rest within them. We batten down the hatches, lock the doors, and the gates; we sleep behind barred windows and high compound walls. The poor are not so protected.
God,
Nairobi needs a permanent daybreak!
Show the dawn its place
that it may permanently reside
here. Give marching orders
to the Son – do not allow
His departure for
we crave continual light
light light…
enlighten us with Your
DAY BREAK –
take this earth by
its ragged edges
and shake the wicked
right out of it!
Command it
and it will be so.
Please.
I’ll close with that prayer, knowing that you’re with me in praying for and bringing about a permanent daybreak in this country and in this world.
Kwaheri na Afrika,
janay
P.S. If there’s any baby that you want a report on, please let me know!
March 20, 2007
Hi friends,
Habari yako? How are you? I know I’ve missed a week in writing to you (some of you probably hadn’t noticed, but in case you had, my reason is this:) I’ve been contemplating whether to tell you my news –
They’ve asked me to stay on and work here full time! And my answer is, without a doubt, YES!
Everything is still in the planning and discussion phase, but I wanted you to know. I definitely feel called to work here, I feel at peace in my heart about this decision, and I can’t wait to see how everything comes together. When Anne Marie asked me, tears sprang to my eyes. I was ready to say yes. I think it was perfect timing. A week earlier, I might not have been ready. But there it is.
From what I’ve seen, this is such an incredible ministry, run by strong, God-filled leaders, who are willing to sacrifice themselves and their lives for these children. I know that I can learn a lot from them and I feel so blessed to have this opportunity at this point in my life.
I will still come stateside at the end of June. I know this much. But beyond that, I need some time to sort out all of the details. I’m hoping to sit down with the leadership team this week.
Other stuff going on in Africa…
Lamu Islands
Two women from the States were supposed to come out and do training in Lamu for the caregivers of orphans and vulnerable children. Turns out they can’t make it. So I’ll be going with Anne Chege (one of our school Administrators) in April to present a four day training called Children in Crisis: Offering Healing and Hope. I’m excited about this. This’ll happen April 17-21.
speed bump parade
My Saturday night fun? Counting the number of cars outside my window that skid to a halt in front of the newly made, umarked speed bumps. So Kenya. No warning signs. So far – three, four, five, six, ten. I stopped counting after thirty. Now it’s not funny anymore. I’m cringing and praying. People’s cars are bottoming out, launching out of control, spinning and skidding. The guys outside on the street are laughing at the speed bump parade. It’s like a live reality tv show, or bloopers and practical jokes, or Cops without the cops, just the moronic events.
It’s quirky things like this that remind me that I’m living in a slightly more chaotic and disorganized “developing” nation.
Good Samaritans
And it just became clear to me what it actually means when they say, “This baby was rescued from the cho (toilet) by a Good Samaritan.” I pictured baby Joel lying sweetly on the floor next to the toilet, waiting for the next person to discover him. But social worker, Grace, explained further.
Things are dawning on me. God is good to increase His light slowwwly, knowing that I can only handle so much at once.
So when they say that baby Joel, this beautiful, perfect little guy, was found in the cho, it means that he was lying and dying in feces and urine in the bottom of a hole-in-the-ground. Someone dropped him in there. The brain doesn’t want to wrap around this one.
Social worker Grace says that many Good Samaritans risk their health, their lives even, to rescue these babies. It costs them sometimes an entire day’s pay because they’re stuck in long lines at the police station trying to report “child abandonment”. Apparently, holding an abandoned infant gives the Good Samaritan zero priority in line. It’s just the way it is. The value of the child…
The staff at New Life Homes uses that expression a lot– Good Samaritan – to describe the people who bring babies into our care. I was thinking about Jesus’ teachings about the man from Samaria who He called “good and merciful” and who was the original Good Samaritan. I was thinking about what this man did in contrast to what the other passers-by did. They were all presented with the same problem – a man badly beaten up and probably left for dead on the roadside. The first person to see the man was a priest. The priest crossed to the other side of the road and avoided the man. The second person to see the man was a person from the tribe of Levi (the tribe that “produced” God’s priests) and he did the same stinking thing – crossed to the other side of the road!
God,
as Your people,
give us Your strength
to stay on the right side of the road –
where the hurting people lie,
where the abandoned babies cry.
Don’t let “distance be the enemy of Africa.”
Don’t let us distance ourselves
from the needs we see and feel,
and hear about.
