After a few months trying to post every blog twice, here and on my book website, I decided to throw in the hat on this one.  So if you're looking for my latest musings, look to the Into the Mud website.  Same good stuff, new place.
 
And to get the very latest, I also now have a Facebook fan page for Into the Mud, or you can follow me on Twitter at intothemud.

So we just spent two weeks in Kenya, traveling with a former student from ESSA, on our way back to the United States.  As much as I love telling and retelling favorite travel stories in person (and I'm not being sarcastic), I thought I'd share a couple highlights here for those of you I won't be seeing in person immediately.
 
Contrary to what most people expect a family of four to do in Kenya, we didn't hit any game parks (except an animal orphanage in Nairobi, in which Adam and I got to pet cheetahs).  We spent two nights at a church guest house in the second largest slum of Nairobi (Huruma), and then spent a week in our friend's home village, and then spent a few days in Kisumu, on Lake Victoria, where Adam preached and we all took a boat ride to look at hippos and invasive plant species on the lake.
 
Kenya, we learned, operates on Kenyan time, which is about an hour or two or three later than South African time, which, in turn, is an hour or two slower than Jeske time.  Perhaps we've been spoiled by spending the last year mostly in the bubble of our seminary, where classes generally don't start more than fifteen minutes after their scheduled time, but it came as an adjustment to find that breakfast planned for 7:30 a.m. arrives at 11 a.m., and the day goes on from there.  Fortunately the children quickly learned it was futile to ask questions like "What are we waiting for," and we stocked up on bananas and bread to stay off hunger, and enjoyed going with the flow. And to their credit, we found Kenyan people wonderfully hospitable and kind and respectful, and a perfect group of people to hang out with for our last weeks in the continent.  Phoebe kept a journal during our two weeks in Kenya, and nearly every entry ended in "It was so fun."
 
The most surprising event shaping our journey happened the first night in the village, where we were staying in friend's small room decked out in a castle of mosquito nets.  Phoebe woke up at 2 am and announced that she thought she had a fever.  Sure enough, it was at about 102 F.  By the morning it reached 103, and I stayed home with her and Zeke while Adam went to preach his first church service in the village.  A couple hours later it reached 104 (that's just shy of 30 Celcius, for you South Africans, and is trouble in any measurement).  When Adam returned home Phoebe was just starting to complain of a black line that wouldn't go away whether she had her eyes opened or closed, and when she told us she was seeing a woman killing a horse where there should be only sheets, we decided it was time to speed up the Kenyan timing and book it straight to a doctor.  Phoebe's next journal entry would end, "It was not fun."
 
To reach the doctor, we all got to pile onto motorcycles, the only form of motorized transport in the village.  Phoebe was in a daze, but Zeke was thrilled.  The doctor turned out to not be a doctor, but was better still: a 76-year-old German nun who had spent 53 years in Africa starting health clinics like the one she operated, along with 2 Kenyan nurses in training, in the village where we stayed.  Not only did she discover that Phoebe did not have malaria (much to our relief), she diagnosed Phoebe's acute tonsilitis, loaded her with antibiotics, and then offered us a place to stay.  Our Kenyan friend was more than happy to turn us over into her hands for sleeping quarters and just take us out during the day to visit all his friends and relatives.
 
So we spent a week staying with this German nun named Sister Theresa (she even met the famous Mother Theresa years back during a short furlow working in slums of Rome!), eating many of our meals with her.  We stayed in the building where she and her coworkers also cared for 17 orphans, and ran a huge demonstration garden and tree nursery, with chickens, goats, and fruit trees every where we turned.  We couldn't believe the blessing God tossed our way through Phoebe's sickness.  It was a lush and beautiful place that she had raised up from desert soil in just 15 years, dripping with her peace and insight into life in Africa.
 
