Power Surges

On Power Surges

The hospital’s hydro-electric dam is not steadily running the local power source until a 3^rd turbine is built.  How one inserts a new turbine into an already built hydro-electric dam I could not tell you.  I can’t help but imagining a little Dutch boy is down there sticking his finger in it though.  Bet he’s tired too.

Hence we have power outages frequently and irregularly.

Our little Miss cannot cope when the power goes out at bedtime and the little princess night light in her room goes black.  So we light candles and flashlights and wonder if all the overhead lights are switched off in case we are asleep when the power surges back on in the night.

Today the power was out when Michael went to play racquetball.  Yes, there is a racquetball court at Tenwek. And yes, he did try to play racquetball in the dark. 

Brown outs: warn us of the pending darkness and surge of electricity when it ends.  They are actually worse than black outs (unless one is playing racquetball) because the power will fluctuate up and down and destroy electronics.  And I ain’t talking about my hairdryer.

Hospital CT scanner: burnt out.  The $100,000 light bulb couldn’t withstand the surge of electrical ups and downs from power surges.  For Daktari, it means he has to guess what is going on inside the patient’s heads (which he’s pretty good at, at least for me).  But these patients come in with embolisms and blood clots and abscesses left and right.  Not knowing for certain from an image is risky business too. 

Burnt out: what happens when people get too tired from 6 months in living cross culturally with no break nearby.

Even my indiglo watch light is burnt out. Not like I need to actually know what time it is after dark anyway.  It’s time to be asleep is all I know.

So here is the little story of some ups and downs that came in our life recently leaving us feeling dizzy, shocked, and thankful.

Last September, we entered Kenya on a visitor visa and had applied for a work permit.  We were told that having applied for the work permit was good enough to begin work.  Due to many factors, Kenyan immigration has slowed some things down lately on issuing work permits and apparently our name was not at the top of the stack for any of the meetings leaving us in a 3month + backlog. On March the 3^rd our visitor visa would expire and we would need to leave the East African community to the nearest, cheapest, safest place in order to exit, re-enter, and get a new visitor visa.  We were prepared to head north to the Land of the Giles: Ethiopia.  We even have good friends there in the capital city- Travis, Emily, and baby Clare Weeks.  However, the US Embassy in Nairobi notified us that to be working under any circumstance in Kenya (even unpaid) on a tourist visa was ill advised, illegal, and potentially hazardous to your health.  Hmm hmm.

Wow.  We are undocumented workers.  What were we to do?  We found out about a special work pass that could take a month or more to process but would cover us until the long-term work permit was cleared.  Well, for a month or more what were we to do?  Brown out.

That was Friday last week.  Saturday I helped lead a seminar for about 30 Sunday School leaders and teachers out in a village where a pastor and his wife have a children’s home with about 50 orphaned kids living.  It is a lovely place with glossy concrete walls of manilla and sky blue trim.  Standard issue rust colored concrete floors.  I find myself oddly attracted to these typical paint schemes and I think “ah that is mid-century chic” (my enculturation rate may be febrile).  There were panorama vistas in the chapel overlooking the green hills that are quilted with tea farms, fallow fields of failed maize crop, trees, and nice wooden stitching of fences.  The window looking up the hill lures with a flowerbed of cosmos.  Oh yeah, I was teaching too, sure.  T

rying to encourage a room full of Sunday School teachers who are young teens and old men, and they each have about 50 kids each week sitting under a tree, struggling to convey the message of the gospel without props when some of them don’t even have a Bible of their own to start with! (Something we will be working on soon.)  But there I was, lost in the cosmos.  Gloriously delighted to be lost in green pastures, beside still waters, at the place of songs.  At this moment, I think, this is what I’m here for!  Power surge.

But I do miss home.  We miss our family.  We miss our times at the Mexican restaurant by Kroger, we miss stability, we miss anonymity, and so much more.  So maybe this will be time for us to go back to the States for a few weeks.  Or more.  So we sent out an urgent prayer request on Sunday morning, seeking wisdom, grace, favor, etc.  And we concluded that indeed for far too many years have far too many white people put themselves above the Kenyan law and created a cycle of symbiotic disdain.  But we are here to be whole Gospel people, not indispensible medical saviors or missionary super saints who would go to jail for our right to treat people and not submit to authorities.  Because this story is bigger than what we can see- this story that goes back to a long, long time ago, when a man looked up in the pitch dark of an ancient near eastern night sky and seeing the stars burn from billions of miles away with the beacon of light that still reaches my eyes today.  They echo to me: live by faith.  And we put our dream on the altar.  We would submit to the authorities and leave those 50+ patients to be unseen by Mr. Daktari Monday morning.  We will live by faith, even though fear knocks at the door.  The fear started to tell me “you may be gone for a long time before your work permission is granted”.  And I cried to think of our kids missing this dreamy life they have.

