Day 4

Well – today was incredible.

After our morning routine of breakfast and a Psalm (Psalm 40.1-3), we headed out.

Upon arrival at the mission school in Kosovo, we set up a medical screening clinic. In a designated room, partitioned by a blanket, Dave (paramedic) and Linda (nurse) both did the major screening with the help of Kenyan nurses and translators. Prior to the kids coming to them, they were filed into a different room where Josh took their heights and weights, Steve checked their teeth and gave them fluoride treatments, and Megan examined their ears with an Otoscope. It was really great to see the children lined up with their first-ever medical files in hand… Dave and Linda were finding everything from thrush to ringworm to pink eye… much diarrhea… Most had distended bellies… one child they believed has typhoid and another sounded like a micro-valve prolapse. (This is an artist describing medical conditions… so forgive my ignorance or misspellings…)

Meanwhile, while all this is occurring, I was assigned to paint murals in the classrooms and teach a hand-picked “art club” of 11 children. I was given a Kenyan teacher to translate as well as supervise while I was painting walls. I taught them the proportional way to draw a face, and they all worked on portraits. The murals I completed yesterday were images from their textbooks that they wanted to see on a large scale, thus easier to teach larger groups with. So… yesterday I painted and colored a life-sized cow, rooster, fish, lizard, and one HUGE housefly. I also started on a human body for them to teach from. Tomorrow I’ll continue this and move onto painting nature elements like plants and weather patterns as well as a large map of the districts of Nairobi. Tomorrow the kids will also move from drawing to painting – We’ve gotten each of them a small 12”x12” panel on which they will make a painting. When they are finished we will hang them for an art show, then they can take them home to decorate their houses with (the homes here are often decorated with old Coke boxes…).

By lunch today we had finished only 1 class of kids out of 12. So… Margaret (one of the key leaders here) asked if we could skip one of the meetings scheduled for that day and continue medical screening. Of course we agreed, and also picked up the pace by having the two Kenyan nurses create two additional stations. Kenyan social workers were then paired with Dave and Linda so they could continue. By the end of the afternoon they had made through almost half of the school!

Tomorrow we will be screening the much younger students – 3 and 4 year olds. We were told to expect them to be nervous…

One last story – while I was painting, Edinah came and asked me to come pray with a man she had been counseling. I entered the office to find a young man, in his 20s, who asked to pray and commit his life to following Christ. He then told the story of having been to the U.S. in the university, but was deported for misconduct. Upon returning, he joined a gang (“mafia”) and was swept up into their criminal activity. However, he now wishes to escape the life and journey to his mother in the northern country. Should his gang find out he is trying to escape, he said they will take out his heart (per the oath he has taken with them). So, for the last two weeks he has been pretending to be insane, so they won’t send him out on “missions” which include murder and stealing. Edinah wisely has arranged for him to come back in two days and if he does, we will be able to supply the funds to purchase a ticket for the north country.

These are the front lines… and these people are doing amazing work. Keep them (and us) in your prayers…