Jarretts Ministry

Dear Friends and Family:
Thank you so much for your prayers. I am surviving and enjoying being back with friends at Tenwek. Please click on the link to read the entire message. It seems like my first week here was the busiest in surgery. A team of heart surgeons came during my second and third weeks; as much as possible, other services stepped aside to allow these volunteers to use their amazing skills to do open heart surgeries.
Some days have been busy and others not so much. Even with the heart team gone, I’ve done less surgery the past week –more as a result of fewer cases than of others doing a lot. I probably saved some lives this week without doing the major surgeries, so it felt worthwhile being here for that reason, as well as making some improvements in the OB service.
One day this week, the ultrasound tech called me up near lunch time to see one of our nursing staff who has a fibroid in her uterus. The patient had stepped out when I arrived, so I waited on a chair while the tech was doing a heart ultrasound on an elderly patient. Her daughter was assisting her and introduced herself. She was a teacher at Tenwek High School, and I had helped her in 2001 by delivering her son, whom she named Jarrett. He is attending the Ernie Steury School. That was fun.
This past Wednesday I was on call, so I ran the labor room most of the day to have continuity on call that night. For a change, the labor room was full of laboring patients as we had finally cleared out the non-labor patients needing more intense nursing care. Some were having labor induced and some beds contained two patients. I think there were seven labor patients. On a delivery couch was another patient who three days ago had delivered at home a set of twins, her sixth and seventh children; she had bled heavily afterwards. She hadn’t delivered either placenta and her hemoglobin was down to 3.2, whereas normal is 12-14. They had no O positive blood in the blood bank to give to her. The intern said her cervix was closed down and she wasn’t bleeding any more. We started some Pitocin to see if she could expel the placentas. The nursing matron appealed to the staff for blood donations, but only one unit was received. I expect most had given too recently for the heart team patients. We started the unit of blood.
As I checked on the laboring patients in the late afternoon, I found that a mother of eight had been admitted the night before with complete separation of the placenta and no fetal heartbeat. Abruption of the placenta is a really urgent situation; one must get the patient delivered before she uses up all of her clotting factors trying to stop the internal bleeding. She had been missed on rounds and the admitting intern forgot to mention to anyone that she had arrived the night before and assumed she had been delivered. Wrong – she was just quietly waiting in the logjam in the labor room. Now some 16 hours later, her uterus was as hard as a rock and she hadn’t responded to the Pitocin with any labor or change to the cervix. I took her immediately to surgery for a cesarean section which actually went well despite her having lost two pints of blood inside the uterus. I feared that the uterus might not contract afterwards because of the suffusion of trapped blood throughout the muscle of the uterus. The uterus was purple in color as in the dangerous Couvelaire condition, but it still contracted after the baby was removed. Fortunately there wasn’t any extra bleeding from the incision or venipuncture sites, which happens when all clotting factors are gone.
I returned to the ward to check on Alice, the mother with two retained placentas. I thought it might be necessary to do a hysterectomy. To have retained the placentas so long suggested they had grown into the wall of the uterus during the pregnancy. She had received a unit of blood and her blood pressure was stable, but she was beginning to bleed again. It was clear that she could not withstand continued bleeding overnight with no available blood in the bank to replace the loss; I had to do something. Doing a hysterectomy was possible, although it might involve more blood loss than she could tolerate with her hemoglobin still in the 3 range. I checked to see if the cervix had opened enough for either of the placentas to deliver. Nothing had come out, but I could now get my hand into the uterus to grab part of a placenta. Manual removal also involves risk of hemorrhage, but it seemed the quickest and safest way to solve the problem.
The patient was extremely cooperative as I removed most of one placenta. I was able to insert my entire hand up to mid forearm without her complaining. The placenta seemed to be fairly firmly attached to the lining surface of the uterus but not deep into the muscle. After removing all that I could in that manner and being unable to reach to the top of the uterus for the remainder of the placenta, I decided to look for some instruments to aid the removal process. I went to surgical theatre and found Anna, the Japanese nurse in charge. I had been told by several people that my large curette necessary for this procedure had been lost. Anna said, “No it is wrapped separately as always.” There it was on the front of the shelf! I only needed to ask the right person. With the curette and a pair of ring forceps which were nearly broken with metal fatigue – one ring had a complete crack – I began the piecemeal removal of the placentas.
