Korr...

This past week was another one of intense temperatures and interesting experiences. We spent a week up country in Korr…a small desert village in northern Kenya. First of all…it was hot. Not warm, or comfortable, or sitting and tanning kind of heat. Hot, like sweat constantly dripping off your body like water, drying wet laundry in a few minutes, temperatures upwards of +50 C, NEVER dropping below +30 C in the afternoons…hot, hot, hot!!! Even the lightest, thinnest clothing is not light or thin enough. We had never experienced the direct heat like this before! Nothing grows…vegetation is sparse…the sound of rain is so waited and prayed for…This was Korr.

We arrived in Korr on Saturday morning. The purpose for our trip was to help the missionaries who live there. They had some vehicles in need of repair (this is an understatement…all the vehicles up country are in such bad shape…Trevor has been astounded over and over again at the beating the vehicles get on these “roads”!!) and pleaded for someone to come and help out, and Trevor was more than willing to volunteer!!

There are three missionary couples who live in Korr, and we were thoroughly amazed and challenged to meet them, and see there unselfishness and willingness to serve in such a difficult place. One couple, Nick and Lynn Swanepoel, have served there for 28 years!! They are translating the Bible into the Rendille language for the Rendille people who live in the area. Another couple, Grant and Loki Swanepoel, (Grant is Nick and Lynn’s son), and their two daughters have lived in Korr for almost 5 years now, and they are working on getting a Bible school up and running. The third couple is Jim and Laura Propst, and they have been in Korr since May of this year, but both Jim and Laura grew up in Africa, and have now been missionaries for more than 20 years, and just moved to Korr. They are in charge of building projects, and any other “hands-on” type of work.

There is so much happening in Korr…God is working mightily, and doing wonderful things in the lives of the people who live there. The Rendille people are nomadic, and have quite a few similarities to the Samburu people that we met in Kurungu a few weeks ago. They live in small huts, travel with their animals, live on a diet of mostly goat/cow/camel’s milk mixed with blood, walk miles and miles to fetch water, find food for their animals, get to school…some will walk 55 km to get to the hospital, or walk 15 km with babies and small children just to attend a Bible study, and then walk back in the dark the same day!! The Swanepoels have seen a lot of progress in the ministry…they have started literacy classes to teach the Rendille people to read, and through that are able to present the gospel, and many lives have been given to Christ through this program!! Nick and Lynn are constantly handing over leadership and responsibilities to the Rendille, who are now teaching the literacy classes, and teaching in the Christian primary school, and preaching in Church…it’s amazing!

The Rendille are a “begging” culture. They pride themselves on their begging, and will beg and beg until they wear someone down enough to get what they want. They all beg…the “rich”, the poor…they beg from each other, and they beg from the missionaries. The missionaries will have people outside their door and in their house EVERY DAY…begging, begging, begging. There’s a story that’s told of a Rendille man who died, and at the funeral, the tribute to him was “He was a good man…he knew how to beg.” Nick also went to visit a family while we were there, and the mama asked him “Are you Nick?” and when he said he was, she replied, “I’m coming to beg from you tomorrow!” This is every day life for them, and it’s very, very tiring. Yes, the need is there, and it’s a great need. So many people are starving and completely destitute, with NOTHING to feed their babies, and NO WAY to get ahead. They told us of a time in the 1980’s when the people were going through a famine, there were sometimes 3000 people camped outside their house, begging for something, anything. So the missionaries do what they can, and leave the rest up to God.

“We Fear the Dark…”

Saturday night was interesting…there was a seminar that was happening all day Saturday for a bunch of the Rendille Christians…and they had walked to Korr from their manyatta villages in the morning to attend. Some walked for 15 km with babies on their backs!! They were all going to walk home close to suppertime, and had yet to fetch water and firewood to make some supper for their families, and it was already getting dark. So Swanepoels decided to drive them home, and we tagged along. Let me remind you that this is the desert…at night it’s completely DARK…there are no roads…very little vegetation or landmarks…the odd scraggly acacia tree and some bushes and shrubs, tons of very hard lava rocks scattered on the sand, and the “luggas” (dry riverbeds) to mark the way. As we were trying to find these villages, Lynn commented, “we fear the dark…”, and it didn’t take long for Trevor and I to understand what she meant. It’s so easy to drive around in circles and completely lose your way. It took awhile, but we finally found the manyattas with the Rendille ladies’ help…but after we dropped them off we were on our own. Just us and the dark…and the occasional African rabbit getting confused by the headlights and running in front of the vehicle…we were trying to follow our tracks to find the way back…but the tracks were so faint that they were very hard to see…it was very disorienting…We eventually made it back, but now in Korr, we now fear the dark as well…

We visited with this family outside their hut one evening...despite the huge age difference, they are a married couple with their first child. (She is still in her teens, and he is over sixty years old!). She shared her testimony with us (in Rendille, and Nick translated into English)...how she was forced to get married to him when she was basically still a child, how she longed for a baby...she then attended the literacy program, heard the Gospel and gave her life to the Lord...she prayed for a baby (in the Rendille culture, having babies is the highest calling for a woman), and after a few years the Lord answered her prayer. She loves God so much, and gives Him all the honor and glory for blessing her with a child. It was interesting, because her husband takes care of them so well, and was doing laundry while we were there...which is VERY unusual for a man to take on those responsibilities. He loves his little baby too...he is not a believer, but has not stopped his young wife from talking about God or serving Him.

