POD People Part 2

Our last two weeks in Bakersfield were one of those intense times where a year of living gets compressed into a few days. It began with a round of farewell parties, mostly hosted by our good friends, Charlie and Judi McCan. In the photo at the right our accountibility group, the Finishers, along with good friends Randy & Norma Hamm, are having a last evening together, Interspersed with the parties was the privilege of being commissioned for our new work in Kenya by our home church in all three services.


Later in the final week our focus turned to packing the POD. On Thursday evening 11 friends braved the heat of the afternoon to help us finish wrapping furniture and packing the POD. Amazingly, in three hours over 90% of the packing was completed. The tune from the old Beatles tune "I get by with a little help from my friends" kept floating through my mind. Two of the eleven, Randy Hamm and Paula Strome are wrapping up something with bubble wrap. In the background you can see a piece of furniture that has been wrapped in green wrapping film for its two-year time in storage. I have a video of several of the men wrapping the sofa - quite an intricate dance!


On Saturday the driver came with his flatbed and used "Podzilla" to lift the POD and position it on the truck. Again, about fifteen minutes after he arrived he had pulled out of the driveway and disappeared down around the corner. We spent the rest of the day cleaning the house and enjoyed a last evening with our friends the Coopers at whose whom we stayed from Thursday through Sunday. On Monday morning, one day later than planned we drove north from Bakersfield to Berkeley, carrying with us our bags for our trip to Kenya and 21 years of great memories of life in Bakersfield. The video shows the departure of the POD on its way to Seattle.

POD People

The pressure of our simultaneous moves to Seattle and Kenya just increased this morning. A truck with our POD pulled up at 9am and off-loaded a 16' POD onto our driveway. Now that it is here I have to get serious about a packing strategy, since the total space (8' by 8' by 16') equals the size of a San Joaquin kit fox burrow. Actually the preceding comparison may be a tad off since I've never actually been inside a kit fox burrow, but I hear that they are quite spacious from a kit foxes' perspective.


It's always interesting to me to see how a company will solve a problem. In this case, the problem is, "How do we deliver the POD on a flat-bed truck and get it off and on without tipping it?" The solution - build an exoskeleton that can serve as a four-point hoist to lift it off the bed of the truck and lower it while keeping it stable. I have more pictures of the process, but realize that not everybody shares my interests...



I'm glad that we'll have the company of some of our friends as we do our major packing next Thursday. The doors are open!

Two Homes in Kenya

We're moving to a nice house in Kenya - a very nice house. It will not only meet our needs in abundance, but will allow us to extend hospitality to others who are passing through. I feel fine about having it - the rent is very reasonable and it will provide a good home base for our service in Kenya. Here's a picture. Well, the big car out front isn't ours, but we'll have the use of the little red one on the left.

But there is another home in Kenya that is on mind mind. It belongs to our good friend Chrispine Juma, a Sabaot staff member of ICM Kenya who works at our Mt. Elgon Training Center (METC) on Mt. Elgon. Three years ago Chrispine had a house, some animals, crops and a church that he pastored there. Then the troubles came. His home and church were burned, his animals and crops stolen and for two years he and his family survived in a rented apartment in Kapsikwony, the district capital of the Mt. Elgon District. Chrispine is a nice a fellow as his picture appears. His wife is named Suzy and he has three children


When the violence came to an end, Chrispine and the other members of our METC staff returned to Kopsiro to resume our pastoral training program. Some generous donors in the USA gave some money to help him begin rebuilding his home. He told be that he got started on a larger building, but realized he wouldn't have enough to complete it so he built a smaller home so his family would have shelter. It is essentially a one-room home that five people share. He is happy to have it, but I think that we can do better by him and our other staff, Justus Kirui, Jonathan Aramis and Charles Chebok.

A Harambee on Mt. Elgon

Today was Sunday in Kenya, and for a Mzungu (White) visitor that usually means that you will be preaching at some church. I was happy to learn that I'd been assigned to go to a church back on Mt. Elgon.

Pastor Stephen Mairori, our friend and ICM Country Director picked me at 9:30 and we drove up to a point on Mt. Elgon that is the highest up I’ve gone to-date. We drove up and through Kapsakwony, picking up Pastor Harry Bowen at the AIC house. Pastor Harry graduated from our BA program yesterday. In addition to pastoring his congregation, he is the supervisor over 21 other African Inland Churches in the Kapsakwony area.

A few kilometers out of Kapsakwony on the Kopsiro road we turned right and headed up the mountain. We stopped first at the shell of the church that they are building. This is actually the second oldest AIC congregation on Mt. Elgon, but the Government forced them to relocate (they were in the forest). So they bought a plot of ground a little further down the mountain and are constructing a new building. What we were going to was a Harambee (a fund raiser) for its completion.


The Harambee was held at a school that was so close to the forest – we could have walked a few hundred yards east, north or west and been in the forest. The event went from about 11pm to 2:30 pm. It was interesting and I think that the message I preached was helpful. Pastor Harry was my interpreter, and I gave him a good workout. The giving was good - about 92,000 Kenya Shilings were raised (about $1,100). We had a light meal afterwards - my piece of chicken put up a struggle, but I prevailed.

Hunger and Hope on Mt Elgon

I got to Kitale on Wednesday evening. The next morning I joined a short-term mission team from Mtn View Community Church, Clovis CA on an expedition to the Mt. Elgon Training Center at Kopsiro on Mt. Elgon. It was great to be back and to see the once-devestated hillsides once again planted with crops and new homes scattered across the land. But the area is far from recovered from the trauma of the land dispute violence of 2007-2008 - there are a lot of traumatized indivduals, and hunger is a present reality for many. We were told that four individuals of that community had starved to death the preceding week.

The good news is that the church is alive and well in Kopsiro. At a leadership training conference the team put on there were over 100 pastors in attendance. Since they all had to walk to the center for it, this implies that there are nearly 100 churches active within a 10 kilometer radius of Kopsiro.

On Friday we did a distribution of sheep for widows, cows for pastors and maize (corn) for all. The team had paid for 2,000 lbs of maize, but even that wasn't enough to give something to everyone. At times it seemed tense as people waited for food, but in the end there was an orderly distribution. Pray for this area - for God to sustain these Sabaot people until they can harvest the crop that has just recently sprouted.

I'm Leaving On A Jet Plane

I'm sitting in the departure lounge at LAX waiting for boarding to start. It always takes a ton of energy to reach this point, but right now I'm feeling good. When things go right, we feel good. Right now there is a family sitting behind me who had a snafu with their flight arrangements and are on stand-by. The flight is overbooked and they are calling for volunteers to give up their seats. Some people who are checked in are going to be bumped off. They don't feel so good. Thank you, Father, for watching over me, and over all who are traveling today!

Geezers Unite!

What is it about technology? There are new and improved items hitting the shelves all the time - it seems that the pace of innovation has been picking up during the past thirty years. Sometimes I catch on fairly quickly (I got my first personal computer in 1983), but sometimes technology and I don't get along. For example, I really dislike talking on the telephone. I've gotten better at phoning, but I like to see the person's face when I'm talking to them - the non-verbal expressions communicate so much. But, hooray for other technology! I've just installed webcams on our laptops so we can use the video feature of Skype when we're separated. Our webcams also let us take video - a scary thought.

OK - webcams have been available for years - I admit that I'm not an early adopter of technology. But eventually I come around to new things that prove their worth. Next week we'll get to test out how these will work for us from Kenya. I'll be able to talk with Kathy, and with our kids - that is if they join their geezer father in getting a webcam on their computer!