"To: Dan.... Love, Rachel"

Background: My brother, Dan, just moved out of the house and into his own a few weeks ago. His new room just happens to be a very brilliant and altogether wretched shade of PINK. hehehehe So being the very sensitive and loving sister I am *ehem* I wrapped his Christmas present in pink tissue paper with a pink bow...

"To: Dan
Love, Rachel
grins I thought the PINK would compliment your room."



Sisters have to find SOME way of lovingly dishing back the jokes our brothers have so lovingly dished us. hehehe

Merry Christmas!! (literally!) ;-)

Worn Soles

Today (Saturday) I sat under a tarp, brown from dirt and use, with what seemed like millions of holes in it, some big, some small. And light shone through the holes. Light and blue sky. And it struck me that those holes seemed like millions of twinkling stars, and the background of the tarp the deep night sky. Under this sky of tarp and holes I sat behind an old man with splashes of white intertwined throughout the frizzy black strands. The collar of his suitcoat was frayed and threadbare at the neckline, a walking stick held loosely in his stiff crumpled strong black hand, the skin on his feet dry and cracked with age and caked with the dust of paths tread. On those feet were falling-apart sandals made of discarded tire fragments. And as he crossed his ankles underneath his white plastic armchair, I saw that the heels of his soles were worn on the outside edges... Just like mine.

Humility "Part 2"

There is great humility to be learned in being a "foreigner". To be a foreigner is to be dependent. You are dependent upon those around you to open their lives and hearts to you, to welcome you into their midst, into their communities, into their circles of friends, into their families. You depend on these people to be bridges of understanding to their culture and traditions. You are dependent upon their willingness to be teachers of their languages and patient as you stumble about in your journey of learning. You depend on them for a great many things like these, and then, as you have started on that path to becoming one with them (I stress WITH them and not one of them. To be one OF them simply isn't possible. Nor should you seek it, as that would mean losing those things that make you who you are, largely coming from culture, from how you were raised, the education you received, etc. God has made you who you are for a reason and a purpose, and it is not for us to divorce from ourselves that which God has molded and shaped us into being as a result of our own unique backgrounds. However, it is so sooo important to engage in being ONE WITH THEM. This is being their sister, being their brother, walking in their shoes, eating their food, speaking their language...), you begin to depend on them for other things... Things like love and acceptance... like the extended family that the body of Christ is able to offer, because when it really comes down to it, we're all foreigners. You depend on these people who you are building relationships with, friendships with, to be your mother to comfort you when you're sick (because your own mom isn't there to make you chicken soup or ginger tea). :) You depend on them to encourage you when you're having a rough day, laugh with you as your joy shared is doubled, and cry with you to bear some of the burden of whatever pain you are going through. To be dependent is to know humility - a humility that is sweet to taste, full of love, and abounding in grace.

a mix of pictures (and more to come) :)

Preaching on the "maui" (stone) in "Kenya 2" (the people here are very hostile, and almost all are engaged in brewing illegal alcohol). My third weekend in Kipkaren, the students and staff at the training center went from house to house in our surrounding community to invite the to "the rock" for an afternoon of preaching and music. A lot of people are found deeply imbedded in poverty (not only economically), and have no church to turn to or to have turn to them. So out we went. It's the intention of the spiritual leaders at the training center to make these meetings a weekly happening, as people are responding to the Word and to the love being shown them. We've only just begun though, and there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done.

Listening.

Eating sugarcane (my first time) with Rashid and Henri (2 public health interns). The dairy unit is behind us.

Up before 5am to milk the cows. grins (they have 2 cows: Istoria and Nenile)

HIV/Aids Testing

Yesterday (Monday), I went with the public health workers and interns to an area called Osorongai (near Kipkaren) to test people for HIV/Aids. Betty (the worker), Rashid and Henri (interns), Miishak (driver) and I piled into the landrover/ambulance with our supplies and kits and headed out over the bumpy roads to Osorongai. The back of the "ambulance" acted as a sort of office/area of privacy, as those who were willing climbed in and out to get their fingers pricked, blood tested, results read, and personal information written for records. Of the 44 people we tested, most of whom were youth, all 44 were negative (yay!). And one of the opportunities of catching, testing, and educating people when they are young is that you can teach them how to protect themselves from getting HIV, as well as help erase some of the stigma surrounding the virus. And for some comic relief, we ended the day with loading the back of the truck with a couple bundles of squawking smelly chickens to bring home with us for supper for some visitors at the training center. grins Never a dull moment. ;)

Humility "Part 1"

The other day I was asked the question: "What is God teaching you here?"

Perhaps I might have responded "What isn't God teaching me here?" grins But I didn't. ;) Because he IS teaching me some specific things, one being humility (I'll share more of the others later), which is also completely inexhaustable as far as coming to know it. It's a lifelong learning. So anyway, to the details.

Humility...

