Jambo Afrika!

Monday, June 18, 2012

New Nephew Tristan!

I am so happy to announce that as of Saturday night at 11:13pm I have a new nephew!! Tristan Lee Goldade has arrived! Congrats to my brother, Tyler, and my sister-in-law, Lynn, on their new baby boy! Tristan and mom are both healthy and he is 8lbs and 21 inches. It kills me to not be there with them right now but just makes me look forward to seeing Tristan on August 6th even more.

On a less exciting note, I arrived in Ougadadougou safely yesterday. I can't count how many times I have already told people here "I don't speak French". I need to work on that quickly! It is hot here. Very hot. I am so thankful for the fan in my room and I have never been more thankful for an ice cold shower in my life. After I arrived yesterday afternoon we ate lunch, did some grocery shopping. We got home around 4pm and I decided to take a quick nap before supper. However, jet lag took over (only 3 hour difference this time) along with the little sleep I got all of last week while trying to spend as much time with my team before they left and I ended up sleeping through my alarms for supper and through the entire night! It felt wonderful.

I have already seen a stark difference between Kenya and Burkina. They are poor here. Much poorer than Kenya. Burkina has now moved to being the 2nd poorest country in the world. It is a little surreal being here.

I keep praying that God will use me and that despite the language difference I will be able to spread hHis love. When the people here have so little, I desire so desperately to give them something. And nothing is better than God's love and the knowledge that they can have a relationship with Him.

Please pray I learn as much French as I can as fast as I can and that I adjust to the heat quickly and easily. Or as my friend Annie would say, "like a princess." These words became a motto among the girls of the Mediquest team during our month in Kenya. Whenever we were doing something less than glamorous or slightly unenjoyable, to make the experience seem less rustic we would simply state we would do the task, "like a princess"!

Hope all is well in U.S. and Kenya and where ever you are at. So long for now!

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Kissed a Giraffe Today :)

Heading West

Tonight is my last night in Kenya. I have loved my time here! This country is so beautiful! And the people are even more beautiful. I have seen things here and met people that I will never forget. It was sad saying goodbye to my Mediquest team who I have shared all of these experiences with. This chapter of Africa has come to a close.

In just a few short hours I am boarding a plane and heading west to Burkina Faso! I will be meeting up with Lynn Kennedy who I will be living with for the next 2 months. Please pray that the transition goes well for me as I leave English speaking Kenya and enter French speaking Burkina Faso. I do not know any French and am a bit nervous the culture shock of this country may be a little harder to adjust to.

Au revoir!

Loki Pics

I have been on the road and without internet access for the last couple weeks. A lot has happened! Here are few pictures of Loki. I will upload more when I get a chance!

Annie and I

I thought this goat was impressive. Eating leaves off the tree.

This is a super large ant hill!

Lokichoggio

The evangelist and one of the women Renate works with through transformational development showing us their first crop of watermelon which they will sell to pay for needs in the community.

Merideth and I with the Turkana women Renate works with

I sleep under a net every night here :)

Top Ten Encounters: Week 3

1. Visiting an Italian chapel built at the base of the mountains by Italian prisoners of war.

2. Baboons on the highway and in the forests nearby!

3. I got to see my first surgery ever! It was a c-section and the mom and baby made it through just fine :)

4. I got to see several deliveries. I will never get over the miracle of new life!

5. We visited the beautiful tea farms near Litein! I never knew how much work goes into one cup of tea.

6. I had a terrifying experience with an electric shower head that began to smoke, turn frightening red, and threaten to explode as I ran out of the room! Cold shower vs. electrocution: cold shower wins.

7. During our home stay in Litein we had the privilege of watching a television show called Eva Luna. Eva Luna is a soap opera written by a Chilean novelist with the Spanish words muted and voiced over with English voices that is popular in Kenya. Talk about multicultural!

8. I got to stay at the Litein hospital until late into the night observing how it operates at night! One of our new friends (a young girl who was helping to care for her paralyzed mother who was in the hospital) came to visit us during the wee hours of the night.

9. We got to stay in Maasia huts! They were gorgeous!

10. Running in Kenya! We got to run on a trail in a gorgeous valley in the Kijabe forest. It was my first time running in a skirt. Not very fashionable but completely culturally appropriate :)

Sunday, June 3, 2012

Lessons from Lokichoggio

This week stretched me more than I ever have been in my life. But in a very good way. I saw things and had experiences that will stick with me forever. From the minute we stepped of the plane until the minute we boarded again 5 days later, I was in a constant learning process.

I will begin with the physical challenges I faced. The average temperature in Loki while we were there peaked around 100 F. This is quite a switch from the early spring weather of North Dakota. Even at night the heat was relentless. I don’t think I ever stopped sweating. I was amazed at how well the people there handle the heat!

Because the rains just ended we were graced with a constant presence of flies. They were, of course, accompanied by mosquitos, cockroaches, spiders, and a some other bugs that I have never seen before. Once again, the people there are not even phased by the bugs. It took me a couple days, but after awhile I didn’t notice them much anymore either. However, I have never appreciated a mosquito net more in my life!

