A Little Bit Of Everything

Sunflower and Aloe Vera Projects

The farmers continue to sell sunflower oil, and both groups have now gotten their first pay outs! This only happened because Rebecca has God-given gifts in both basic accounting/budgetting and teaching. So she's spent a couple hours with the leadership of both sunflower groups in order to help them figure out how to record their sales and distribute money to the individual farmers and their loans in an equitable fashion. She's so good at it that both of them have now gone through the fairly complicated process on their own. Please pray that they keep selling and that the farmers are empowered to gain some entrepreneurial skill by getting out there and selling the stuff.

One of our aloe vera groups has also sold some seedlings, and looks like will sell some more really soon. We also have a potential buyer for the leaves (the real harvest) coming soon. There have been a lot of complications with all of this, though, so keep praying for wisdom and time for us to help the farmers get it together to meet these marketing options.

Mt Kenya

So last week Rebecca, my sister Katie, our good Kenyan friend David Khisa and I summitted the Lenana Peak of Mt Kenya! Considering that the summit is over 16,000 feet (read "higher than anything in the lower 48" here), we felt pretty darn proud of ourselves. It was a gorgeous 4 day adventure to the place where the Kikuyu people, who make up the majority of the farmers in our groups, traditionally believed that the creator god lived. And for us it was a pilgrimage of sorts, I guess. On summit day we started hiking at 3 a.m. beneath an enormous star-filled sky with the rugged sillhouette of Mt Kenya rising up before us, and I couldn't help but be filled with gratitude, not just for the hike but for the gift of this season God has given us in Kenya, and for the friends and family who have participated in it in both big and small ways.

More At New City

I recently got all excited on this blog about getting to lead once a month at NCF. While we were in South Africa, however, our worship leader got called to another church, and I suppose, noting my enthusiasm, the church decided to elect me the interim guy for the time being. This is an awesome opportunity for me in myriad ways that I'm sure will come out in conversations and blog posts soon enough, but for now please just pray for our church and for me as we seek to understand what Jesus would have for us in this family of faith. Also, the young adults group asked me to preach on August 8th for a "youth service" (10-35 year olds), so I'd appreciate your prayers there too.

One particularly cool part of the new responsibility was getting to do some songs with Katie last week! We realized afterward that we've never really sung together publicly before, so that was awesome, especially since Katie's got a great voice and an ear for harmony which eludes yours truly.

The Garden Revisited

When we got back, our land lady had taken out some container tomatos Rebecca and I had planted and consequently felt so bad that she gave us small patch out back to practice on. And so this morning, Katie, Rebecca and I went to work in the garden. Beans, onions, cilantro, radishes, lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, and broccoli seeds all went in, as well as tomato, hot pepper, pepper mint, basil, and rosemary seedlings. We also set up a few bucket irrigation lines, just like the ones we're promoting with the farmers, that will help us save water, cut down on disease, and give us a little bit more info on just what it is we're telling our farmers to use.

Writers and speakers like Wendell Berry, Rusty Pritchard, Annie Dillard, and Matthew Sleathe have convinced me that God cares deeply for our Earth, and that part of our kingdom call is to take care of it. Our work here, which has kept us constantly on small farms exploding with horticultural diversity, has changed not only my diet but my interest in the miracle that brings food up out of the ground and the systems which put food on our tables. And finally, as we've felt on previous occasions, gardening for us is an act of solidarity with our farmers, a tangible reminder to long for rain and wrestle with agricultural diseases. It isn't much, but it's something. At any rate, look out for more musings and updates on our 110 sq foot reclamation of our original pre-Fall calling.

Peace,

Michael