Cockroaches…and other Creepy crawlies…

I hate bugs. I hate snakes. I hate anything that moves too fast for me to run out of the way. I hate things that fly at me. I hate things that buzz and bite. Well…all of these fears and dislikes of mine were challenged during the week!! First thing we had to deal with…the cockroaches in the outhouse. This outhouse hadn’t been used in awhile (a fact we did not know at first), and so we used it without really thinking twice…until the inhabitants who were there first got irritated at us! I was closing the lid and happened to look down and make eye contact with a monstrous cockroach! It was so big and ginormous…(yes, that’s a word!)…the size of a cat! (ok, exaggeration, but it really was huge!!!) So I ran to get Trevor to save the day…and he sprayed Konk-like stuff around the edge of the hole while I stayed a safe distance away..and all of a sudden the outhouse was FILLED with cockroaches of every size, trying to get away from the killer spray!! GROSS!! My first thought was…”now how am I going to get away with not using the bathroom for the next week…I can‘t do this!!” We were both thoroughly disgusted!! But all was well when we found out that there is another outhouse that did not have the bug problem…whew!
Next…the scorpions. When walking after dark, you have to make sure you are carrying a torch (flashlight), and keep your eyes on the ground ahead of you to watch for the scorpions. They are very difficult to see, as they are the same color as the sand! This makes for a very paranoid Andrea!! But…thankfully, we killed the ones that we saw, no one got stung, and all was well!
The room we stayed in had many spiders in it, and at night, when the flashlight was on, also had many moths and other creepy bugs…so, needless to say…we were constantly surrounded by the scent of konk, and slept much better for it!
Some of the men killed a snake one afternoon…they said that this snake, although it wasn’t very big, was very deadly…if it bites you, you start to bleed from your nose, eyes, ears, etc….and you die within the hour. Not really something we wanted to contend with!
So yes..there were many bugs, and many more than what I’ve mentioned here…just a small taste of what it was like for us to conquer some of our fears!!

The Vehicles

Trevor had his work cut out for him…it’s a whole different story fixing vehicles when you live in the middle of nowhere, and have to fly the parts up to you (and fly the mechanic up as well!!). They say that driving a vehicle for one year in up-country Kenya is like driving it for 10-15 years in Canada!! The vehicles are also so needed in a place like this…they need them to haul water, both for their homes and also for the schools there. They also need them to bring teachers to the literacy classes, and to the preschool and primary schools. And because so many of the Rendille villages are so many km away, they need the vehicles to be able to effectively keep up with visitation and ministering to the people who live in these villages. So when the vehicles are out of commission, it really affects the entire ministry and daily living becomes a challenge. There were a few Christian Rendille men, Joshua and Rafael, who have taught themselves a lot about fixing vehicles, so Trevor worked together with them. They worked on Nick’s land cruiser for the first day or two, then while we were there, their other land cruiser broke down! Trevor was able to get parts for that vehicle flown up on an AIM Air flight, and fixed it the day we left (finishing about a half hour before our plane was supposed to leave!!). There were a few days that he was waiting for the parts to come, and so he was able to fix a couple problems on Grant’s Land Rover as well. It was an eye opening experience for Trevor to fix vehicles in Korr…to not have access to proper or specialized tools, to have to get parts flown in, to have to be very creative in how the vehicles get fixed…It was a challenge as well for Trevor to work in the intense heat, wearing shoes and coveralls!! And another thing was that as he was working on the vehicles, there were always other Rendille guys hanging around, watching, visiting…all day. They have nothing else to do, and so if there’s something happening, well it’s better than sitting in their huts, so they may as well be where the action is! So he had a constant audience!!

A Rendille Child...

We were supposed to leave Korr on Wednesday, but due to miscommunication, we ended up missing the flight…and there wasn’t another flight scheduled till the following week! It was frustrating for us at first, but after realizing that we didn’t have a choice, and that when you live in Africa, you HAVE to be flexible with your plans…so we decided to just make the best of it. We prayed about it, and gave it to the Lord. It was neat, because God knew what He was doing all along (of course!!) and Trevor was able to get more work done on the vehicles, and get them fixed properly! The way we ended up getting home was interesting…Friday morning, Loki, Laura and I were going to spend some time in prayer, and one of the things we were praying for was a way for us to get home. But before we even started praying, Trevor came over to where we were sitting, and said that he just heard that there was a plane coming that afternoon that had room for us! God is so good! He was also able to get some more parts flown up in the plane as well! What we didn’t realize at the time was who was on that plane…a bunch of big shot Kenyan government officials and MP’s were coming to Korr to have a celebration for the Rendille people because they voted the new MP into power…so we flew back with all these important men! Very interesting!! They had chartered four planes and a helicopter…I don’t think that Korr has ever had that much traffic on their airstrip before!!

So, it a nutshell…this was our experience in Korr…a land that is not so immediately beautiful, but if you look hard enough, and let yourself get to know it’s culture and people, you begin to see a raw, natural beauty that comes through. We experienced just a taste of what life looks like there…and know that the missionaries serving there need so much prayer to keep going, to press on in the task that God has called them to. It is not an easy life, but through their stories we sensed the call of God on their lives, and the joy they find in serving Him in Korr…it truly was amazing.

~A