The joke goes, “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer is, “One bite at a time.” That’s the way I removed the placentas, bringing out one tiny section at a time. A placenta usually has about 13 cotyledons [lobes] and each bite brought out a whole or half cotyledon. It took over an hour of repetitive scraping and grasping chunks of placenta until I felt like I had removed everything. Fortunately, the bleeding didn’t increase throughout the entire procedure.
The following day, the patient still had a rapid heartbeat but was making plenty of urine indicating good perfusion of her internal organs. She received a second unit of blood but not the third as requested. The next day her heart rate was still fast and she was dizzy when sitting up. We kept her in bed and pleaded for more blood. It sounded as if she would get one unit when I went off duty yesterday afternoon. These looked to me like two cases of multiple orphan prevention; both patients should do well.
I was able to get the ward a little more organized by changing some procedures. The nursing instructors granted us use of the small classroom to discuss our cases after rounds. We had been meeting in the middle of the busy hallway junction outside the nurse’s station where patients had to pass through our meeting on the way to the nursery and relatives sat on the bench with us. Discussing cases in such an environment wasn’t conducive to patient confidentiality, especially if the interns talked loud enough for me to hear them.
In my last letter, I had mentioned the problem of our maternity beds being full of patients who were recovering from gynecologic surgeries, medical conditions in pregnant or postpartum patients, and even advanced cervical cancer in an elderly patient. With the nursing shortage, many of our patients were missing vital signs and medication dosages. In contrast the female surgical ward remained one third empty and those nurses were not so busy. After I had left in October, 2007, a decision was made to move these other patients to Maternity to make room for more post surgical and orthopedic patients. That census eventually went down while our maternity census increased dramatically the past five months to the point of having no beds for labor patients who were often walking the halls or sitting on a bench outside the labor room. I discussed the situation with the nurse in charge as well as our OB team. Before the doctors could arrange to go to the medical superintendant with our request, the nursing matron made the decision to go back to the former status of having the gynecology patients in female surgical ward. It made an immediate difference in our overcrowded labor room. Thank you, Lord.
Next I tried to solve the problem of no room to do exams for our patients needing assessment for induction of labor. After rounds, the patients selected for exams are instructed to come up from the big ward room and sit on a bench outside the delivery room while the intern on duty does exams of the cervix. If deliveries are occurring, there is a long wait; many finally go back to the ward without being seen. Others get started on inductions very late.
I discussed this with the nurse in charge and we agreed there was no reason for these routine exams to be done exclusively on the delivery tables. We could screen off a bed in the ward or use the small exam room if it wasn’t in use by the nurses for checks of routine postpartum mothers, as it frequently is. We could even use the private room if it isn’t in use. I hope that this change will allow the interns who saw the patients on rounds to do their own exams rather than selecting one intern who has acute patient care responsibilities to do all the exams all day long while other interns go to clinic. The patients really need to be examined early if they are to have labor induced.
We continue to see patients with serious medical conditions. In my last letter, I mentioned patients with pneumonia and heart failure after delivery. While the heart team was here, the cardiologist examined each of these patients and found each had significant heart disease probably as a result of rheumatic fever damage. Another patient probably had a type of stroke. We had several patients with significant pregnancy induced high blood pressure.
Sharon is a 28-year-old mother of four who has inoperable cancer of the esophagus. She delivered the week before admission and was so weak from being unable to swallow and get food past the cancer that she was unable to walk. The gastroenterologist was able to put in a stent that opened up the esophagus enough for her to be able to swallow. She should survive long enough to nurse this baby until it can eat regular food. Please pray for her; she will enter our hospice program.
