Final Countdown

Our fourth place finisher in the 10Km race, Felix. Seeing the kids giving everything they had at the finish of the longest run of their lives was enough to almost bring me to tears. I felt like a proud parent must feel.

This, sadly, will most likely be the last time you will hear from me in Ilula. One week from today, I will be leaving Ilula early in the morning for Nairobi, where I will then catch a short flight to Maasai Mara for a brief safari experience in what I am told is the best game reserve in Africa. After that, it is back to Nairobi to spend time with my friend and see what he is doing with an NGO centered around microfinance and small crafts production. I am also hoping to spend a couple days in Mombasa with some friends I met in Nairobi the first day I arrived in Kenya, who are involved in microfinance and education. Following that, since I got an essentially free stopover in Europe on my flight itinerary, I will spend a few weeks with my Aunt and Uncle, who live in Brussels, and with my mom and another aunt, who are making the trip over. While there, I will speak with a group of children about my experiences, and also visit some organizations based in the area. As you can tell, even though the official “work” of my journey is within a week of completion, the learning experiences will continue until I return to Seattle on June 18th, when the real work begins. This is consistent with a twofold lesson I am constantly trying to teach the children, which is to never stop learning and always allow God to work in and through them, the two of which go hand in hand. Every single day presents many opportunities for both, and how we respond to those opportunities affects the course of our lives and those we come in contact with, whether positively or negatively. Such lessons are not easy to communicate to anyone, let alone children in their second language, but I think they are really starting to understand what I mean.

The opening coin flip of the afternoon football (soccer) competition between the families at the home.

As for the past week, it has been very busy, but very productive. The race and sports day was the main focus of my time and energy, and it went off without a hitch on Saturday. It was another example of doing something seemingly minor that is received as something quite major. Apparently this was the first organized road race in the area, which is unbelievable to me since this district is where the majority of elite Kenyan runners come from. We ended up having a local restaurant sponsor the race and provide free lunch to everyone involved, and even a television station come to cover the whole event for their evening news program. To motivate the children and provide living examples of the dedication and commitment I have been preaching, I invited a few top level local runners to come run the course before them. The kids were so impressed and encouraged by them, and even the men themselves were appreciative of their first opportunity to race in their own community. In total, we had 32 children run 4 kilometer and 10 kilometer races, many of whom realized that day that they have a real talent for running. Our top finisher in the 10 Km race, a 14 year-old, ran an impressive 37:58, just five minutes behind the top senior level runner. There were many people from the community who came out to see what all the madness was about, and ended up staying to support the children. We even had a physiotherapist and massage therapist, who has worked with the national running team the past two Olympics and world championships, on site to provide medical attention and massages to the exhausted finishers. After the race, of course, we had a typical Kenyan ceremony, which means it was way longer than it needed to be and filled with way too many overly dramatic speeches. During the ceremony, each finisher was honored and received a certificate and a new pen, and the top three finishers in each race received slightly bigger prizes. All in all, it was a huge success, which provided the means for many children here to discover their abilities and/or enjoyment in the sport of endurance running. They are already saying it will be an annual event that will grow to involve children throughout the entire community, and even competitive senior runners. At the consideration of all of this, I would have to say, “Mission accomplished.”

A hard fought volleyball game between families at the home.

The next week looks to be very busy for me as I go through the standard last week conclusion activities. I will be visiting many homes to meet family members and share meals, and of course we will continue running in the mornings, as even more children are excited about doing so after watching the event on Saturday. In order to keep the kids on track and motivated, I will put together a training program for them to use in my absence. Next weekend is the much anticipated wedding that I have been waiting for the entire time I have been here. I know that I will get to be there and treated as family, so I will experience it as authentically as possible. After spending the past nine weeks here as part of this huge family, I am finding it difficult to leave everything and everyone behind, but that is the nature of this journey, as I have learned at least twice along the way. Each time I have left one place or another, I have felt a huge sense of disappointment and sadness, but also a lot of excitement for the coming of the next stage. This time it feels a little different, as it now seems that I am leaving behind the entire journey and looking to the next stage as reentering the familiar life I used to lead. Who knows how that life has changed since I left I left it nearly a year ago, and how exactly I have changed during the same time period? So I find myself stuck in between the excitement of return to familiarity and highly valued relationships, and sadness for leaving behind the incredible experiences and new relationships that have represented the past nine months. I guess that really isn’t too bad of a place to be stuck, huh?

Any time I am with the kids, they grab onto my forearms and do a pull up, waiting for me to twirl them around.

I had a really good thought the past few days in relation to the above. When I was finishing university, I got the standard question of what I was going to do next as much as anyone else did, and I finally got so tired of answering it that I just decided I would tell people that what I was going to do next was love people and learn about the world. As I thought about that the other day, I realized that I have been doing just that, though I never imagined it would be in this context. To me, that is the beauty of applying the twofold lesson I spoke of. If you are always learning and always available to be used by God, then you will find yourself enjoying many situations and experiences that you would never have been able to guess for yourself. Last week, as I was eating recently slaughtered goat liver, kidney, and intestines with one of the fathers at the home, we had a conversation about living authentically when travelling. He told me that he really hates to see Wazungu (white people) come to Africa and only live in a way that is comfortable by their standards, and so he was pleased that I had lived like one of them for the past couple months. I told him it would have been a waste of time and money to do otherwise. With that said, I still am in a position where I know that I will be here only temporarily before moving on, back to “real life.” The entire time I have been here with the kids, I have not been able to really conceptualize that this is their real life; it isn’t a summer camp or boarding school. I keep imagining that they get to call or email their parents every once in a while like I do, but they don’t have that luxury. A lot of them do not even know their biological parents, and so their parents are here with them and this is their real life, and the same is true for each of their 90 siblings. Part of me is very sad for them when I think about this, but when I consider the alternative, I can’t help but smile and be thankful on their behalf.

My little buddy, Joshua, and I hanging out in the dairy during milking time. This was the first time I held him without him crying, “Mama!” I think it is only because he was more scared of the cows than he was of me.

I am trying not to become too reflective too early, but repressing my undoubtedly overly reflective nature in a transition of this magnitude is not easy. I have had just enough experience as this point to understand that bigger and more important transitions will come in my life, but this one is the biggest to this point, so I need to deal with it accordingly. Either way, I think I should be ready for culture shock when I get back into the developed world and everything that comes with it. So, farewell from Ilula; thank you for your support and attention the past 9 months, and I look forward so much to seeing you all in a couple months. I will write when I can from Nairobi and Europe, but otherwise, be good to yourselves and those around you.