Grace & Peace

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from the Nardellas!

So much to be grateful for this season: Jena's sabbatical, our 5th anniversary escape to Costa Rica, healthy parents, a thriving little niece, Eric & Becky expecting (brother and sister-in-law), 400 healthy babies born in Lwala, and 50,000 more people with access to clean water. Most surprisingly, a Christmas Party at the White House!

We celebrate the day Love broke into the world and are so grateful for you, our family & friends.

Grace and Peace to you in 2013!

The Birth of a New Vision

This is post 8 of 10 in the Broken:Beautiful series. Guest post by James Nardella.

As we talk about the vision of Isaiah and how we see it revealed in our work in Africa, I am reminded of the Lwala, Kenya, where my work is based. In Lwala, we talk about building the capacity of people to advance their own well-being. And pole pole, slowly by slowly, I have seen what it means for the community to address its own challenges. Here is just one example:

For generations women have labored and birthed at home, without care from a skilled provider. (Jena has also touched on this topic.) If complications arose, the trip to a hospital required putting the mother in a wheel barrel and rolling her down a mud road for hours. Many moms died on that road. In fact the rates of maternal and infant death in the region are the highest in all of Kenya. A baby in Lwala is 10 times more likely to die than a baby in the U.S. The community longed for new options. In response, we rallied our supporters, to transform our small clinic in Lwala to become a Community Hospital, with a dedicated maternity wing. At the same time, the Lwala Community Alliance began training and employing locals as maternal health outreach workers. In Kenya we call the program Umama Salama, which is Swahili for Safe Mothers. These maternal health workers recruit and support pregnant women to ensure they receive prenatal care and deliver with a skilled attendant, which is especially important in a place where 1 in 4 women have HIV. In the past less than 35% of women delivered with a skilled attendant, but now, as a result of Umama Salama and the new maternity, more than 80% deliver at a hospital. This year, more than 400 healthy babies will be born, many of them to HIV positive mothers. One baby at a time, we see the birth of a new vision.

Have You Smiled Today?

Everybody smiles in the same language. For that, I am thankful.

Sometimes, when I look at myself in photos, my smile seems faked and forced. It seems to forget that I have countless things to find joy in. Not so, with my friends in Africa. I look at these photos and am reminded of true joy in the midst of the realities of a broken world. I look at the smiles of my friends and am amazed by how they light up the lens and make all the other stresses of life seem out of focus. A true smile can do that. The world becomes a bit brighter and full of hope. And friends, hope is a very good thing. Hope is a necessary thing.

Cheers to your Monday!

Stories of What Will Be

This is post 7 of 10 in the Broken:Beautiful series.                             

The words of Isaiah in chapter 67 are words of reality. They are words that recognize and acknowledge that the current state of the world is not as it should be. Not as God intended it to be. But they are also words of promise. They are words that speak to a time when the world will live as it ought to. When the vision of our Creator will be fully realized through the coming redemption and ultimate restoration through his Son.

In our (myself and James') work in Africa, we are given a peephole into the vision of Isaiah. Everyday, we are able to see individuals and communities break out of how the world is and begin to see and practice how it can be - how it will be one day.

Here is the story of two individuals:

Milton and Fred Ochieng’ are two brothers from Lwala, Kenya. Because of their academic promise and their parents’ support, Milton and Fred won scholarships to Dartmouth College and then Vanderbilt Medical School. Sadly, while the brothers were in college they lost both their mom, Margaret, and their dad, Erastus, to AIDS. Milton and Fred took this as a call to action to provide access to primary care in their home village of Lwala and in April 2007, after years of fundraising and an initial gift from Blood:Water Mission, they opened a small clinic. Five years later, that clinic has become a hospital. In a place where Milton and Fred’s parents died without HIV care, we now have more than 1,300 of their friends and neighbors enrolled in care and treatment. Forty more patients are added each month. The Ochiengs are now young doctors, living proof that the future of Africa is to be shaped by Africans. In them we see a vision for a new continent.