Last week I gave a lecture to the interns on malaria in pregnancy. The night of the lecture, we admitted a patient who had all the bullet points in my presentation. Mercy had delivered her first child by cesarean at a district hospital and recovered normally for a few days, but then things started going wrong. She was running a fever, had headaches getting progressively worse, and gradually was more and more confused. The doctors treated her for bacterial infection without improvement and the relatives brought her to Tenwek. If she had an infection, it wasn’t obvious, but she was anemic, had a low normal white blood cell count and a low platelet count. Her blood pressure was low and her lungs weren’t clear. She wasn’t making any urine.
We admitted her to the ICU with a diagnosis of cerebral malaria and gave her fluids that helped her produce a small amount of black urine – black water fever, another sign of severe malaria produced by destruction of red blood cells and clogging up of the kidneys with breakdown products. Although we started quinine, within hours she began to desaturate – having inadequate oxygen levels in the blood. We intubated her by placing an endotracheal tube and suctioned fluid from her lungs which helped but only temporarily. The ventilator kept her going for awhile, but she died by 6pm, less than 24 hours after admission. Sometimes we’re just too late with the diagnosis to help such a serious complication – even for a relatively healthy young person.
I have now visited two of our children’s homes – Umoja and Kenduiwa. Already this letter is too long, so I will make it a goal to write again sooner and give an update on those homes. Both are doing very well. The children look healthy and happy.
Please remember to pray for the sale of our house; we are making final preparations prior to listing it on the market although there is another potential buyer who has seen the property and has some interest. We’re praying for God’s perfect timing of everything. Also, please pray that we can make the necessary repairs to make the house attractive to a buyer but in an economic manner.
Amy and Nathan will leave for Kenya on June 7. Please pray for safe travel for them and their luggage.
Serving Jesus with you,
Paul, from Kenya

Dear Friends and Family:
Thank you for your prayers for my travel and immersion into the busy OB service at Tenwek. Please click on the link below to read the entire message from our website. It is somewhat of an immersion experience– sink or swim as the stream moves along rapidly. My concerns about being swept away were unjustified as I survived the initial week and a half of the busy schedule of difficult surgeries and strange cases and so did the patients on whom I operated. I felt like my skills were intact and my speed in surgery at least no worse than it had been two and a half years ago.
I operated the first day by assisting an intern do a cesarean section for twins where both presented as breech first. I always have found it harder to assist an inexperienced surgeon than do something myself, but all went well. By mid-afternoon jet lag had set in and I was glad for a rest.
Coming back was a somewhat emotional but good experience. There are something like 500 employees at Tenwek with nurses, administrators, cleaners, guards, and many other categories of staff. Having worked at Tenwek since 1999, I know many staff members by name and recognize most by face. They all know me, which means that I must stop and greet everyone that looks familiar. Invariably, I heard how people had been praying for our family; most had heard of Marty’s passing but some were on leave in January and didn’t know. In talking with those individuals, each experiences a grieving reaction, and I take longer to tell what a special three years God gave our family with Marty during her illness and of His closeness during that time. Uniformly, the Kenyan friends express their sympathy very kindly. Perhaps those who have grieved themselves are best able to sympathize with those who are grieving, and many Kenyans have experienced grieving where early death is a fact of life for many families.
I found many changes at the hospital and many more things that remain unchanged. Formerly, the OBGYN service consisted of me, a medical officer intern (MO) – a doctor in his or her first year out of school, a clinical officer (CO) intern — comparable to a physician assistant, and perhaps a junior staff member, family practice resident, or a consultant level OBGYN (American or Kenyan) as well as occasionally a student from Moi, Kenyatta, or an American medical school. That isn’t a large number of people caring for 30-40 inpatients and a larger numbers of outpatients each day.
This year, there are a total of sixteen interns (twice the number) which means our service has two medical students, four interns, one junior staff, and two other senior consultants which means I don’t see or know all of the patients and spend less time with the interns on the service. In two months, I may never even know the names of the other interns not assigned to my service. There are six general surgery residents, some of whom hail from other African nations — a category fairly new to Tenwek. And there are some new FP residents; the former ones have now graduated. With American visiting physicians, residents, and students, there are over 40 people in the morning report meetings instead of 15-20. That makes Tenwek feel very big.