Sunday morning I was watching a banana leave wave in the wind and its chartreuse reflection on the polished wood floors.  I listened to Andrew Peterson sing “Hosanna.  See the long awaited King come to set His people free.  We cry Oh Hosanna.  Come and tear the temple down, raise it up on holy ground.  Hosanna”.  The Gospel is lifting up the lowly and bringing down the haughty. 

Monday morning there was a pre-scheduled executive board meeting at the hospital.  Michael was getting dressed to go to work because he is a creature of habit and loves going to work.   But he didn’t go.  Back and forth.  Up and down.  Emotions were on the same power grid as our house.  Then we got word.

The medical superintendant told the board we had this problem and would not come to work until it was legal to do so.

 Within minutes someone was on the phone with someone else and deciding that there would be a special pass for work issued tomorrow!  The immigrations office would also renew our visa to be here tomorrow!  It was a battle of our hearts over right and wrong and hubris v. humility. Someone else was able to fight it for us, thanks to the many prayers from you all.

So now we are still here at Tenwek, keeping calm and carrying on after all the surges of emotions.  And left dizzy by the goodness of our God.

And we have a one-month extension on our visas now, in hopes that the long term permit comes through by March 26.

And the CT scanner has a new bulb being installed too.  So when Daktari gets back to work tomorrow, (legally) he can really see what’s going on inside people’s heads. Light in the darkness.  Dazzling light.

Daktari Mother-In-Law

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When I look at my daughter, who says she is “freeee” years old in every sense of the word, I think of my mom and how she has loved me for all my thirty free years.

Our internet has been inoperable for a few days now so I will send my mom a birthday blog.  Although disconnected from the web and facetime and skype, I feel more connected to her when I see Annie and me together.

My mom pinned wings on my soul before I was born.  She was a flight attendant who set out to see the world and she met a handsome and humble former fighter pilot who was settling down for the domesticity of commercial flying.  She told him she was going to marry him and within six months they did. 

My mom sacrificially left her work aside in order to raise little girls at home.  But the wings were still there on her heart.  So she took us all around the world.  She taught us how to see the world. One day in Clayton County she helped out a lady who was walking home from prison.  My mom established mercy and justice in my heart.

My mom would give of herself to care for another, though it cost her dearly.  That, and she likes to dance.  She likes to have fun and water ski and laugh so loud she snorts.  My mom and her mom and my little girl, they all are passionate and wholehearted about what or who they care for.  They don’t do things half way.  You should hear Annie singing in the yard.  You should feel her tiny forceful running hug.

My mom’s mom was a World War II nurse in training who married a handsome and humble service man named Mr. Jolley who would take her dancing and stay faithful his whole life.  My mom found one just like that; minus the dancing.  My dad just took mom flying.  We have some purty lucky ladies in my family.  I pray Annie finds one like her daddy too.

And these women in my line all stand up for what they believe in.  Like it or not.  I don’t know if it’s Southern or just who we are, but at least I know my mom believed in me.  And she never asked me to be someone I was not even when I marched to the beat of my own drum.  Even when I was a typically bad attitude teenager, she didn’t give up on me and persisted in love.  Oh, mom I hope to be strong like you when Annie is stubborn like me.

Once in my year after college I went to Switzerland to try to figure out life before I moved to Africa (the first time).  What I figured out was that I missed home and my mom came to rescue me.  We dipped our little bread in a Swiss fondue in that Alpine village and went back home where everything was all right.

Back to that Georgia dirt in the garden where she stood like an angel in her nightgown among the white blooming spirea of our home as I drove out to meet my next destiny.   That Georgia dirt from which I grew up too.  Sometimes it is just clay but sometimes it is sweet Georgia brown dirt. You planted us with deep roots and a firm foundation.  And you taught me how to see the beauty that comes out of what was once just dirt.  Potential is what my mom looks for.

So last month she and my dad flew around the world to come visit me and my hero husband and their grandchildren.  My baby girl she says, is so much like me.  And we take her out on adventures too.  As we drive through Kenyan farm land, a man as black as the dirt he is hoeing stands bare chested in the field.  I think of Adam, of the ancestor of us all here in Africa.  And how many generations have treated him like the dirt from which God grew him.  But how my mom taught me to see the Image of God breathed into the Adam like life of that black man.  Even when history is wrong, even when the systems of generations is wrong, she helped me to stand tall for what is right.

My mom gives so much of herself to others.  Now I am starting to see it in the mirror and in Annie.  It’s her image poured into us.  She pinned the wings on my soul after all.   

Happy Birthday Mom.