On the way out we had our second major surprise event, which was that our flight, set to leave Nairobi at 11 p.m., was delayed until 4 a.m., meaning we would miss our next flight from London to the U.S. and have to wait along with dozens of other people for the next seats available, which might not come for days (Brittish Airlines staff were on strike, which meant all flights on other airlines were already far overbooked).  Phoebe was still on antibiotics and supposed to get plenty of rest, so we used that as an excuse to beg our way into a business-class lounge where we all snoozed a bit in Nairobi, while other people slept on the hallway floor.  In the midst of the chaos, I opened my Bible and discovered a verse in the psalms that said, "The angels of the Lord encamp with the righteous."  Watching my little children curl into airport seat after airplane seat after airport seat after airport floor for the next 48 hours of missed flights and standby waiting, catching little hours of sleep here and there and carrying their little backpacks of toys, I felt those angels tangibly surrounding us.
 
So we have all been thankful to be home, with family, and ready to celebrate the birth of Christ, who came for all people, in South Africa, Kenya, London Heathrow Airport, and even here in the United States of America.
 
 
 

The day before Thanksgiving, we ate a great meal of a beef pie with stuffing and vegetables and ice cream.  While it wasn’t quite Thanksgiving (and we would have two other more Thanksgiving-ish dinners in the rest of the week), the food and relaxing atmosphere was enough to get us talking about Thanksgiving.  We talked about the past year, and took turns listing what we were thankful for in 2009.  Here’s some of what we listed:
 
Phoebe: Knitted blankets at grandma and grandpa’s house, playing with her friend Keziah in Cape Town, watching a potter work
Zeke: “We three kings of orient are” (he’s being a king in a Christmas play), yummy food at Kim and Todd’s house, climbing the tree at Mabibi (where we went on vacation)
Adam: Monkeys at Mabibi, that our power is still on (there’s not power shortages like there were in our previous home, and ESSA has the money to pay its electric bills), this meal.
Chrissy: Trains we rode and the car we rented, the chance to home school
 
As a bonus, we also listed things we learned in 2009:
 
Adam: The challenges of institutional fundraising as a foreigner, how book publishing works
Chrissy: How to teach and prepare for my Developing Country Economics course, lots about the field of Christian anthropology
Phoebe: Doing cartwheels, swimming
Zeke: How beans soaked in water can push the cover off a container, how to say anthropology.

A lot can change in a day.  Yesterday, about seven hours after I posted that encouraging blog, we heard that the principal candidate turned down the position at ESSA.  He had come from a difficult position as prinicpal of another South African seminary that ended about a year ago, and probably wisely, he decided that he and his family weren’t ready to dive into another challenging position.
 
And so the seminary has a feeling again of being back at square one, or somewhere even behind square one.  There is as great a need as ever to pray, and keep on praying, for the remaining staff, all of whom we dearly love and respect, as well as the students at ESSA.  By human standards, there is far too much work for the staff to do, and far too little funds to hire any more staff.
 
Oswald Chambers, who seems to be hitting home lately (I just tweeted and blogged about him on the Into the Mud website yesterday), wrote “Our spiritual strength begins to be drained when we stop lifting our eyes to Him.”  He says this describing Psalm 123:2: “As the eyes of servants look up to the hand of their masters… , so our eyes look to the Lord our God.”  Oswald counsels not to stop standing tall, not to say this desire to take a stand is “just a passing impulse” and “you could never hold up under the strain.”
 
I pray this with all my heart for the ESSA staff, who are tired and overworked and left without much certainty for the leadership or finances they will have next year.  I pray they will be able to keep their eyes focused on their master, who asks more than we believe possible, but gives the very strength we need to complete the tasks he assigns.
 

We're on the verge of having to do a whole lot of updating on this website.  I look at the current vocation, history, and giving opportunities links and realize these all need work.  In the mean time, here's a brief update on what's going on.
 
On December 1st, Lord willing, we'll get on an airplane and fly to Kenya for two weeks with a student from ESSA, who hopes to lead us around his home country, into his remote village, with some gigs preaching and taking lots of photos and seeing lots of new sites and shaking hands and using our ten words in Swahili. Then we'll return to the U.S. long term.  We start out living in a missionary guest house in Whitewater (Chrissy's home town).  We've lined up a number of speaking engagements around Southern and Eastern United States for the months of February and March, plus some midwestern ones before and after.  Adam also plans to pack in time to finish his Master's Thesis in Theology.  Phoebe will start public school, Zeke will go on being Zeke, and then, well, it remains to see where in the U.S. (preferably the midwest) we will live and work by the summer of 2010.
 
