Beginning of the End
I’ve been a busy girl lately. It’s been quite a while since I last updated you on the goings-on in my life here in Kenya, and I feel that some good stories are long overdue. With seven weeks of class left to go, we’re finally edging towards the end of our semester at WNS, and I am anxiously awaiting the end of a very chaotic first year of teaching. I’ve been reminded by some of my veteran colleagues that I ought to be excited that I will never again be a first-year teacher. Never again. Praise the Lord. The year’s had its ups and downs, and so the idea of no longer being a complete rookie wreck is completely thrilling.
My two projects, the school yearbook and our production of The Man Who Came to Dinner, both seem to have come to a crossroads. I’ve decided that although I’ve done just about everything I could and can do, the time has come for me to allow these hapless students of mine to either make or break it all. Our final deadline for the design and construction of those darn yearbook spreads is quickly approaching (I believe we’ve got about three weeks left to go with, maybe, 10 percent of the book finished already). I may have a heart attack. One of my students, we’ll call him “X,” is working himself nearly to death, bless his soul. X is one of my section editors and he’s been driving his section staff to work hard and finish up interviews, articles, photo assignments, and layouts as best as he can. Every time Yearbook gets cancelled for sports events or Chapel, he gets this exasperated look on his face and I shrug empathetically and give him an sympathetic pat on the shoulder. I fear that the poor kid just really doesn’t stand a chance. You and me both, kiddo. You and me both.
The play, for a while, had become a real source of satisfaction for me as we rehearsed and I watched my little budding thespians grow in confidence and performing ability. Lots of proud mama moments. But then it dawned on me that we’re supposedly performing this sucker the first week of May and there’s an incredible amount of work left to do. Somehow, I’ve got to wrestle up winter costuming (the play takes place in 1940s Ohio over Christmas) in Africa; create an Egyptian mummy case that I can have one of my actresses step into, get locked inside, and get carried offstage in; find living room furniture to use for my set and all the appropriate properties; AND get these kids ready to perform…with two to three weekly 45 minute rehearsals, plus one weekly afternoon rehearsal…all in a matter of DAYS at this point. Pray that I don’t lose my mind, please.
My English 9 class recently finished up a duo of debates inspired by our reading of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The first group of students debated for and against censorship in schools and libraries, and the second wrestled with the idea of freedom of the press and public access to information. The first debate was pretty immature and argumentative, with kids ending arguments with statements like, “Well, censorship is just dumb. That’s it.” But the second group really did a nice job. Well-researched, thoughtful, articulate. Not bad. Some of them keep asking if we can do more Shakespeare, which gets me a little choked up inside, but we’re headed on to Dickens next.
English 10 is wrapping up a unit on Alan Paton’s Cry, The Beloved Country, a novel that takes place in Apartheid-era South Africa (another good read, by the way), and those kids continue to impress me with their insight and interest in social justice issues and looking at the world through different lenses, all the while informing and solidifying their own worldview. Julius Caesar is next on the docket for that class. English 11, with their completion of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, has now successfully completed all of the novels that last year’s English teacher ordered for this year, and so I’m having to work some quick-thinking magic. I’ve got a set of drama anthologies in my classroom, so I think we’ll attack Death of a Salesman and Fences over the next several weeks leading up to finals week. I’ve said it before, but it really is incredible how easy the Lord has made it to bring up His truth in my literature courses and point kids towards questions and issues and concepts that really challenge them to see His design in our world. It’s a beautiful thing, really.
The school is still in the process of hiring for next year, and that’s definitely a point in need of your prayers. It’s been difficult to find people with the right skill sets for the positions we’re hiring for, and we’ve still got several positions to fill. So, if you know any Art teachers who might be up for teaching in Kenya, do let me know! I’ve also got three separate curriculum guides for next year to write before the end of May (English 12 World Literature; AP English Literature and Composition; and a Journalism elective course). Don’t know when I’ll find time to work on those, but the deadline’s definitely breathing down my neck. Lots to do, very little time to do it all in, and my energy is draining rapidly. Yikes.
