Meru visit

I had the incredible privilege this past weekend to visit Meru, the hometown of Jennifer and Joseph, the directors of the Tania Centre.  I had no idea, as we drove down the dusty, bumpy roads towards the base of Mount Kenya, that this trip would lead me to a much greater understanding of how God has pieced together my story.

            

Our first stop in Meru was to the house of Joseph’s 99-year-old uncle.  Though bed-ridden and blind, this man had clearly lost none of his mental capacity or wit.  He didn’t speak English, so I didn’t understand most of what he was saying, but Jennifer and Joseph hardly ever stopped laughing the whole time we were there.

Joseph told me that it was his uncle who first encouraged his mother to get her children a formal education.  Though Joseph’s father didn’t believe in educating girls, meaning none of Joseph’s older sisters ever set foot in a school, his mother did convince him to let Joseph go to school.  Joseph spent many school nights at his uncle’s house, which was closer to the school than his own.  It was clear that Joseph looked at this man with the same love he had for his own father.

When Joseph was accepted into high school, his mother went to the uncle asking for help with his school fees.  Joseph’s uncle gave his mother a 90 kg. bag of beans, which she carried, by herself, several kilometers to the market to sell.  The lengths that his family went to in order to get him to school are so humbling.

Another stop this weekend was to Joseph’s high school.  He hadn’t been to the school in 45 years, he told me, and he was excited to visit.  We stopped at a memorial to the founding head master, who had been head master when Joseph attended.  One of the nuns, Bibbian, talked to us and exchanged stories about the school with Joseph.  They also exchanged contact information to see about sending some of the boys from Tania there when they finish class 8!

We met a cousin who was there when Joseph brought Jennifer home to meet his family for the first time, when they also met a missionary couple from the U.S.  The cousin, along with the rest of the family, all approved of Jennifer, so she got to stay.

We drove past the house in Meru where Jennifer and Joseph lived next door to those missionaries, who were sent to Kenya from my own church, Fairfax Circle Church, back in the 80’s.  These couples raised their children together and became great friends.  So great, in fact, that the American man, Darrell Wise, wrote to the church to ask for assistance when Joseph was accepted to an American university for his Master’s degree, but his scholarship was not enough, and my church rose to the occasion.

It was in this same house that my roommate stayed on one of her first trips to Kenya, never knowing that, in 2014, her roommate would be seeing the same house.

As we traveled from place to place around Meru this weekend, it felt like I was reading a prequel to the story of my life.  If Joseph’s uncle had never encouraged his mother to get Joseph and education, if Joseph had never attended that secondary school, if Joseph had not met the Wise’s and become connected to my church, both Joseph’s and my lives would have turned out vastly differently.

It feels like all of these stories are one big line of dominoes—knock down the first one, and the rest come tumbling down, but if even one is missing, the rest won’t fall.  I still don’t know all of the dominoes that had to line up to get me here at the Tania Centre in 2014, but it is humbling to see all that I have seen that made it possible.  I am so thankful for a God who orchestrates our lives in ways that intersect to get us all right where we need to be.

I pray that I’ll always be where God needs me to be so that I’m not the missing domino in someone else’s life story.  Who knows what dominoes will fall because of my time at Tania in 2014?