Recent Posts From blog & photos
Quality time: 2 weeks in pictures (27/9/16)
I have found myself with the joy of 2 weeks of quality time with the kids,...
Unfolding vistas (or, the last two months in summary) (10/8/16)
It’s been almost two months since we had margin to write down some...
Prayer Log: Aug 2016
Thank you for praying for us, and/or just being concerned with what is...
Prayer log: July 2016
Thank you for praying for us, and/or just being concerned with what is...
Mud and muck (24/6/17)
Here on the northern edge of the Rift Valley, it’s 7000 feet above sea...
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...
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...
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...
The railroad tracks of apparent contradiction (3/5/11)
It was just under a week ago that we first took the steep, twisty, narrow road to Kijabe. The stunning views across the Great Rift Valley were the first thing we noticed…breathtaking. The people, and the ‘African massage’ you get as your car rattles over potholes the size of a golden retriever were the second. We’ve been here nearly a week, and are settling in well…the kids have unpacked their toys in their room and created their own little nests. We have unpacked our boxes and started to figure things out like how to bake at 7,000 feet elevation (you cut down on baking powder…who knew?), learning not to leave the windows open if you’re not home (the monkeys invade and go on a poo-tastic adventure), telling the kids that the three kangaroo-sized baboons in the front yard are not ‘doggies’, and discovering that the water filter appears ineffectual…judging by the rumblings in our bellies. We have had people bring us cookies and muffins to welcome us here since we arrived, and it has just been lovely. Mardi has started work at the hospital, meeting patients and getting to know how they do things in Kenya. We’ve started to connect...
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My parents’ annual tradition of giving toys to the kids in the hospital… but this time, their first time in the new pediatrics wing!
Passion to help the oppressed
So proud of the pediatric team here, and so pleased to return to it soon!