One of my biggest hopes in leaving Africa, which to me is not an easy goodbye, is that we would not feel like we were running away from anything.  You may know that it has been a very hard year financially for the seminary where we work, and as Adam was asked to be the fill-in part-time financial manager and fundraiser, he faced a lot of near-impossible tasks that would have been nice, at times, to throw aside and leave behind.  While there's no perfect fix-everything cure that we're able to leave with the seminary, we have seen the following beautiful actions of God in the last couple weeks, each one reassurance that God goes on working here just as well whether or not we are here.
-A Cultural Day at ESSA: This was a tradition that got left behind over the last couple years of staff turnover at ESSA, but Chrissy played a part in resurrecting the tradition.  On a Thursday afternoon students showed up in their home country clothes, shared their traditional foods, and exchanged songs, dancing, shouting, and a whole lot of joy.  It was a perfect respite from the tension students have borne as they worry about not having scholarships or a principal next year.
 
-A principal?  We're waiting eagerly to hear if the candidate for principal who has invited to join ESSA next year will accept.  If not him, we go on praying for someone else, as the current principal is wonderful but needs to return to his home country of Nigeria next year.  Once a principal is hired, we pray he'll be able to hire someone to replace Adam as a full-time, more qualified, and local South African financial manager/fundraiser.
 
-Reconcilliation: There were several crucial meetings between past staff, council members, current ESSA leadership, and an external mediating organization, that included apologies and honesty, repairing relationships that have festered unhealed for over a year.  We feel this is important groundwork for any local fundraising and recruitment attempts that can be made.  There were also some beautiful meetings held between students who had been hurt or offended by various things, who are working toward forgiveness.
 
-Glen Isla School:  Ok, I know I mentioned this, but it's just so cool to see the new renovations almost complete at Glen Isla, all done by the Department of Education.  Funds we raised went toward a DVD player, TV, generator, kindergarten carpet tables and chairs, some books and posters, and I'm waiting to hear from the principal about how to use the remaining funds.
 
-Pastor "Welcome" Mxolisi: Our old pastor from where we used to live was one of Adam's closest friends in South Africa.  Over the last years he has married, had a daughter, and is moving to his wife's home area to work as a coordinator of missions activities for the churches in that area.  While he will be sorely missed at the orphan home where he has served for a long time, a great high school teacher will be taking over as pastor of the church we used to attend.  We pray for more men to support the church left behind (the church includes a lot of teens and women), but we also are excited to see how god uses the gifts that God has planted in him.
 
-Sofi's community center:  Again, we had little part in this, but it's exciting anyway.  Back when we lived in Winterton, we had planned to work with this center to start a microenterprise development program, but there were unsettled land rights issues holding it up for over a year.  Now that's cleared up, and the place is hopping.  There's been others coming and going doing entrepreneurship training, plus there are lots of homebased care workers who meet there, a health clinic, a physical therapy room, a computer center and (I think) a hospice in the works, and lots of advising and counseling help available for anyone who drops in.  Hooray for Winterton!
 
 

“Why are we going this way?  Home is back behind us,” Zeke said as we turned the corner away from Winterton, our home for our first two and a half year stretch in South Africa.  It was the last day we would see Winterton.  We had said our final goodbyes to friends, hiked for the last time in the misty mountains fifteen miles from our old home, and visited our old favorite eateries and hangouts.  Now as we rolled past mountains, mud homes, and free ranging cows, tears slid down my cheeks.  Zeke had lived in this place longer than any other place in the world.  He learned to run and jump here.  He learned to talk here.  He had loved to fish and pick mulberries and pecans here.  He made his first friends here.  “Yes Zeke,” I wanted to say, “I also feel like home is back behind us.”
 
In less than two weeks we will fly to Kenya for a two week adventure and from there to the United States to search for a new place to settle for a few years.  As I face the possibility that we may never live in this continent again, I find this is a chapter of life that is not easy to close.
 
As with any move, we take a piece of this place with us.  I read in 2 Timothy 3:10-14, “You, however, know all about my… way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings—what kinds of things happened to me… Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them… As for you, continue in what you learned… because you know those from whom you learned it.”
 