The first part of humility I'm learning I expressed to a friend through email, so I'm going to include some of it here, and hopefully clarify it a bit better. (The second part of humility will come the next time I blog.) :)

Perhaps as it goes in many or most traditional cultures (including our own not so long ago), women lack voice. And I'm not talking about the kind of voice that stands up at a podium to demand rights. I'm talking more of being shut out or shut down from sharing thoughts, ideas, emotions, feelings, wisdom, using the gifts and creativity and intelligence God has blessed them with. With women to women there is freedom. But women and men sharing together on equal footing has yet to come to full life, and most especially (and sadly) in marriage. Within marriage, in a quiet but firm way, they are oppressed and treated injustly. Someone told me that once a woman enters into marriage she begins to self-destruct. She loses her voice, her ability to make decisions, her freedom to express thoughts and feelings... In traditional Nandi (the local tribe here) marriages, the men are trained beforehand - a kind of marriage counseling ceremony of sorts for men - and one of the things that they are told is that their wife is their "closest enemy", so build a wall against her and don't be vulnerable or share anything on your heart with her because she may turn against you. How horrible is that! So instead of marriage bringing a man and woman even closer together, it separates them. (Not exactly the picture of marriage we read of between Christ and the Church.) Where the man will perhaps share all on his heart to his girlfriend or fiance before they're married, afterwards he stops sharing with her and she is not allowed to share her thoughts and feelings and desires with him. She becomes simply an object of pleasure and a bearer of his children. With intimacy in marriages, women can never approach men or express their love or feelings of attraction to their husband. It's only when their husbands have the desire to be with them. And even if they theoretically can approach their husbands, they don't for fear of being beaten (regardless of whether or not their husband actually would). I'm not saying that that happens in ALL marriages (there might be the exception here or there), but it's definitely in the greater majority. Women are blocked out physically and emotionally and intellectually. So now you can perhaps see why it was said that they self-destruct. Even before marriage, women aren't given equal footing with men (intellectually, in leadership, etc). I maybe happen to be an exception here, simply because I'm a mzungu (white person), so I can access conversations that African women can't or are less likely to.
And it is in this sense of gender oppression and injustice that I've been learning a lot about humility. And I was thinking... that even though humility is always a good thing... the source of that humility, or what causes the humbling experience can be a pretty aweful thing. I guess that's not a new concept... arrogance is bad and so the humbling is good (put simply), but before now I'd never thought of humility and the cause of it as being systematic. The "system" is culture. The culture says that "the way it has always been is the way it should always be". And so you find a culture of injustice and oppression against women (and again, especially in marriage). But it is this system, this culture, that is causing humility in me, because I've taken equality for granted from growing up in it. My hearts rebels against being put in a box with no voice... when I know that a man, ANY man, looks at me and sees first that I'm a woman and so I'm on less footing from the beginning. Before we've even begun we're on unequal ground. And then, because I have white skin, I land just ahead of my black sisters because they have black skin. I'm somehow special because of a DNA code, a difference in pigment. And so I hurt twice - in hurting for being a woman, and hurting for the injustice against black women because even though I've started off on uneven ground, my ground is higher than theirs. And if you try and share these things with the majority of men of this culture, they don't see the pain that women experience because they are the ones that are benefiting from the system. How brave are the people that work for change even if it means losing some of the status and benefits (even though injustly gained) they possess! But even if you look at the so-called "benefits" and "status" and such, men have NO idea what they are missing in isolating women and their wives from themselves, chaining them to tradition because "things are the way they've always been". Where would ALL of us be if that was how we lived?? So, as I wrote my friend: "A burdenshared is a burden halved... A joy shared is a joy doubled..." (something like that). grins So, I'm learning humility - how to be humble - in this culture, while at the same time in my own small ways humbly challenging the powers that be. The humility I'm learning isn't from the source of pride, and it isn't a humbling who's source is something ill inside of me. The source is bigger than me, bigger than women, bigger than men, and really, bigger than culture. Who is the corruptor of all that God made good? Satan and his "principalities and powers". These are what we are ultimately fighting. And who is the only one that can fight Satan but Jesus Christ. Yet we have been given His power through the shedding of his blood. We have been given his name. And we have been given his Word and the Holy Spirit who gives us his words to speak.

Before I end I want to assert that Nandi (and Kenyan) men aren't evil. (You may laugh, but I'm serious.) I have met so many wonderful christian men here who sincerely love the Lord and desire to do his will, and I'm friends with ALL of the students, and we all hang out together and joke and laugh and talk together and there's not so much the sense of "you can't participate because you're a woman". I do want to share these things with you, however, SO THAT YOU CAN PRAY. Not only the women need prayer as they deal with their experiences of oppression, but the Nandi (and Kenyan) men need prayer as well - that our Mighty loving God would soften their hardened hearts... that the power of the hand of Jesus Christ would touch their eyes so that they can really see the intense pain and chasms of separation that their cultural norms are placing between them and their women and their wives... that the Holy Spirit would whisper in their ears, giving christian men a voice to speak out against their culture of injustice against women and instead uplift them before God, before their families, and before their communities. Christian men NEED to be different from what their world tells them is "right to do". Christ came to make disciples of both men AND women, and both were found at his feet. He fulfills those attributes in cultures that are godly, and he turns the tables on those that are not. Pray that men will be Christ in their culture. Pray that the Holy Spirit would give them the vision, the insight, and the courage to break cultural norms and defend the oppressed. Pray that they would see the value of their women, that they would see them as indeed being made - male and female - in the image of GOD. Cast out what ill feelings you may have against them and PRAY for them because they are being greatly deceived by the Deceiver. And pray that the Lord might even send men - foreigners or other Kenyans - who can teach them what they do not know, and that they would have ears to hear and hearts that receive.

Siki berurin mising' ! (Kinandi: Be blessed so much!)