And here is the story of a community:

There's a large peri-urban community in Zambia of about 60,000 people. Because the location was known for its filth, crime and disease, the community's name was Chapulu Kusu, which literally means cursed. Every year, they were stricken with the water-borne disease of cholera because they lacked clean water - which perpetuated the sense that they were truly cursed. Our local partner in Zambia began working in Chapulu Kusu and community members began to make changes in and around their homes: latrines were constructed, broken hand pump wells were repaired, new wells were drilled and biosand filters were installed in their homes. The community began removing large piles of trash and cleaned the area. These physical changes led to dramatic health transformations. After these events, the community, for the first time in its history, had no case of cholera during the rainy season. Slowly by slowly, brick by brick, the cycle of disease was broken and people were filled with hope. Newly transformed, the people of Chapulu Kusu legally changed the name of their community. They are now known as Mapalo, which means blessed. In Mapalo, we see the hints of a new earth.

The Gift of Rain

Hurricane Sandy is hitting our friends in the east with a vengeance. There is massive flooding, wide-spread power outage, and according to some photos roaming the internet, sea-monsters are emerging from the crashing waves onto Manhattan Island. In some of the biggest, most prosperous, most powerful cities in the world, all we have been able to do is prepare for the inevitable and wait out the storm. Offices and schools are closed - even the New York Stock Exchange. Public transportation has shut down. The President has signed "major disaster" declarations for New York and New Jersey. This is an unprecedented national emergency and all we can do is wait for the worst to pass and for life to return to normal.

My mind is filled with thoughts and prayers for our country. And yet, I think of him, and his words stop me dead in my tracks.

"For us, this ear of corn is a gift from God. This evening's rain is a shower of mercy upon us. This healthy breath is life-giving. And maybe tomorrow we will not have such things, but our hearts are so full of God's provision."

Rain is a funny thing in its ability to destroy and restore. Like almost everything, too much is just as dangerous as too little. While we're hunkered down in our homes praying for the storm to pass and the rain to stop. He is going about his everyday life, praying for the rain to start.

So I pray for America. For safety and provision and hope for our friends waiting out the storm. And I pray for Africa. For safety and provision and hope for our friends waiting for the rain.

Slowly by Slowly. Brick by Brick.

This is post 6 of 10 in the Broken:Beautiful series.                             

To get perspective on a New Jerusalem, we examine the land in which we work. If you look at the amount of time it takes in Africa for corn to grow or for a boy to walk his cattle to the nearest watering hole, you will find that the pace of life and growth of people follow the pace and growth of the land. Contrary to the speed at which electronic information travels or our genetically modified food grows here, we can only expect a slow-paced change and approach in Africa.

In Kenya, they say pole pole, or slowly by slowly. In Zambia, they say panono panono, brick by brick. And truly, that is what characterizes this work. Slowly by slowly we see that Africans are given access to healthcare, to education, to dignity, to opportunity. Brick by brick, there are hospital wings and rain catchment tanks and latrines being built that one by one, slowly by slowly, bring a taste of the new heavens and new earth to both those who live in poverty and to those whose material abundance have made them spiritually poor. We have come to see that the true transformation lies in this slowly by slowly process, a grassroots approach that truly honors the I-Thou relationship, that allows the communities to believe in their own capabilities and take ownership of their own development. It is a daily fight of endurance, courage, and resilience that we see in our friends who wage the long defeat. We are reminded of the new heavens and new earth in the specific stories of place and people and we are inspired in the slow and patient work of ushering in that kingdom.

Life in the Desert

This is post 4 of 10 in the Broken:Beautiful series.                             

Blood:Water Mission has been working in a Kenyan region overlooked by governments, charities and markets. The Marsabit district is in the northern part of the country, sitting close to the border of Ethiopia. It is a landscape that is difficult to explain because it is a place of such extremes.

It’s not just hot, it’s oppressively hot.

It’s not just dry, it’s earth crumbling dry.

It’s not just poor, it’s extremely poor.

