Upon coming home to our tiny village of Kosikiria the last week of January, Katy and I were not feeling the zeal and romantic fervor for missions and living in Africa we first felt when we arrived in Turkana in 1999. Nope. We were feeling the heat, the dusty wind; the pressures of a community that expects too much from us. No matter what we give or how we help, more is always expected from us. We could feel the lightness of the last couple weeks of vacation time with visiting family quickly evaporating. The burdens of the community and of living in the desert were returning, uncomfortably hot and dirty, on our backs.
Of course, there was the usual course of things not working when we arrived home—the refrigerator wasn’t cooling, the solar batteries weren’t charging high enough, one of the hand pumps in the village needed fixing, a tire was going flat. I ignored them all and walked around the house to check out the garden.
The grass that we had been working so hard to grow in our garden was finally growing—it was tall and thick; a beautiful sight in the desert. I wanted to forget about the tire and the fridge, take my sandals off, and stand in the thick, cool, lush grass for a while. My plot of grass, literally a yard, in the middle of Katy’s garden is one of the hobbies that keeps me sane here; that keeps me here. The grass is a grace that God provides to let me know that even in the desert He enables growth. It’s a beautifully soft Bermuda grass that was coaxed to grow from seed purchased in Nairobi.
I went to greet Nakamu, our neighbor who watered the garden while we were away—to thank her for doing a great job. She informed me that in the last couple days she had killed two sand vipers, poisonous snakes, who had come to enjoy the shade of my grass. So much for kicking off my sandals and plunging my toes into the thick grass! There would first need to be inspection and trimming.
I would be lying if I told you that Katy and I haven’t been considering a change of occupation in the last few months. While I love teaching and working alongside the Turkana church leaders, there’s a lot more to living here than the teaching. And it’s the “a lot more
