Into Africa

We loaded up “Big Red,” our Toyota Land Cruiser, crossed the equator and traveled out across the beautiful highlands of Kenya, awed by the landscape of lush green patchwork fields, clumps of banana trees, little thatched roof huts, gorgeous skies and the picturesque flat-topped thorn trees that dot the countryside like huge umbrellas. It was the White Highlands where early British settlers had farmed and lived the good life. The landscape was breathtaking. Then we came to the edge of the Great Rift Valley and headed down the steep 2,000 foot escarpment into the valley floor. The rock and dirt road, mostly one lane, hugged the side of the mountain with turn-outs for on coming traffic but we never saw another vehicle on the whole trip. Reaching the valley at the bottom was like falling through a time crack. No lush green fields, no banana trees, only the monotonous brown vegetation of the flat arid bush land along the Kenya-Uganda border. The only road through the area was a narrow dirt road that was sometimes not much more than a goat trail. The frequent drainage gullies that cut across the road made shifting into low gear a regular event, the Land Cruiser bucking and swaying down into the wadi and struggling up the other side. The only sign of life we saw was the occasional bare backside of a man quickly disappearing into the bush at the sound of our approaching vehicle. I looked around dismayed wondering how anyone could live in this desolate place. A real step of faith is getting out of the car in the desert when your bladder says it can’t take one more bump in the road and you no longer care what might be lurking behind that roadside bush. After eleven hours, several “bush breaks” and late in the darkest of nights (no electric lights, no gas stations, no shops, nothing but that endless teeth-rattling bumpy road), we finally came to the little house of Pastor Andrew Kendagor, an African missionary living deep in the bush among the Pokot people. Andrew and his Pokot wife were trying to begin an outreach into the nomadic warrior culture of the Pokot tribe. Andrew’s father, Pastor George Kendagor, was the man who first took Dick into Pokot territory and showed him the needs of the people who were untouched by civilization or by the gospel message. Pastor Andrew and his little tribe of kids welcomed us. It was hard to figure out which kids were his and which were strays he had taken in, but he always had a houseful. To the light of a kerosene lantern we threw our sleeping bags on the floor of his house, exhausted and ready for sleep. Too hot to crawl inside, we sprawled out on top of the sleeping bags. Then, just as we were dozing off, the heavens opened and pounding rain, like a hundred drums on the tin roof above our heads, announced the beginning of the rainy season. Nine months of the year Pokot land is dry and brown. For three months the rains bring about 8 to 12 inches of badly needed rain for the cattle and people, transforming the brown vegetation into beautiful multi shades of green and blanketing the desert floor with tiny flowers. That first night for us in Pokotland the rains came with a terrific force. Andrew’s house was a typical bush house like the African huts except that it was square and had a roof made of corrugated tin sheets. The rough walls were mud, plastered over a frame of lumber woven with tree branches. The floors were made of packed mud mixed with cow dung. During the dry season that concoction makes a nice hard shiny, sweep-able floor, but in the pounding rain, with a leaking roof, we found ourselves sliding about on slippery sleeping bags on the muddy cow dung floor. Dick slept soundly, as he always had an innate ability to do in any situation, but Rick and I were awake long into the night. With the smell of damp cow dung in our nostrils and the pounding rain on the roof, we laid our plans of how we would talk Dad out of his insanity. I assured Rick, "In the morning we'll talk about this and we'll go back up there to the beautiful highlands and work among the people with the banana trees." Waking up the next morning a strange emptiness was gnawing inside of me, as feelings came creeping up from a long buried childhood memory. It was1945. The war had just ended and so had my parents’ marriage. My mom got on a bus in Pennsylvania with three kids and six suitcases headed for Oregon, a continent away. We arrived late one dark rainy night to a Greyhound bus depot, cold and dank, with no one there to meet us, and a scared six year old wishing I could wake up from a bad dream and be back home in my own bed. How could this be reality and what had happened to my familiar world? Thirty years later, my first night in the bush, waking up in that little mud house, I had that same lost feeling of displacement. Where was my reality and my familiar world? As I was mulling over all of this, Andrew’s wife came in bringing us a big metal tea pot of steaming chai (sweet tea brewed in milk) and a tray of huge enamel cups. It was a wonderful breakfast and it initiated in us a life-long love of African chai. The bright African sun came out and we laid the muddy sleeping bags on the car to dry. The warm welcoming sun accompanied us as Andrew walked us down a path to a little school room made of tin roofing sheets. There in that dark tin building was a small group of semi-naked boys learning their ABCs by writing in the dirt floor with sticks. It was the only school operating in an area with over 50,000 people. I stood there that morning transfixed, looking into the big brown eyes of those boys, eyes filled with amazement as they looked on the first white people they had ever seen. There was something in their eyes and expectant faces that touched deep inside of me, and somehow I never got around to telling Dick that we could not live and work in that desolate, forsaken place. After that day I never looked back. Some of the boys from that small group grew up to be evangelists and pastors. A couple of them graduated from college and one went on to earn his PhD, this from among a people with less than 5% literacy rate. That mysterious “thing” that grabbed me there in that little school room on that bright morning took me through forty years of loving and caring about the Pokot people. It carried me through a famine with so many tiny bodies with stick arms and legs and the sad, sad eyes of dying children. It took me through a deadly cholera epidemic when we covered the floor of the school building in sand for desperately ill people laid out like logs, hooked to IVs, spewing vomit and diarrhea simultaneously, and the staff with shovels scooping it up and throwing it down the latrines. Not knowing just how contagious it really was, we could only pray. Hundreds died in the bush during the cholera epidemic but not one person was lost at the mission. Then there were the years of tribal warfare, gun shots in the night and constant uncertainty. What would cause a person to want to live like that? And, crazy as it sounds, to like it? How could one have peace and security in the midst of that kind of life? The only answer I ever had was that God’s love constrained us and maintained us. There was no logical reason, nothing that made any sense, but often what God calls us to do does not make sense. What was that thing that grabbed me there in that little school room? Nothing but the Holy Spirit could have galvanized my life like that. Only the engulfing love of Jesus could have kept me going and given me that “peace that passes understanding.”