4 You
After two long weeks of parent-teacher conferences and proctoring the students’ Stanford Achievement Tests, we were finally dismissed for our Easter break last Friday. A bunch of the staff gathered at one of our favorite places to eat out—4 You, a cute little Chinese restaurant where the owner, a cute little Chinese woman, absolutely beams every time we come to visit—and enjoyed a celebratory dinner. Our math and computers teacher, Steven, had picked up his fiancé Aftan (who will be moving to Kenya from Korea where she’s been teaching the last two years and joining us on staff next year as a PE teacher after the two of them get married this summer), and the two of them looked absolutely exhausted, but we were happy to have their company. Two staff families, the Kims and the Gibsons, also joined us, and then the rest of us “singles” filled in the gaps at the table.
Amy P had also brought along two friends, Josh and Steve, whom I’d met before, but hadn’t had much opportunity to get to know. The two of them work with a local professional soccer team through a missions organization, playing for and managing the team with the purpose of sharing the Gospel with their teammates and making an impact on the Nairobi community through their ministry. It’s always exciting to talk with other folks who are here doing neat things for the Lord, and to hear about the unique opportunities that each of these individuals find in their ministries. After chatting a while over dinner, talking about how the Lord led each of us to Kenya, where we’re from back in the States, things like that, it turns out that Steve’s sister was one of my sorority sisters at Miami. Small world, right? I hadn’t spoken with Elizabeth in over a year and I was elated by this chance to hear about one of the women who had impacted my life in such a huge way as a student. So last Sunday, when I visited the local internet café to catch up on some emails, I made sure to send Liz a message telling her about my ironic encounter with her brother half-way around the world.
And in thinking about it, I realized that the Lord somehow used that evening to bless me in two equally profound and encouraging ways. First, He reminded me that I’m never alone in this world, no matter how isolated and claustrophobic I’m feeling. I’ve been feeling so exhausted lately by the secluded experience I’ve had as a teacher at a small school in a big city in a foreign nation. I’ve been completely clothes-lined by the transition between college life, with its infinite supply of social networking options, to living in this new world where such circles seem tragically small. I’ve been surprised by how much that change has rattled me and left me feeling cornered and alone. And so running into someone who connected me back to a time and place and person who were each so wonderful, had a strangely liberating effect on me. And secondly, I think the Lord reminded me that I haven’t simply been uprooted from normalcy and dropped haphazardly into some strange and unfamiliar place. There are connections to be made, things to be thankful for, people to reconnect with. There’s design and timeliness and irony at work in my life. It’s as though God’s placed little moments like that along the way to serve as reminders that He and I aren’t completely crazy. And it’s good. It’s very, very good.
Red Earth, Blue Sky, White Water Nile
Through his friend who works at Rift Valley Academy (another international Christian school like WNS) in Kijabe, one of our teachers told us all about a travel opportunity to Uganda over our Easter Break, and four of us—Becca, Jonathan, Amy P, and I—all eagerly jumped at the chance to go. So this past Monday, four of us (all of us, with the exception of Amy, who had flown in a couple of days early to meet up with a friend who works with an AIM children’s ministry in Uganda) woke up early to grab a taxi downtown to the Akamba bus station where we boarded for an 11 hour trip from Nairobi to Jinja, Uganda. About an hour into our trip, we picked up the RVA teacher, Ryan, and six other Kijabe folks en route. There was a father/son pair, a father/daughter pair, and a couple from the Netherlands who are working at the Kijabe hospital for a short-term stint.
In the early afternoon, we reached the Kenya-Uganda border and I enjoyed my first experience with border-crossing outside of an airport or train. Wild, let me tell you. We all filed off of the bus and entered what I can only describe as some kind of demilitarized zone—a fenced-off dirt yard surrounded by chain link and iron gates, with several small concrete buildings placed inside. There was a washroom, for 10/- a use, and several government buildings with haphazard queues leading to small, dirty windows, behind which sat very gruff-looking Kenyans and Ugandans, slowly thumbing through passports and inspecting the documentation we’d filled out on the bus. I caught Becca just before she leaned on a table which read “Do Not Sit. 50,000/- Fine” as we waited in the Ugandan entry line. Dozens of money-changers shuffled through the yard, harassing mzungus and other travelers, holding out small calculators and claiming that their rate was best. By far the most startling presence at the border zone was small metal box hanging near one of the windows. Apparently approved by the Kenya and Uganda Heath Agencies, the Office of the President and several other bureaus, the box dispensed free condoms to help protect travelers from contracting AIDS.