As you fly above the region, the land looks like the surface of Mars, or the Moon, not Earth. You can see spontaneous twisters of sand, dust and heat dancing across the barren landscape. You can feel empathetically thirsty just from looking at the vast desert. One man I know from Marsabit, named Yegon, says, “Welcome to Marsabit. There is life in the desert.” It’s hard to believe that people live here. But they do, alongside their camels, donkeys, and goats.

I remember the first time I came to visit Marsabit. I was amazed by the nomadic communities who travel days to find the remnants of vegetation for their animals to eat and to live, searching anywhere they could find water. It was nothing like Isaiah’s vision where all is well, peace prevails, and each has enough.

Last year, I brought some of our donors to come with me to Marsabit and see the work. We landed on a dirt airstrip in a place that felt like The Middle of Nowhere and traveled to one of the schools where we have worked. Prior to the visit, we had played up the wonderful water work we were doing in Marsabit. We told these donors about the rain catchment tanks, the oasis, and the boreholes. We were excited to show them the good work when we visited Torbi Primary School. The children greeted us with songs about water and recited poems about AIDS. At the end of our visit, we confidently walked to the water tanks to proudly take pictures. But the tanks were dry. You could turn the tap, but no water would show. Marsabit was suffering a severe and unexpected drought for more than a year and the storage had run out. All was not well.

We then drove to the site of the dam that has been constructed. As we walked up the hill, a goat was lying on the dusty sand, dead from dehydration. The ground below that was supposed to be filled with water was instead a cracked and crumbled prune of a landscape. We arrived at the rehabilitated borehole that we supported. More than 7,000 animals were coming to drink from this borehole because the water intended for human consumption was the only source there. The animals are the livelihood of our Marsibit friends, so now the people and the animals are competing for the same water source. Mothers, fathers, babies, and animals are continuing to fight the long defeat of a life with no water, which really doesn’t leave much of life after all.

I wished that the picture would have been different for our visitors, I longed for a world where provision justly meets need. Instead, we were hit by the reality of how hard it is to live in a place such as this, and how difficult it is to provide support to these communities. Had we failed in our attempts to serve our friends with water? It sure feels that way. It is humbling to realize that in places like Africa, the laws of Return on Investment just don’t translate. The forces of nature are beyond what most can comprehend. It can cripple even the strongest, most capable person.

As Americans, we are indoctrinated with a can-do attitude about almost anything. But there comes a point where human capability meets its threshold and you get a glimpse of the real truth about what we can and cannot do. We can raise all the money we need, mobilize the communities with excellent methods, train in best practices of hygiene, build solid latrines and construct fool-proof rain tanks.

But we cannot make the rain come.

We just can’t.

We are simply a part of this work, but ultimately, we are dependent on God to renew and restore the world.

I find myself asking if Yegon was right or if he was impossibly optimistic. There is no environmental mercy in a place like Marsabit. It’s a place that will make you question Isaiah and his vision. What is the eventual pay-off of hard work? When will men, animals, and the land be reconciled? Where is this God who hears his people? Is there any sensibility in hope? If I’ve learned anything about Marsabit, it’s that only the strong survive. That is the only life you will see in the desert.

In the midst of these questions, the empty tanks remind us all that water, whether from above or below, is the provision of God. And we remain faithful to the work, a shadow of what it means to be faithful to live in hope for a New Jerusalem even in the midst of such a drought. And looking closely, we see little bits of it coming. Certainly, life is hard when there is no rain. But if we pay attention, we are witnesses to the dignity, the hope, the community ownership and endurance that are empowering communities to work together to overcome these hardships. They are mastering a kind of emotional and psychosocial poverty that stands in the way of Isaiah’s vision.

We hoped that our visitors would understand the complexity of the work that we do here. I think they came away with that. I also have been reminded of it. I think we all come away with a deep cry inside us that the rain will come. So we get on our knees with our friends in Marsabit and pray deeply and desperately to God that the gift of water might be brought to this land.