I am finding my way home through the back door of poverty, disease, despair and sorrow.  These are places where the darkness is pierced by a small window of the noonday sun, or dimly lit at night with a flame from a tiny tin of paraffin. I’ve been invited in through narrow doorways made of […]

All Saints Day Sunday 2019 The yard with her fallen leaves beckoned me outdoors this All Saints Day Sunday.  Bent over to gather raked up leaves, and to pull a few stubborn weeds, the sun warmed my back and thoughts of my mama soothed my weary soul. It has been three months since she died. […]

Please be sure to watch our new video at the end! Way back in time (2006) Pamela and Deaconess Mary building a mud wall. Back in the day when I first traveled to Kenya in 2006, cell phones with the capability to make cheap calls home were not an option. The iPhone had yet to […]

Beatrice and Christine in the kitchen, Kenya, 2006 A turning point is a time at which an important change takes place which affects the future of a person or thing.  (College English Dictionary). Fifteen years ago, (this very month!),  I was seven days into my first mercy trip to Africa. Truthfully, since day one, I […]

One of the reasons I love Kenya, January 2020 If you missed the first part of this blog, simply scroll down and read it. …..Obviously, since you are reading this, I survived the flight, even catching a few hours of sleep.  I landed in Doha around 5:30 PM the next day (eleven hours ahead of […]

When the rains fall in western Kenya, it’s often as if the heavens suddenly burst open and dump an ocean of water–all at once. I remember my first experience with Kenyan rains in 2006.  I had come to Kenya from Khartoum, Sudan, where the heat was unrelenting–nighttime temperature in Khartoum might “cool down” to 110 […]

In the still, inky hours between midnight and dawn, my father lay dying.  Unable to speak or move, struggling for breath, his vital organs shutting down, he lay there succumbing to the ravages of a severe stroke and pneumonia. It is difficult to reconcile this image with the one that is before me now. I […]

A couple of months ago, when visiting my mama and step-father, I loaded a rectangular, wooden box into my trunk. This tiny trunk contained treasures I planned to use to create a memory book for my mama. I’d read an article written by a daughter who did this for her mother who had Alzheimer’s and […]

All this hurrying will soon be over. Only when we tarry do we touch the holy.    Rilke   A summer morning finds me sitting by an open window in Café Don Diego, a small café near the plaza with the yellow and white La Iglesia de Merced. Homework (tarea) is spread across the small wooden […]

Along the red dirt roads of rural western Kenya, the foliage is so thick in places that car windows need to be shut tight to protect occupants from scratches by thorns and branches that slip through even the slimmest of cracks. These roads wind endlessly, deceiving me into thinking, “I’m in the middle of nowhere”. […]