When we arrived back to the bus, dodging young men carrying cardboard boxes and shouting, “Madam! Cold drinks! You need Fanta? Coke?” we were greeted by our quite smarmy bus driver, who introduced us to several young ladies and had us shake their hands before he allowed us to board the bus. We realized later that he had been introducing all of us mzungus to beggars. Several other passengers took longer to get through the lines, and so as we waited, I looked out into the streets of Busia, watching children play with shoeboxes tied to long pieces of string that they dragged in front of storefronts and smiled at the “boda boda” (motorcycle transport) men who all donned bright pink button-down shirts and waited in the street for some customer to come along and hop on their back seat.
Another hour or so of driving, and I began to feel like I really was in a very different country. Kenya’s landscape is very stark—shades of brown, gray, blue, and sage seem to paint horizontal stripes behind the silhouettes of acacias. Streets in town are lined with Jacarandas that bloomed last fall, and imported palm trees, but outside of the Nairobi city limits, there’s something beautiful about the dry, hard land. Upon reaching Kijabe, the landscape changes when you enter the Great Rift Valley. A ring of hills and mountains encircles a deep valley below, filled with blues and reds and greens. Lake Naivasha also holds its own oasis of beauty, and visiting Mombasa and Maasai Mara introduced me to the coolness of the coast and the splendor of the plains. Uganda, to me, was striking in the saturation of the colors you encounter. Kenya’s ground may be spotted with green, but Uganda’s marshes and palms grew lush and lustrous. Kenya’s earth may be red, but Uganda’s clay ground seemed somehow to bleed. I think our drive through the Ugandan countryside called to my attention the contrasting beauty of Kenya, as well as the uniqueness and vibrancy of Africa as a whole.
When our bus arrived in Jinja, we waited at a small station until the rafting company’s transport came to take us on to their site. We were surprised when a large truck arrived. Literally, a truck—filled with enough benches to seat about forty people, but the side walls were missing, so we loaded into it like livestock and were sealed in by Nile River Explorer employees for our half-hour drive to the campsite. As we drove through Jinja, we passed through a small town with storefronts littered with people making their final purchases of the day, here and there receiving a yell of, “Hey! Wazungu!” from the side of the road, while others looked on with blank or bewildered stares at this strange sight of thirty five white people driving through their town. It became stranger still when we left town and drove through rural Jinja, past small villages, brick and mud thatch-roofed huts, and small dukas (shops) near the road. Little ragged or naked children would look up from their doorways or the game they were playing and call out to us in shrieks of laughter, excitement, or curiosity. I think it was Eric who compared us to a parade float passing by. And that’s what we were—a bizarre, foreign spectacle.
Our lodging Monday night was pretty dodgy, but the mosquito nets kept the bugs away and I slept soundly both knowing that I’d taken my Malaria pills and listening to the nearby rushing of the Nile past the rocks below our cabin. The next morning, we hopped aboard the same strange truck and headed towards the Nile River Explorers Adventure Centre (which, I realize in typing this, sounds really kind of silly) where we had a breakfast of chapati, toast, hardboiled eggs, fresh fruit, and chai, all the while watching a rafting video that was playing on a TV suspended in a corner. My anticipation and excitement rose as we listened to one of the guides give us a brief explanation of what would happen that day and as we were fitted for life jackets and helmets…and then we were off to the bank of the Nile.
In a word, our eight hour day rafting the Nile was exhilarating. With the exception of a fluke grade 3 rapid they’d christened “50/50” that flipped our boat on its side and surfed for about 15 seconds, with me and Amy hanging onto the side suspended in the air, and the rest of our little crew being slapped ferociously against the side stuck in the rapid until the boat finally flipped and sent us all hurtling underwater for another few anxious moments…everything was really great. We went through about twelve total rapids, with several grade 4 and 5 rapids along the way. I’d never been white water rafting before, and found that even with the humiliating reality that I was somehow completely unable to get myself back into the boat whenever I found myself out of it (Our guide Juma, on many occasions, would reach down to dunk me under water and then fling me back into the boat), I was blissfully happy during that day on the water.
