Day 65 Kakamega July 12, 2011

Greetings

Today we got off to a slow start again.  Hezron had a flat tire this morning and we were late getting the instructors to the training session.  We dropped Brenda and Robert at the Blessed the Blessed ECDC for training the widow’s while Hezron and I went back into town to fix the tire and get some more chemicals for the orchard.  In the states we usually pick up a nail or screw every now and then.  Hezron had four holes in his tire two in the tread and two on the side.  What made this interesting is that the holes were not from a man made item such as a steel screw or nail but a fierce weapon of nature called a thorn.  You see when you travel around in the bush there are these really nasty bushes that have spikes up to three or four inches long and they have a really sharp point.  They have no problem going through steel belted tires.  Don’t let one of them get you they really hurt.

We returned to the training site before lunch time.  Hezron’s wife Melissa got an emergency phone call from her daughter that her son was very sick and the clinic in their small town had just sent her home because they did not know what was wrong with him.  Melissa and Hezron rushed home to take their grandson and daughter to the hospital.  We later found out that he has a really bad case of malaria and they have admitted him into the hospital here in Kakamega.  Malaria is one nasty disease and we are so very fortunate to not have it in our country.  Please pray for Melissa’s and Hezron’s grandson so that he might survive this deadly disease.  It is said that up to three hundred million people come down with this disease every year.  There are up to a million deaths every year and about 90 percent of them are children under five.  Out of the million deaths each year almost all of them are in the poorest of countries here in Africa.  The medical care here is not the best but at least this young boy will get some treatment and his odds are better then most children that don’t have any access to medical care.

For those of you that have had malaria can attest to the feeling that you are going to die.  Then you wish that you do die.  After a while and there is no death comes the fear that you won’t die.  I told you early on about John Imala going to the CFO conference in Western Tennessee back in June and how he spent his first trip to the states in the hospital and the staff not knowing what to do.  While I was in Maralal a few weeks ago I met a young missionary girl Ann from the same area in Western Tennessee that John visited and she just so happened to come down with a case of malaria here in Kenya.  She had the same problem John did.  They did not know how to treat her and she ended up getting really sick after a nasty reaction to the medication they were giving her.  Both of them thought they were going to die.

Tomorrow we will finish up with the training session for the widow’s in the morning.  We will replant the dead seedlings and will have some live demonstrations on proper care of the orchard.       

Take care and God bless

Dave