Unfortunately, there are fewer nurses. Recently, the government expanded its community health nursing program as it had built many clinics around the country. That meant hiring over 3,000 nurses with community health training. Since nurses do not grow on trees, many nurses left hospital positions to take these higher paying jobs. It was a good offer for nurses just out of their training at Tenwek. Our more senior nurses would not receive the same level of pay commensurate with their years of experience here, so most remain.
Other hospitals in the area lost nurses as well. The net effect is fewer nurses working on each shift and heavier responsibilities for those remaining. Surrounding hospitals seem to be sending Tenwek more patients as their staffing levels are insufficient to keep some services going. For example, one afternoon last week, a local hospital sent their five labor patients to Tenwek because their operating room was closing for the night. In the long run, the increase in community health programs should be positive but a period of adjustment remains.
My first night on call last Thursday was busy with three straight cesarean sections from 7-11PM. Most c-sections here are complicated by risk factors such as prolonged labor, multiple repeat c-sections, excessive bleeding, or coexistent medical problems such as anemia or toxemia. Many are referred in from distant hospitals or clinics with the attendant delay in transportation or even initial presentation. I was thankful that all went well as I avoided the inherent pitfalls with those complicated cases. I slept for most of the night before being called up to assess another patient for cesarean. I decided she could make it without the surgery and she delivered safely by mid-morning. I finally got to eat lunch after being called away just as I sat down the first time. We began another round of three cesareans in the afternoon of which I did two. The other two senior consultants were not on duty on Friday.
I immediately noticed many more sick patients on the ward. Many more patients were identified as HIV positive; one reason for this may be a more liberal screening program where patients must “opt out” of being tested rather than being given upfront counseling and consent to be tested. Nonetheless, patients with more advanced HIV complications abound. Two patients with active TB were on the ward, and one mother of eight died in the ICU after not responding well to treatment. I have seen many patients with intra-uterine death of the baby before and during labor; fewer working fetal monitors and a lower sensitivity to their use may be having an impact.
Malaria cases are far fewer and the disease is being forgotten as a consideration by our interns. Often we have seen cyclic ups and downs in cases, but wider availability of medications and bed nets may be having an impact. However, we must keep malaria in mind as the effects on pregnant patients and the babies can be severe.
In addition to these sick patients, we have gynecology patients mixed in with the OB mothers as we no longer use the female surgical ward for post operative GYN care. There are too many general surgery cases and too few beds on that ward to house everyone, so our patients were combined in the maternity department. That means increased bed censes, more demands on the remaining nurses, and during my first week more patients per bed.
Another reason for the increased number of surgical cases besides more surgeons and fewer surgeries being done in other hospitals would be the special surgical teams coming from the US to do more “exotic” surgery than has previously been done at Tenwek. A visiting team of heart surgeons and technicians is slowly assembling to begin open heart cases next week. Cases have been stockpiled for their brief time here. Earlier this year an orthopedic team performed multiple joint replacements.
I am again giving lectures for the now more formalized chaplaincy training program headed by my good friend, Pastor David Kilel. I believe there are ten students this year who will receive two months of intense training before beginning service in other parts of Kenya. I give lectures on anatomy, physiology, medical terminology, and pathology [disease conditions] to give them background for their hospital work. The curriculum expansion will mean some additional preparation time for me in the weeks ahead.
I guess my letter wouldn’t be complete without some “never seen that before” reports. First was the case of a term pregnancy in an achondroplastic dwarf, a patient whose head and trunk are normal size, but all limbs are shortened. Average height for a woman with this condition is 4 ft. She required a cesarean for delivery and recovered very quickly.
The only other pregnancy in a dwarf I had seen was in my residency for a “proportional” pituitary hormone deficiency patient, whose name I remember to this day. I don’t think she was much over 3 foot tall. I am using the medical term “dwarf” rather than a more politically correct term.