These are Paul’s words to Timothy, but they could just as easily be the words we would hear from our African brothers and sisters as we leave them:  “Remember all about what has happened to us.  Continue in what you learned, because you know us with whom you learned it.”  As I leave I feel more committed than ever to finding ways to continue communicating the wisdom, experiences, and action of Christ from among people of Africa and elsewhere in the developing world.
 
It could not have been a more fitting week of goodbyes.  We saw our old pastor, Mxolisi, our closest friends like Barbara, John David, Roz, Andy, Corina, Charmaine, Lungile, and finally Sofi and her family.  On our last night we spent a long time talking.  Sofi’s earthy theology was pouring out as usual as we mulled over reconciliation, men’s lost purpose, rampant sex, and denominations handcuffing people.  We laughed to tears over our four-year-olds, unsure whether they are small or big, so different from the toddlers they were when we met.  We spent moments in sober silence.  We said goodbye with quick hugs, all pressing to start busy days, and only when I reached the car did tears pour out as the realization sunk in that this is it.  This is goodbye to my firsthand view of all this place has been, all it is, and all by God’s grace it is becoming.
 
As I say goodbye, I pray with deepest thanksgiving for this home God gave us, with trembling hope that we will return, with acceptance that God has taken us to new places, with trust that God the new places will also be good, and with upturned hands to give back to God all that He graciously entrusted to us.

Sloshing along a thin path in dress shoes and loafers, the dozen seminary students and I were taking a break from a day-long silent prayer retreat to appreciate the beauty, order, and creativity in God's creation together.  Instead of the typical "what a cool little purple flower" kind of comments you'd expect on a spring hike through a nature preserve, the following conversations that remind me this is, in fact, Africa:
 
-You know this green stripey worm?  They're prickly, but I'm not afraid of them.  Some people eat them.
 
-Mmm, this is a good spot to look for mushrooms.  They're so expensive in stores, but I remember finding them all the time as a child.  They're just like good meat. (From a Swazi).
 
-This one has a fruit in the fall that we eat in the fall in the Congo.
 
-This yellow-flowered plant is endangered now.  It fetches a very high price in Zambia.  Many traditional healers claim it can cure HIV.
 
-This plant you can feed to chickens when the have a cough, or mix with water and spead on a rash. (From a South African).
 
-What do you call those nice houses over there.  Suburbs?  In my country we call them "high cost."  There are no poor people in that kind of house.  (From a Zambian)
 
-In our country we used to have many nice forests.  Many of them were burned during the war to search for rebels. Now our church is helping teach people to plant trees again.  (From a Burundian).
 
-When I was little my father died, and I remember spending a long time out in nature like this, hiding just by myself.  At first I would pretend to talk to my father.  Then when I learned that God was my father, nature was where I learned to pray before anyone taught me.  (From a Rwandan who has not been home since the genocide).

Tonight we had over for dinner three Burundian men from my class of first year students.  We talked about the Bible Colleges that they have each taught with in Burundi.  One man teaches at a two-year college designed for students who have not finished primary school.  One teaches at a four-year college that has existed since the 1930s.  Both seminaries lack books and educated teachers.  These three men have each worked as public school teachers, one as an electrician also.  None spoke English before the beginning of the school year.  They were chosen by their denomination, supported by hundreds of gifts to gather just one year of tuition.  Now, as scholarship money dwindles at our seminary, the possibility is slim that they will be able to return for a second and third year to our seminary.  All of them have wives back at home, one of them has four children ages seven and younger.  They dream of being able to afford two more years of school, of being able to bring their wives with them to seminary, of having more people from their seminaries trained with more than high school diplomas.
 
They talked about what their Bible colleges and churches, with very few leaders who have even high school diplomas, have accomplished.  Many refugees who left Burundi over the past decade settled in Mozambique and Uganda, in places where no one is a Christian.  Now these refugees coordinate receiving delegations of missionaries from these students' Burundian churches.  They will receive missionaries who these students of mine are going home to teach.  That makes four short steps from you to, say, a Mozambican village that has never heard of Jesus--from your support of Adam and I and the seminary where we teach, to these Burundian guys, to the people they lead and send, to places that have no churches.  We're that connected.  As they prayed over dinner, one man mentioned "we look forward to the day we will all be in heaven singing to God in all languages," and more than ever I look forward to that day.  There will be so many more people like these men, people that deserve to be heroes in the news but who would never get discovered in mass media, who we can sing with in heaven!