Half way through our day, the safety boat came alongside ours and dropped off freshly cut pineapple for our lunch, which we ate over a few quiet moments on the river, and in the still places between rapids, Juma would encourage us to jump out of the boat and swim with the current, enjoying the cool water under the hot sun. Throughout the day, heavy storm clouds lurked ominously just beyond us, contrasting strikingly with the clear bright sky above us on the river. We floated past women washing their clothes in the shallows, young men diving from rocks for a swim, and the occasional naked man taking a bath. Juma pointed out to us along the way all of the curious intricacies of the landscape I’m sure I would have missed had he not called our attention to them. During one long calm stretch, our conversation turned towards spirituality, and the six of us in our boat found ourselves chatting with Juma about the Gospel, marriage and family life, heaven and hell, right and wrong, and how a loving God could allow bad things to happen to good people, and good things to happen to the bad ones. Our conversation eventually turned towards his questioning us about how things are in “mzungu land,” Obama, global politics, and how we perceive and experience Africa. One particularly good question that he asked, “If you could change one thing in Africa for the better, what would it be?” led to an interesting and challenging dialogue about the complicated relationship between Africa and her eager beneficiaries who, though desiring to help, don’t always know how to do so effectively. Juma summoned wisdom from personal experience and his own travels and research and intuition, and we all pondered on the problem until some lighter issue surfaced.
Near the end of our journey, Juma told us that we would be taking the boat to shore and walking around a particularly dangerous grade 6 (expert only) series of rapids before we would re-board for our final grade 5 rapid and the end of our day on the Nile. We arrived at the bank and walked along a narrow mud trail up a hill through some brush until we arrived at a rocky bank where we would wait to get back aboard. When we turned around, I think we all gasped in awe of the sheer grandeur of the colossal sight before us. The grade 6 rapids crashed in waves of white, rolling violently through and over and within themselves, the water a cataclysmic, mesmerizing display that left me completely awestruck and gaping in my soggy shorts on the rock. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like that before. I remembered lying under the stars one night in Hocking Hills in southern Ohio during high school during a meteor shower where I counted over 40 shooting stars before I fell asleep. Unbelievable. I felt so small, and yet somehow protected and special and remembered all in one moment. This was a moment not unlike that one, although a different sense of wonder swept over me as I stared at those rapids. Having been through several powerful spots along the Nile that day, I looked out and realized that these before me…these could absolutely destroy a person. The might and power of those rapids could completely overwhelm even a strong man’s strength and will. Just water and pressure and rock. And yet, in that terrible power, there was also a compelling, prevailing magnificence and beauty. God is massive. God is commanding. God is unbelievably merciful and good. Because the same hand that churns up those rapids capable of taking the life of a human being also formed us, heals us, comforts us, and makes us whole again.
Pray
- First and foremost, I find myself thankful to have journeyed through about eight and a half months of ministry here in Kenya. But there’s still a crucial seven weeks left before I get to trek back to the States for a visit home and some rest from teaching. I’d ask that you pray that I would continue to keep my focus always on the Lord as I battle the fatigue and apathy that I know will become harder and harder to avoid. I need to persevere in order to be the best teacher I can be so that my students would be encouraged by the Christ in me.
- I mentioned it before, but WNS also needs prayer as we work to fill the remaining positions on our staff for next school year. We need God to send us Christ-like, focused, enthusiastic, and adventurous people to join our educational ministry here so that our school can continue to serve its students and families well.
- I would also ask that you keep the nation of Kenya (and after my trip to Uganda, I would perhaps expand this to the entire African continent) in your prayers. There is so much poverty, so much corruption, and so much hunger in this place. Physical hunger, yes, but also hunger for encouragement, hunger for peace, hunger for change, and, I believe, a hunger for all of the blessing that can be found in Jesus. Keep it up, folks.
Happy belated Easter, everyone—and thanks for reading and praying and supporting me in God’s work here. Love you all!
Kate
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