My next case was yesterday at lunch time. I was called back up to the labor room for a ruptured uterus. The mother having her fifth baby had labored through the night until 5 am when she didn’t feel the baby move anymore and had abdominal pain. She had one previous cesarean section for a delivery in the past, so the presumption was that her scar had ruptured. Her pulse was fast and thready; it was assumed she was bleeding internally from the rupture. She was dirty and muddy from her trip from home. She wasn’t bleeding on the outside, but some blood in the catheter bag suggested a tear near the bladder which is where a cesarean scar often separates or ruptures. The intern could still feel the baby’s head in the birth canal, so we thought perhaps just the body and feet had broken through the scar allowing the placenta to separate and kill the baby.
I took her to the operating theatre where a good friend, Agneta Odera, was the anesthesiologist; she is taking anesthesia training as part of her surgical residency. It was nice to work with her and Hank, an American anesthesiologist, with whom I eat everyday at the guesthouse. They put her to sleep for the surgery since a spinal may make a patient’s shock worse.
I made a high incision and was surprised not finding the baby floating free in the abdomen like in all other rupture cases I have had. I could see bruising beneath the surface of the uterus which was certainly funny shaped, like a two-horned uterus [bicornuate].
I could feel the bruised area of the uterus in the middle of my incision was very thin and made a tiny nick there with the scalpel. The placenta and a foot came out, so I brought the rest of the baby out once I had something to grab onto. After I delivered everything, I could see the uterus had indeed ruptured but in a very unusual location.
Each side of the uterus is supported in its position in the abdomen by several fairly strong ligaments and one weak one which is called the broad ligament. The broad ligaments run the entire length of the uterus on both right and left sides. They are very thin [about 1-2 mm] with a thin layer of peritoneum on each surface, front and back. In between the surface layers are blood vessels, lymph vessels, nerves, and the ureter. Imagine two maple leaves glued together and you get an idea of how thin it is.
The baby’s body had ruptured through the right side wall of the uterus and was pushed out into the thin sac formed by the stretched-out broad ligament. It might be like carrying an 8 pound turkey breast in a very small, thin Wal-Mart plastic sack. I had never seen that before — how many times have you heard me say that at Tenwek?
Amazingly, there was very little bleeding which is probably why this mother survived for 8 hours after the rupture at home. I gingerly inspected the hole that had been created in this ligament. Part of the new cavity went up behind the appendix and large bowel. The hole extended down beside the birth canal and cervix, both of which were torn. That’s a deep hole in which to be sewing, but bleeding was minimal, I was able to repair everywhere there had been a tear. The large uterine artery going through the middle of the ligament wasn’t torn. The larger, round ligament at the top of the broad ligament was torn in two, but it doesn’t have a big artery in it, so it was just oozing. The ureter had not been injured at all. It seemed to be the best possible combination of structures that were hurt and those that weren’t.
I decided it wouldn’t help to do a hysterectomy [and might hurt], so I just repaired everything and put a suction drain into the big cavity that remained where the broad ligament was pushed apart by the baby. The two-horned feel to the uterus was the main body [fundus] of the uterus pushed to the left side and the baby in the broad ligament feeling like the right side of another uterus.
Strangely I don’t think the patient had lost more than a pint of blood. Infection is a future concern, so I started an antibiotic. She looked pretty good this morning, all things considered. With a male nurse translating into Kipsigis, I explained to Mercy how God had had mercy on her allowing her to live through an emergency which would have killed most patients. She should be able to go home and care for her four children. I told her the baby was a boy too big to fit through her pelvis and the uterus had eventually ruptured. [It may not have had anything to do with her having had a previous cesarean as the old scar held together; if the labor is obstructed, the uterus will eventually rupture in a patient having any other than her first child.] The nurse prayed for her; I saw a large tear pool into the corner of her eye as we talked – about as much emotion as is typically displayed by our patients.
Today was another busy morning at the hospital. I did a cesarean for the
placenta previa condition where the placenta comes near or covers the
cervix. We lost a fair amount of blood with it. We have one undelivered mother with severe pneumonia, another with heart failure, another with severe toxemia [pre-eclampsia with high blood pressure] whose baby has already died inside at 24 weeks into the pregnancy. Another mother lost a baby at 32 weeks from abruption of the placenta [premature separation] but she delivered quickly enough to avoid severe complications.
