March Update with Lots of Pictures

Hello friends of Africonnection and ANU, LINKS churches, relatives and visitors! Just a note about this blog posting: it will have more pictures than our previous entries. A young friend (these days, that's anyone under 50!) reminded us that his generation loves pictures, and there is that pesky saying that a picture is worth a thousand words. At that rate, you're going to get nearly 10,000 words worth of pictures. If the email you receive doesn't include the pictures, you can go to www.africonnection.org to see them. Thanks as always for your emails, snail-mail letters, phone calls and prayers.

Settled In. It's a little hard to believe we're entering our fourth month in Kenya. Our crates (Thank you Ray Burwick for helping build the crates and Bob and Kim Cantrell for storing them before they were shipped) arrived on March 11 with some things we remembered packing, some things we didn't remember packing, and some things we couldn't figure out WHY we packed! We're nicely settled into our home and had our first guest (the new ANU Chancellor Dr. Jerry Lambert) this past week. The picture to the left is of our living room looking south into the dining room. The second picture is of a sunrise taken from our balcony which overlooks the Maasai plain. The scaffolding of a new faculty-staff 8-plex is visible to the left of the picture

Loving Our Work. Mark's office (pictured left) has a view out across the Ngong Hills, made famous in Out of Africa. Nan's office looks out over the Nairobi National Park and the city of Nairobi in the distance. Major items on Mark's "to do" list are rewriting the faculty handbook, revising the strategic plan, overseeing the committee planning for graduation, chairing the committee that is doing facilities allocation, assisting young faculty in beginning to do research. Nan is the University Alumni Director and is helping a sharp young group of alumni (when your University is less than 15 years old, all your alumni are young!) elect officers, establish a web site and start tracking alumni.

District Assembly. About three weeks ago, we attended a Nazarene district assembly in Nakuru, about two hours northwest of Nairobi. This was the district whose superintendent intervened to stop two warring tribes from fighting right after the election. Two of the churches on the district had had their whole congregations flee the violence, but amazingly the mood at the district assembly was good. To the right is a picture of a Maasai tribeswoman who was a representative to the district assembly. To the left is a picture of one of the 10-12 heart-breakingly sweet children who are part of the host church, a tin-clad building surrounded by basic public housing.

Trip to Amboseli. Last weekend we went to Amboseli National Reserve at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro (pictured to the right). Amboseli is in the middle of Maasai country (Maasai women under a tree pictured at left) on the border with Tan-ZAN-ia (accent on the second syllable here). We travelled in a nifty van whose roof could be raised so we could stand and look at the wildlife from the safety of the van. The park is famous for elephants, and it didn't let us down on this trip. We saw perhaps 18-20 elephants during our three-day trip, including a number of baby elephants. We also saw an event that seemed to come right out of a National Geographic animal show: two jackals seemed uncommonly interested in pestering a Thompson's Gazelle in high grass. In a few minutes, the truth came out: a baby Thompson's Gazelle darted out of the high grass and away from both the threat of the jackals and the protection of its mother. For the next 10 minutes the mother and another female Thompson's Gazelle alternated between running from the jackals and chasing the jackals away from the baby gazelle. When we drove away, the baby gazelle was still alive and the jackals were still hungry.

Precious Students. We always want to introduce our friends in America to people in Africa. Here are some sketches of some of the students at ANU. If you're moved to do one thing by this blog post, we hope you'll chose one or two of these students to pray about on a regular basis. We're purposely not including pictures in this section to preserve the privacy of some precious young people who told us their stories over meals at our home (sloppy joes are a huge favorite--go figure):

• Mbior was an armed aide to his uncle who led a rebel faction in the Sudan. After his uncle was killed in a mysterious helicopter accident, Mbior came to ANU and became a very passionate Christian. He wants to go back and assist the Sudanese people and says young Christian leaders are the answer.
• Yvonne is the daughter of a single mom in Western Kenya. During the post-election violence they were barricaded in their home with machete-wielding young men outside. Her mother struggles to pay Yvonne's fees to the extent that she has had to move from campus housing to a room in the city.
• Fidel was a Nazarene pastor's kid in Rawanda. When the Tsutsi and Hutu conflict broke out, he saw his father killed and his mother raped. He was filled with rage until he said he was out in a clearing in the jungle and the peace of God came down upon him in such a dramatic way that he surrendered his hatred.
• Jackson (the saxaphone player) also plays guitar, drums and keyboard. His mom runs a temporary labor service with 200 people. He knows he needs to find a "real job" to support himself but wants to make a CD of jazz and R&B.
• Akon is a Nazarene ministerial student from Nigeria. Traditional people in several African countries believe that when people die, unless a huge funeral is planned--with relatives receiving gifts, food and entertainment--the deceased will cause bad luck to the family who remain. When Akon's father died during his junior year in high school, his uncles came and planned a funeral so elaborate (including a post-funeral disco dance!) that Akon had to postpone his final year of high school because his relatives had used his school fees and sold some of his father's land to pay for the funeral. Akon vows that when he is a pastor, he will guide families into more responsible and Christian funeral observances.

Finally... Several of you shared prayer requests with us in a post last month and we have been praying about a number of those things. Some of you have shared answers to prayer. Other prayers were answered in God's way rather than our own. We'd ask you to pray for the students we mentioned above and for ALL our students as they enter final examinations in a couple of weeks. We'd also ask you to pray for our Chancellor Jerry Lambert and our Vice Chancellor Leah Marangu who are at a US-government sponsored conference for faith-based institutions in East Africa. Finally, we'd ask you to pray that some conversations campus leaders have had over the last week about pastoral education and compassionate ministries in Africa will result in real breakthrough's at ANU, in East Africa, and in the entire continent. Thanks for your love and prayers and support. More later.