Some days I wouldn’t trade my job for anything in the world.  Recently in my Intercultural Communication and Anthropology class we hit the question, “When have you felt or witnessed oppression?”  One man shared about being a junior pastor and having to wash the car and do other demeaning work for his senior pastor.  A Zulu man told about resigning from managerial job when he received only a fraction of the pay that the previous person in the position—a white man—had received.  Students from Burundi told about women raped and people having their cars confiscated by soldiers.  A Congolese woman told about soldiers who beat people and forced them to transport soldiers or supplies by bicycle without pay.  These were students who knew oppression firsthand—rape, war, racism, you name it.
 
“How do people naturally respond to these kinds of oppression?” I asked next.  I sat in my chair facing the students in our circular seating arrangement, feeling the heaviness.  They listed depression, fear, division, anger, resentment, insanity…
 
Then I asked, “How does the Bible say we should respond?”
 
“Turn the other cheek,” a couple of the seminary students replied instantly, and most people smiled or chuckled at the absurdity of these words.  But then an Indian South African, older than most of the students, spoke about that verse and in his quiet mature way that made us all see that he had lived out this verse, he had tried it, and it was possible, even for the woman who knew people beaten, even for the man who was forced to leave his job.  One man read the Love chapter of 1 Corinthians.  Others talked of forgiveness and of times to be bold.
 
Then one of the men who lived through war in Burundi and knew people who had gone insane with hatred or terror, opened his Bible to Matthew chapter five.  He had the must struggles with English of anyone in the group, and paused at nearly every word.  “We must go to these words of Jesus,” he said.  And he read.  “Blessed are those who mourn… blessed are the peacemakers… blessed are you when people insult you…”  One woman lay her head on her arm and closed her eyes with an expression of peace.  Others leaned forward on their seats.  Others whispered “mm-hmms” and “amens.”  These were holy moments.  The rays of heaven shone into our little classroom.
 
People talk about the North American needing to start learning from the Christians of the global South.  It’s true, North America does need them. I need them. Nearly every day I hear sentences and voices here worth recording and sharing, and it seems all the more ironic that I’m supposed to be called a teacher here.

While I sat watching the kids in their swimming lessons, I mentally began a list of things I will miss about South Africa.  In no particular order:
 
1. Fearlessness.  I am always amazed at the way the swimming instructor here expects children to pretty much sink or swim.  Sure, the teacher helps the little ones like Zeke who are still new to getting their faces under water, but once the kids can stay afloat, they just go at it, faces under water until they come up to breath because they have to, sometimes struggling along hardly moving forward.  Then the instructor calmly gives little pushes and the most calm one-on-one instructions without criticism or distress.  Phoebe, who is naturally pretty timid, totally thrives in this.  You can’t be here long as a parent without noticing there is something in the attitude toward children here that is entirely different from most Americans’.  Kids run off to play on jumping castles and two-story high playground equipment (with gaping spaces for kids to fall from) and parents just sit back from a distance and watch, or even don’t watch.  And it isn’t neglect.  It’s just that they don’t blame anyone for the bruises their kids encounter in life, plus they trust the kids to figure things out.  Children here seem to learn a great balance of bravery and caution from a few hard knocks.
 
2.  Big brothers and sisters.  Part of the reason kids can go off and experiment in the dangerous world out there, like when Phoebe climbs the huge fruit tree in front of our apartment building, is that big kids know they are expected to look out for little ones—no babysitting money asked.
 
3.  A theological library of books across the street donated from around the world, including amazing academic journals by some the best African Christian scholars around.
 
4.  Music.  Sigh.  There’s a sadness in my gut just thinking of leaving behind the weekly chapel services.  Sometimes it chokes me up when I try to sing lately.  Even as I write this there’s a guy outside walking by, singing in a deep bass voice while another guy responds with a second part.  It is a precious, precious thing to get to hear raw, honest voices without inhibition belting out music in four-plus part harmony from the depths of the soul.  African music was one of the ways God lassoed my heart and pulled us to Africa, and I suspect a part of my heart is going to be roped to this part of the world forever.