I am surviving on my own with the help of the guest house staff and the other missionaries. The visitors have lunch in the homes of long-term missionaries, at the guest house, and the hospital canteen. Breakfast I can prepare in my room and supper is cooked ahead at the guest house by Livingstone, the head cook. Three times a week, one of the helpers does my laundry at a small extra charge. I don’t have enough clothes, time, or sunshine to do it myself, since it rains nearly very afternoon.
I gave my torn tennis shoes and a sandal to Livingston to take to a duka [shop] to be re-sewn; I splurged about 70 cents for those repairs which should insure my OR shoes hold up the rest of the time I’m here. I was supposed to be on call Tuesday night, but Caleb Maina volunteered to take my call. He had been at a meeting last week and didn’t have any call for two weeks. He seemed very glad to see me. I’ll be on call Friday night and the following weekend.
A good friend, Pastor Helen Tangus looked fine last Monday, but she got sick over the weekend and was in ICU. She’s better but still has some issues they are working on. Please pray for her complete recovery.
I think I will save a good story about our orphans for the next letter. All reports so far are positive. I met briefly with Joseph from Umoja Children’s Home; I will try to go there on Saturday.
Finally, I would ask for your prayers for the sale of our home. The past three months we have been working with a potential buyer with whom we had agreed on a price. But everything broke down after the inspection report and we were unable to reach final agreement. We hope to list the home within a short period of time. We will need wisdom exactly how to proceed. Unless the house sells quickly, we will lose the house in Noblesville we had a conditional purchase agreement on. It is now back on the market, although we can still purchase it at our original price if it doesn’t sell first. We have peace that God is in control.
Our family is doing well although emotions were stirred by the first Mother’s Day without Marty with us here on earth. Please pray for Amy’s trip to Kenya with grandson, Nathan, age 16. They leave on June 7. Flights through Europe are occasionally interrupted by the volcano in Iceland spewing ash into the atmosphere. And British Air flight attendants have scheduled periodic strikes which caused cancellation of half of scheduled flights for several days in April. Our return flight on June 29 would also be under these threats.
Thank you so much for all your prayers and support.
Serving Jesus with you,

Paul, at Tenwek

Dear Friends and Family:

Thank you for your prayers for my travel. I arrived safely at Tenwek at 1:30pm local time. From the very beginning of my trip God gave me assurance of His approval in an unusual way. Please follow the link to the website to read the entire story.
My flight from Indianapolis to Chicago was scheduled for 12:35pm on Saturday, May 1. I forgot to ask you for prayer for the check-in procedure; my approval for a free third bag was not in the computer as it should have been. [We’ll check on that with the travel agent later.] Instead, I paid an extra $60 to bring the second bag of orphan clothing. Otherwise the check-in and security check went well.
We boarded the small Embrair jet on time, but the pilot announced there was a glitch in the onboard computer and a maintenance guy was on his way. Twenty minutes later everyone was standing in line at the gate waiting for a lonely agent to reroute forty passengers. I was near the front of the line and was placed on the next Chicago flight around 2:00pm – plenty of time for my Chicago connection to London.
I took a seat in the lounge and noticed a young man across from me who had a large cat in a soft, portable cage. In all my travels I had never seen a passenger with a cat, so I asked him about the cat while he took it out to reassure it about not being nervous. He told me the cat had never flown before as I had assumed from the amount of shedding hair that was flying around. He said it was 11 years old and weighed 18 lbs. He was taking it home to Nebraska. Then he carried it for a little walk down the hall. He returned a little later with some chewing tobacco which he chewed and spit into an empty plastic juice bottle.
It took the airline a long time to tow away the plane which delayed the incoming flights as well. Our gate still listed my new Chicago flight but they announced a Miami flight would land at our gate and reload for a return trip. Some people were still in line being rerouted and others were boarding the plane for Miami. When the young man returned he got into the line to board only to be turned away by the gate attendant since he was a Chicago passenger.
