Recent Posts From Blog
What if the problem is…me? (6/9/20)
Until last week, I saw myself as a pretty typical right-of-center white guy...
Learning to cuss without cussing during Advent (12/12/18)
A couple of nights ago at 7pm (dusk) we were returning to Kijabe on the...
Learning from Eugene Peterson: resisting the temptation of ‘great things’ (30/10/18)
Eugene Peterson died a few days ago. He’s well known for...
Settling in (16/10/18)
It’s hard to believe that it’s coming up to two months since we...
Why thinking clearly about God matters in cross-cultural/global mission
Note: Andy’s paper, “Righteousness, suffering and participation...
Popular Posts All Time
Update on Riley (18/11/13)
Summary As we mentioned in our last blog post, our six year old daughter Riley’s growth has been poor for the last year. On Friday she had an MRI of her brain and pituitary gland (the gland that produces growth hormone) to help troubleshoot this. We are incredibly fortunate to have Dr. Leland Albright here in Kijabe. An expert pediatric neurosurgeon of 35 years who retired to volunteer in Kijabe Hospital, he has reviewed the MRI and it shows there is an area of abnormality in her pituitary gland (about half the size of a penny / one cent piece). He isn’t yet sure what it is – it could be a benign tumor (pituitary microadenoma), it could be something else. Tomorrow he is sending the images to a friend, a neuroradiology expert, because while Leland has seen similar abnormalities in teens and adults, he has never seen one in a child Riley’s age. The bottom line is that we don’t yet know what this abnormality is. It may or may not be the cause of Riley’s poor growth. It may just be something that was there, won’t cause problems and can stay there her entire life with regular...
Questions without easy answers (14/5/11)
“Dear Kijabe Hospital, I …. was admitted on …….. I was diagnosed with hypertension and I was 27 weeks pregnant. I was told that the child I was carrying could not grow and so she was removed. On removal she was found to be only 855 g and she was taken to the nursery. Due to the huge bill I incurred in the hospital which upon the time I was discharged I could not clear, I could not afford to pay the money which could help my baby grow. I have so decided to give the child to the hospital. Yours faithfully….” What do you do when you read such a note? The hospital here charges for its services, as does every government-run and mission hospital in the country. A hospital bed is charged at 200KSh (about $2) per day, drugs are obtained at deep discounts and charged at close to cost. The hospital staff are paid Kenyan nurses and some doctors, with most of the doctors volunteers. Yet after 2 months, this little princess, alive and thriving, has accumulated a bill that is prohibitive for her mother. A mother whose decision is difficult to question when none...
Giving ourselves permission to not be OK (29/10/14)
Here’s some titles from top-selling Christian books on Amazon: “Every Day a Friday” “You Can, You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner” “The 7 Most Powerful Prayers That Will Change Your Life Forever!” “Living Life Without Limits” No kidding, these are real books. And they are huge sellers. What do they have in common? They are representative of an almost total loss (both in the West and Africa) of a sense of rhythm and pattern to our lives, of an ebb and flow between seasons of equilibrium and orientation, and seasons of suffering and sadness. Last week, I was asked to lead this term’s Prayer Day for the staff and students of Moffat Bible College. I spoke on this loss of rhythm and pattern, and how profoundly we in the church have lost a Biblical understanding of the importance of grief and lament, steeped as we are in cultures that aren’t comfortable dealing with normal human loss and suffering. Also in church cultures, where words like ‘victory’, ‘power’, and ‘overcoming’ are seriously overused (my own tradition of charismatic evangelicalism and pentecostalism is not blameless). We spent our time in the Psalms, re-learning the power and depth of the Psalms of lament and complaint. We...
We need your prayer… (14/11/13)
We normally publish our prayer needs and reflection back on the status of the last month’s needs at the beginning of every month…but we’ve had a few things pop up that we’d be grateful for some specific prayer on. If prayer isn’t your thing, your encouraging words and just knowing that you are thinking of us is also incredibly helpful. Riley: Riley has always been a small child…she had nutritional issues while gestating, and nearly died the day of delivery due the umbilical cord being wrapped around her neck. She’s our ‘mighty mouse’, to use her Aussie grandmother’s phrase…full of life and energy, despite her less-than-3rd percentile size. But she’s not growing as fast as expected, and on the advice of her pediatric endocrinologist in Adelaide, we are taking her in tomorrow for an MRI in Nairobi. She’ll have to be sedated to keep her still, and it is our hope that this will rule out obvious things like brain tumours or a malfunctioning pituitary gland. Following this scan, we’ll have to decide whether to subject her to growth hormone testing, to determine if she needs growth hormone supplements. We are hoping not to have to do this, as...
Ishmael (4/3/12)
My heart’s a little heavy today. Last week, Ishmael (my pseudonym) came back to us from Dadaab Refugee Camp. I haven’t seen him since Friday since I’m not on duty this weekend, and I’m not sure if he’ll still be alive when I call the hospital tomorrow. We took care of him from November-January when he came to us malnourished, withdrawn, a mystery mass on his back. Initially there was relief at the biopsy result – nothing malignant. But no clues to what it was either. And then, infection after infection of the area, the tissue just dying before our eyes. A 4 year old lying in bed, refusing to eat, no interest in play, soulless eyes without hope. Finally, an answer – an unusual mycobacterium infection, needing strong TB drugs. Then slowly, a glimmer of hope. Incremental weight gain. Months of fever, disappearing. A boy waking up to the world. His apparently sullen father – trapped in this place where he spoke none of our languages, reliant on other women of his race to translate his most basic requests and thrust into the role of nursemaid – starting to hope that soon, maybe his son would be well....