Loki is a very rural part of Kenya. It is so far north that the locals joked they are not apart of Kenya, but that they are forgotten. From Loki it was pointed out that just over those mountains was Uganda, over those mountains was South Sudan, and over those mountains in the distance was Ethiopia. We could definitely feel the close presence of Sudan. There are multiple villages that have become Sudanese refugee camps. In fact, while we were out in the bush (60k) from town doing the mother and child nutrition clinic, we saw several vehicles from the UN roll past us. We were surprised to see other vehicles in such a rural location. We were informed that they are planning on forming another Sudanese refugee camp very close to where we were. Seeing them made things come to life for me.The nurses at Loki also told us in the past years that the Sudanese crossed the border into Kenya seeking medical care from war wounds. I have read about the war and heard stories but being so close to it is completely different.

The 5 days I spent in Loki I was blessed to share with a Kenyan nurse named Gladys. She opened up her home to me and prepared some delicious Kenyan food for me! Even better, she taught me how to make it so I will be preparing some when I return to the US!

We also spent a lot of time at the home of a single German missionary who has been in Loki for over 30 years named Renate. She was the main nurse of the clinic for 23 of those years and has more recently turned her ministry towards transformational development. We had several long discussions hearing her many stories and and experiences. One quote I feel is worth repeating. We asked her how she knew that God was calling her to come to Loki. She said that she was currently in Bible school in Germany and had already attained her nursing degree. She said she was living the Christian life and serving God with almost everything she had there in Germany. And everything was just fine. But then God told her, “You can serve me 99%—or 100%”. Renate decided to give God that last 1% and it was enough of a difference to her being a missionary for over half of her life! As I continue to search God’s will for my life throughout my college years I plan to hold these words close to my heart and give God 100%. I encourage you to do the same!

Every day in Loki we visited the local Africa Inland Church clinic. This facility is entirely run by nurses and they do a phenomenal job! They take care of everyone who comes through the door and if a case is too complicated, the patients are sent to the nearest hospital—which happens to be 90k away over a bumpy road. We saw just how vital this clinic is to the people of Loki and the surrounding areas as it provides the best health care for the region.

The clinic not only cares for the people who walk through its doors, it also does outreach clinic to the surrounding areas. Many people are not able to travel that far for immunizations or for nutrition treatment so the nurses go out into the bush to serve them. I gained a huge amount of respect for Kenyan nurses. They are on the front lines and work so very hard.

Loki is at the heart of the area of the Turkana people. They are nomadic and mainly herd goats for their sustenance. The women wear beautiful beaded necklaces while the men wear what I thought were very cute hats that often had a feather stuck in them. And they men always carried a long stick. The Turkana frequently face raids from Ugandans or Sudanese. There is an interesting atmosphere in the region because of the raids and revenge.

During the years of the Sudan war, NGOs poured into Loki as a way to provide relief to Sudan because it is very near the border and has a large landing strip making it easy access for delivering aid. As the title predicts, I learned so much while in Loki, and relief efforts is the first thing I will discuss. There is no doubt that Loki and the Turkana need assistance. However, the people there told us how one NGO has come after the other and tried to help but they always leave. As we were walking down the streets of Loki, children would shout “mzungu!” as we passed by. And we soon learned what majority of them equate our white skin to: money. Nearly all mzungu (kiswahili for white person) who come to the Turkana are there to give them some kind of assistance whether it be food or money. This is the same story in many other parts of Africa and other parts of the world. It was a new experience to have people look at me but only see money while they looked right past the actual person underneath my white skin.

We got to see first hand the affect this coming and going of the various aid organizations has had on the area. There were locked doors on vacant rooms with signs of organizations on them that had left. It brought up so many questions about how aid should be delivered, how it most will help the people, if it actually helps more than hurts, and if I do feel called to serve people in poverty, how I will choose to do it.

As I stood in the middle of a crowd of mothers with their malnourished children I was faced with so many questions that I had to ask myself about life. Really tough ones. I have read about missionaries in books since I knew how to read and heard their stories of the work they do. I have read of how children around the world are starving. I have seen pictures. But it was all still an ocean away.

Last week as I stood under the blazing sun in a desert in northern Kenya it all became real. The reason I was stretched so much last week was not because of the heat or the bugs. It was because I can never wake up again viewing the world as I did before I came to Loki. I cannot erase the memories of the desperate Turkana mothers trying to provide food for their children. I cannot keep those malnourished kids on a page on a book or suppress their big brown eyes to a picture in a magazine. They are here and they are real. Living in the same world as me. Even when I return to the US an ocean will longer be enough to separate my life from theirs.

I thank the Lord so much that I saw Loki and the Turkana people. I’m so grateful that I have seen the poverty and suffering with my own eyes. I also saw something else in Loki…I saw life! I saw a beautiful people group with a great sense of community. I met brothers and sisters in Christ who love Him so much! I saw the results of the life of faithful Renate and what a difference her stable presence has made among the Turkana. I saw hope. I saw progress. There is hope for the Turkana and the chance to make a difference in their lives that will last through eternity!

I have been so challenged by my time in Loki and realized that God is in even the most difficult places. Whether it be among starving children in Africa who will not live two weeks without their portion of supplement that we handed them or in broken relationships that have not changed in years and seem hopeless—God is there. Whether it is in grief over a lost loved one or or a in a Sudanese refugee camp—God is there. He is in those places and He is moving and healing!