Appearing agitated, he sat down a few seats away in my empty row. He seemed to be decompensating. Then he addressed me in a louder than conversational voice saying, “I’m an Iraq veteran, an alcoholic, and I really need to lie down and rest. Can you watch me?” I said that I would tell him when they announced our flight and asked if I could pray for him; I put my hand on his shoulder and prayed for peace and rest for him. Then he stretched out on the floor beside me and rested.
Several Miami-bound passengers never figured out from which gate they were departing, so the agent delayed and paged those passengers by name; our gate still said Chicago. Finally they left without three passengers and the Chicago plane came in having been sitting on the tarmac waiting for our gate to open up.
The young man, Ken, got up and started talking about his problems; he was sober but nervous. He’d been a medic for two tours in Iraq often under shellfire. He had come to Indy for a great new job while his wife stayed home at her job in Nebraska until they saw how it would work out for him; it didn’t. He didn’t like alcohol but had taken to binge drinking to kill the emotional pain. He’d been in the local VA hospital but “didn’t receive any help”; he wanted to go to the VA in Nebraska. A middle-aged lady sat down across from us and offered to buy him a bottle of water which he declined.
I asked him if he knew Jesus. He said he didn’t; he had attended church as a child but not since. He had gone to a university and received a master’s degree in history but became an agnostic. He said that he was 30 years old, had made a mess of his life and couldn’t find a way out of his problems. He had studied religion but didn’t see any help in it.
I talked with him about Jesus Christ, using as much scripture as I could remember appropriate to where he was. I told him my testimony. I explained to him that he needed only the smallest amount of faith to confess that Jesus is the Son of God who died for his sins. We probably talked for ten minutes while they cleaned our plane. Finally, I asked him if he would like to pray to receive Christ. He said that he would, so I helped him pray a prayer of confession and acknowledgement of Jesus Christ as his savior.
The lady came back having bought him some water despite his initial refusal. She talked to him a little and gave him some contact information for someone in his home area. Then they announced our boarding, and we four, the lady, Ken, the cat, and I, boarded the plane together. I remembered having put one of my ministry cards in my pocket as I left home [it was on the floor near my desk] and gave it to him. I also called Amy from my cell phone before take off and asked her to have our family to begin to pray for Ken.
He sat two seats behind me, but the lady exchanged her seat to sit immediately behind him in the small aircraft featuring only single seats on our side. She and he carried on a loud conversation all the way to Chicago. I think she was trying to keep him engaged and calm. I didn’t really get the feeling she was a “sheep stealer” but decided to write him a letter explaining about his new birth and the power now residing inside him. My stationery was an emesis bag from the seat pouch. I suggested a brief plan of Bible reading and the need to find a Bible believing church. I told him that God would never leave him or forsake him. I gave him the “letter” as we exited the plane; we were headed for different terminals, and as he thanked me, I asked him to write to me.
I don’t know if I’ll ever hear from him, but I’m praying for God to safeguard the treasure that Ken has been given. Would you join me in that prayer? I thanked God for involving me in Ken’s life. It involved inconvenience and expense to a lot of people to put me next to Ken at his moment of crisis. I thought of it as a great privilege and affirmation that God had planned my trip in such a way for our lives to intersect at Gate B7 in Indianapolis.
Nothing nearly so exciting happened the rest of the way. I met and shepherded a new visitor to Tenwek from Chicago to Nairobi. I slept on the transatlantic flight and all night Sunday, the first night at Mennonite guesthouse. Today we rode up to Tenwek; the road is in wonderful condition almost the entire way. It took only three hours to make the trip instead of four or more hours as when I was last here. We were flying past all my familiar landmarks that I was used to sighting at a snail’s pace.
In the afternoon I went up to the hospital to get my computer hooked up to the local internet. I was greeted by so many of the staff that it took a long time to get up and back to the guesthouse where I’m staying. I’m sure the next few days will be similar given my experience in the past. So many staff members told me how sorry they were about Marty and how much they had prayed. I really felt like I was home.
Tomorrow I plan to go up to the hospital to work. I feel a little rusty but hope that I can shake off the scale and debris and function as before. There are many new faces and names to learn and new problems to face but it’s good to know that God has gone ahead and planned more work for me to do to His glory.
Serving Jesus with you,
Paul, in Kenya