Hello again,

If, as Robert Frost said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in. Then perhaps by extension, family are those who, when they tell you to come home, you have to come there.

I got sick in November, a bacterial infection and probably a little malaria. I got prompt treatment and have recovered well, and hearing the clarion call from mi familia, came back to California a little earlier than I had planned, and have been back now for for about eight weeks, visiting and eating and working on the project and eating and playing a little basketball and eating. I apologize for the long absence.

Things Africa-side are cooking along. We have a thrice revised site plan, very close to a final rendition and we have the plans for the buildings, drawn and revised. The five acres and the three acre addition are all fenced and we have planted 10,000 acacia seedlings (two varieties) in four staggered rows along the entire perimeter.

We will train them into a very thick, impenetrable hedge, and then, as a natural component of our self-sufficiency and sustainability model, we will selectively harvest trimmed branches to provide the wood fuel needed for cooking everyday. We can also, when the hedge matures, produce ecologically friendly charcoal to be used and sold for cooking fuel. The non-sustainable production of charcoal is one of the main reasons that so much of Kenya has been deforested in the last few decades, with devastating ripple effects.

Wilson, the young man who has been living and working on the property is off to Moi University to study medicine. I have written about him a number of times before. He is the first person to benefit in a life changing way from our efforts. He was completely without resources to pay the university tuition and fees, and through specific generosity, that situation was remedied. Wilson will be a fine doctor and healing arts he learns will help keep the orphans at the Red Rhino Children’s Home in fine fettle for many years to come.

Here’s Wilson on the property last Halloween.

Wilson and Gabe just before the fateful pumpkin toss and subsequent pumpkin tragedy.

Our friends and neighbors are mostly well, although Joyce, the seventy year old grandmother of Victoria and Christina, both of whom live with her, got very, very sick just before I left. After her third day in bed, I was afraid she was going to die, so I took her and one of the other babies who lives with her, Annie, who had a very bad respiratory infection, to Nairobi Hospital to see my doctor there.

Joyce the day before I took her to the hospital.

Annie on the same day

He treated them both. Joyce was doing much better by the time I left, but Annie’s respiratory infection, so common among the children there, particularly during the rainy season, has proven more stubborn. The rattling, labored, shallow breathing of one or more of the babies there is a backdrop to every visit to their little shack.

The short rains this December were very heavy around Christmas time, making the always nearly impassable roads completely so for days at a time, and turning Nairobi into a grid of brown rivers flashing through potholed streets forded by Land Rovers, ancient Isuzu pick up trucks, wobbly bicyclists, and umbrella-ed Kenyans, pants legs rolled, slpashing through street-rivers throughout city center.

Christmas at home was what in a moment of unguarded optimism you might hope for–a big sack, smudged with chimney soot, filled with new bicycles and old friends and gathered family and Boo Boo and Bubba and enough love and hilarity to swaddle the pain of loss in genuine comfort.

Boo Boo and a favorite present

An incomplete police line up of the usual suspects at Christmas at Aunt Rosie’s

Watching “Little Miss Sunshine” with little miss sunshine.

A quick pep talk…

Bubba the daredevil in footies.

Boo Boo setting the land speed record on the Michigan Street Salt Flats.

I spent a few days between Christmas and New Years’ in San Francisco, in a lovely apartment in the Mission District, offered by friends of mine and the project who have moved to Brussels and have plans to come to Kenya and work on the project this Spring. Janine organized a Friday afternoon get together where she works and showed the video to her colleagues and raised money for the project. So thank you Migdalia and Janine.

Mornings I’d walk to the Nervous Dog coffee house and sit in an overstuffed chair and read the “Onion” and the Chronicle with a latte and a croissant and then roam the Mission afoot. I remember a young man, a boxer’s face, on the corner of Mission and Highland smoking a cigarette, his foot-long white shoe laces trailing up the sloped sidewalk like tide-pulled seaweed; and a small market down the block with a garrote draped over the shoulders of a fuse box on the wall behind the cash register, perfectly bowed, thin piano wire, two round four inch wooden handles grooved to accept the the wire; and a ketchup packet that I had passed on the sidewalk on the way down, now flattened, an arc of red on the cement, a miniature crime scene for Dexter to decipher.

Stockton hasn’t been without its little observational gems, either.

Standing in the pick up line at the Stockton Kaiser pharmacy, these two names appeared alone on the LCD screen which announces whose prescriptions are ready:

Wright,J

Wong,J

So, in this case anyway, it makes no difference whether you are Wright or Wong, you can get what you need.

At the same time, on the soundless , subtitled T.V. mounted above us, an animated feature was playing. A young, horse-mounted Native American brave was leaping on his painted pony a Grand Canyon-like gorge to escape the cavalry’s pursuit. With head flung back and arms outstretched in exultation and cosmic surrender he flew…while the black-boxed text silently announced “stirring theme music playing.” I was appropriately stirred, and armed with my medicine, I leaped across the parking lot, and even though there was no cavalry in sight, I figured I wouldn’t take any chances.

I spent a lovely, frigid weekend in Lake Tahoe with my family, a few days in Reno visiting Billy, and a quiet, prayerful time in Big Sur with my dear friend Chris.

Sweet, cold Boo Boo

The starting gate.

Bubba in full flying penguin mode

JuJu and a cold mzungu

I’ll be headed back to Kenya as soon as we raise the 200k necessary to begin construction. Yes, you are more than welcome to help in any way you want.

So long for now, and let’s talk soon.

From sunny, freezing California,

David

God be with you, Larry, my dear brother.

Posted on January 16th, 2007 by david
Filed under: David's Journal