The man from Samaria (this supposedly godless area of the known world at the time) was the man who we know as the Good Samaritan. Jesus says that Good Sam saw the man and “he took pity on him.” (from Luke 10:25-37)
Thank you for being those who take pity on these children, who don’t cross over in avoidance. Thank you for bandaging their wounds, for putting them up in houses. Thank you for entering into their pain.
angel
Jacinta brings a pudgy baby girl named Angel into our office every day. We kiss her and love her for two seconds, then back to work! The other day, as baby Angel is laughing and smiling into Jacinta’s face, Jacinta says, “Gosh, I wish someone would see her soon.”
That’s stayed with me – I wish someone would see her soon.
We wish that for all the babies. Because we know that once you see Angel, you’ll fall in love with her. And always, in the back of our minds, we’re thinking – before it’s too late. Before she’s all grown up. Before she’s raised entirely without a mom or dad.
I’m not saying adoption is for everyone, but for those of you who have this tugging on your hearts, please don’t ignore it!
I was looking at the statistics on New Life Homes the other day. It’s pretty amazing. Seventy percent have been adopted since New Life’s beginnings. Over 500 babies placed in homes.
An international adoption just went through last week and a baby went home with a Canadian couple. We’re hoping and praying that this is a watershed event, helping open up the way to more international families.
These babies could be your little angels…
blogs & chocolate
Everyone loves chocolate here. It's like the universal language of love. I was sharing it in the office, and before I knew it, I'd offered it to the wrong person. She disappeared down the hall with the final one-third of my chocolate bar. She's on my hit list now.
Clive – the founder-director – cracks me up. He came in the other day and said that he tried to go on my blog, but it wouldn’t work. Then he asks in his charming British accent, “Can you believe that? See what you’ve done – blog – you’ve got me saying blog!”
Right now I’ve got to go because the Kenyan sun is setting so that it can rise in your sky. That’s strange to me, living the day before you... Have a great one!
Kwaheri na Afrika,
janay
CCTO Rock the Baby Team Updates
1. Two babies went home with families last week!
2. Baby E(the ACTS 1:8 baby) comes back regularly to “weigh in”. I saw her sporting light-up shoes and blue jeans, her African mama following her as she toddled into our house. She looks so happy.
3. Here’s an idea I had in passing – I’m just throwing it out there. I know that you’re all focusing on “Jerusalem” and local ministry right now. And I was thinking… what if…We started thinking about changing the “face” of the Thousand Oaks/Simi Valley community by literally changing its “face”, its demographic? Picture families coming over in small groups to live and serve in Kenya for 6 to 9 months while their adoptions are being processed. Then returning to the States with new babies, given new lives. Talk about changing our Jerusalem, our world. How awesome would that be? Rock-the-Baby teams morphing into Adopt-A-Baby Teams…
Habari yako? How are you? I know I’ve missed a week in writing to you (some of you probably hadn’t noticed, but in case you had, my reason is this:) I’ve been contemplating whether to tell you my news –
They’ve asked me to stay on and work here full time! And my answer is, without a doubt, YES!
Everything is still in the planning and discussion phase, but I wanted you to know. I definitely feel called to work here, I feel at peace in my heart about this decision, and I can’t wait to see how everything comes together. When Anne Marie asked me, tears sprang to my eyes. I was ready to say yes. I think it was perfect timing. A week earlier, I might not have been ready. But there it is.
From what I’ve seen, this is such an incredible ministry, run by strong, God-filled leaders, who are willing to sacrifice themselves and their lives for these children. I know that I can learn a lot from them and I feel so blessed to have this opportunity at this point in my life.
I will still come stateside at the end of June. I know this much. But beyond that, I need some time to sort out all of the details. I’m hoping to sit down with the leadership team this week.
Other stuff going on in Africa…
Lamu Islands
Two women from the States were supposed to come out and do training in Lamu for the caregivers of orphans and vulnerable children. Turns out they can’t make it. So I’ll be going with Anne Chege (one of our school Administrators) in April to present a four day training called Children in Crisis: Offering Healing and Hope. I’m excited about this. This’ll happen April 17-21.
speed bump parade
My Saturday night fun? Counting the number of cars outside my window that skid to a halt in front of the newly made, umarked speed bumps. So Kenya. No warning signs. So far – three, four, five, six, ten. I stopped counting after thirty. Now it’s not funny anymore. I’m cringing and praying. People’s cars are bottoming out, launching out of control, spinning and skidding. The guys outside on the street are laughing at the speed bump parade. It’s like a live reality tv show, or bloopers and practical jokes, or Cops without the cops, just the moronic events.
It’s quirky things like this that remind me that I’m living in a slightly more chaotic and disorganized “developing” nation.
