BY APRIL BERESFORD

January 30, 2011

Inadequate. Unprepared. Overwhelmed. Fristrated. Homesick. Yep, that's me.

We began the day by sleeping in - breakfast was at 09:00am. I absolutely love the fresh bananas and pineapple at mealtime. Right off the tree! We then walked over to the chapel, which is another open-air room with a cement floor, tin roof, and no glass windows. Phil warned us that the service was long, and he was so right. They sing and dance for almost ninety minutes, then preach for a little over an hour. And it gets HOT out fast here. African praise songs have a sound unlike any other, and I absolutely love it. The dancing is also so unique. I really enjoy it, but after an hour of enjoying it in ninety degrees it got tedious. The preaching was quite intense, too, for a whole hour. There were two peachers: one speaking in Swahili and the other in English. The english spoken here has a thick British accent, a reminant of the British rule over Kenya until the 1960's. Africans here are joyful worshippers: hands in the air, clapping, sawying with the music. Mama Mulli got up in front of the congregation at the end of the service and it was obvious that they all have an affection for her. I was really impressed with how (relatively) attentive the children stayed the whole time.

At lunch I started feeling a little disjointed from the group. I'm missing my family back home. When we sorted out the suitcases this afternoon to prepare for our medical clinic I opened up the two suitcases full of children's clothing that I had brought: clothes from Madeline and Charlotte's early years that I brought along to donate. It made me a little sad and reminiscent to go through those memories 8,000 miles away from home, by myself. I miss my kids and my husband so much.

I was stunned by how cluttered the clinic was. It sits esentially unused between mission trips, and we are the first of about four trips coming this year, and is primarily used as a dental clinic so we are going to have to improvise a lot. Boxes of unused or partially used equipment and medications had to be sorted, moved, and cleaned up. There was lizard poop all over, too, as there isn't glass covering all of the windows so they have easy access to come inside and make themselves at home. I moved a box on a countertop and a small one jumped out at me and ran away. Toto, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore! :o)

We found out today, too, that the scope of the mission trip has changed. When we were invited to come we were under the impression that we would be coming to serve the children of Mully Children's Family. We came with supplies and drugs to treat children, and we expected most of these to be well child checks. What we were tasked with today is to open up a clinic to serve the needs of the people in the nearby villages instead, and to check up on the kids here as time allowed. Wow. That really changes a LOT, and if we had known that before we got here we would have packed and planned a lot differently. And I'm not really a seat-of-your-pants kind of gal. The type "A" inside of me was dying. I was not feeling prepared at all. We had just this afternoon to set up and be ready. Word has already been sent and was filtering through the local communities that the American medical team will start seeing patients tomorrow at 08:00am. They were going to be here whether we were ready or not. We had just 5 or 6 hours to take a handful of dirty little rooms and make a functioning medical clinic.

It was a busy afternoon and that spilled over into a busy evening. As I sit here to journal I already have a hand cramp from rewriting four copies of the list of available drugs we have on hand - one for each physician. We actually have quite a bit, but a couple of the vital ones we are anticipating we will use quite a bit of we need to send to Nairobi for. Phil is going to go on Tuesday and come back on Thursday. Until then, we use what we have. I'm a bit nervous about how tomorrow is going to play out. It's going to be chaotic, and I can handle chaos but controlled chaos. It sounds like an oxymoron, but it does exist.

Julia is a sweet young lady from Germany who is here for six months to teach some of the benefactors how to speak German, both as an enrichment and as a tool for them to use. Germany is a bit more leniant in allowing student VISAs to orphans in Kenya. I found out that the United States of America is actually a pretty hard country to get an approved Study VISA for orphan children. Would have never guessed that. There are quite a few hopeful benefactors currently awaiting acceptance into nursing school in Germany. Anyway, Julia, being the nice person she is, allowed me to use her travel cell phone to call home tonight. I got to hear Matt's voice and talk with the girls for a few minutes. They sound happy, and that makes me feel better and more able to cope. I needed to hear that they are fine, and Matt always knows just what to say when I need encouragement. I am such a lucky girl! :o)