Good Samaritans
And it just became clear to me what it actually means when they say, “This baby was rescued from the cho (toilet) by a Good Samaritan.” I pictured baby Joel lying sweetly on the floor next to the toilet, waiting for the next person to discover him. But social worker, Grace, explained further.
Things are dawning on me. God is good to increase His light slowwwly, knowing that I can only handle so much at once.
So when they say that baby Joel, this beautiful, perfect little guy, was found in the cho, it means that he was lying and dying in feces and urine in the bottom of a hole-in-the-ground. Someone dropped him in there. The brain doesn’t want to wrap around this one.
Social worker Grace says that many Good Samaritans risk their health, their lives even, to rescue these babies. It costs them sometimes an entire day’s pay because they’re stuck in long lines at the police station trying to report “child abandonment”. Apparently, holding an abandoned infant gives the Good Samaritan zero priority in line. It’s just the way it is. The value of the child…
The staff at New Life Homes uses that expression a lot– Good Samaritan – to describe the people who bring babies into our care. I was thinking about Jesus’ teachings about the man from Samaria who He called “good and merciful” and who was the original Good Samaritan. I was thinking about what this man did in contrast to what the other passers-by did. They were all presented with the same problem – a man badly beaten up and probably left for dead on the roadside. The first person to see the man was a priest. The priest crossed to the other side of the road and avoided the man. The second person to see the man was a person from the tribe of Levi (the tribe that “produced” God’s priests) and he did the same stinking thing – crossed to the other side of the road!
God,
as Your people,
give us Your strength
to stay on the right side of the road –
where the hurting people lie,
where the abandoned babies cry.
Don’t let “distance be the enemy of Africa.”
Don’t let us distance ourselves
from the needs we see and feel,
and hear about.
The man from Samaria (this supposedly godless area of the known world at the time) was the man who we know as the Good Samaritan. Jesus says that Good Sam saw the man and “he took pity on him.” (from Luke 10:25-37)
Thank you for being those who take pity on these children, who don’t cross over in avoidance. Thank you for bandaging their wounds, for putting them up in houses. Thank you for entering into their pain.
angel
Jacinta brings a pudgy baby girl named Angel into our office every day. We kiss her and love her for two seconds, then back to work! The other day, as baby Angel is laughing and smiling into Jacinta’s face, Jacinta says, “Gosh, I wish someone would see her soon.”
That’s stayed with me – I wish someone would see her soon.
We wish that for all the babies. Because we know that once you see Angel, you’ll fall in love with her. And always, in the back of our minds, we’re thinking – before it’s too late. Before she’s all grown up. Before she’s raised entirely without a mom or dad.
I’m not saying adoption is for everyone, but for those of you who have this tugging on your hearts, please don’t ignore it!
I was looking at the statistics on New Life Homes the other day. It’s pretty amazing. Seventy percent have been adopted since New Life’s beginnings. Over 500 babies placed in homes.
An international adoption just went through last week and a baby went home with a Canadian couple. We’re hoping and praying that this is a watershed event, helping open up the way to more international families.
These babies could be your little angels…
blogs & chocolate
Everyone loves chocolate here. It's like the universal language of love. I was sharing it in the office, and before I knew it, I'd offered it to the wrong person. She disappeared down the hall with the final one-third of my chocolate bar. She's on my hit list now.
Clive – the founder-director – cracks me up. He came in the other day and said that he tried to go on my blog, but it wouldn’t work. Then he asks in his charming British accent, “Can you believe that? See what you’ve done – blog – you’ve got me saying blog!”
Right now I’ve got to go because the Kenyan sun is setting so that it can rise in your sky. That’s strange to me, living the day before you... Have a great one!
Kwaheri na Afrika,
janay
CCTO Rock the Baby Team Updates
1. Two babies went home with families last week!
2. Baby E(the ACTS 1:8 baby) comes back regularly to “weigh in”. I saw her sporting light-up shoes and blue jeans, her African mama following her as she toddled into our house. She looks so happy.
3. Here’s an idea I had in passing – I’m just throwing it out there. I know that you’re all focusing on “Jerusalem” and local ministry right now. And I was thinking… what if…We started thinking about changing the “face” of the Thousand Oaks/Simi Valley community by literally changing its “face”, its demographic? Picture families coming over in small groups to live and serve in Kenya for 6 to 9 months while their adoptions are being processed. Then returning to the States with new babies, given new lives. Talk about changing our Jerusalem, our world. How awesome would that be? Rock-the-Baby teams morphing into Adopt-A-Baby Teams…
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