This trip is my third to East Africa in the past 12 months. I love the adventurousness of it all, and the exotic nature that resides in East Africa.
My wife, who is traveling with me, and I met a wonderful missionary couple yesterday. They work with the Pokot Tribe in Northern Kenya. From hearing their accounts and seeing their pictures, I can tell that they are helping and healing so many Kenyans.
She is a nurse who, through relationships with doctors trained in tropical medicine, has been able to cure Typhoid, childhood malnutrition, malaria, and, probably more importantly, has respectfully educated the Pokots on the source of these, and other infectious diseases, including HIV.
Great stuff. Mean living. Hard living, that makes people tough. These folks sure are. John, the husband, recounted his battle with a cobra that spit venom right into his left eye, while he attempted to kill it. John managed to bear through the pain, kill the cobra, and run for irrigation. He was blind in that eye for several weeks.
But the most amazing story I heard from them involves the Nairobi Fly, also know as the Kenyan Fly. It is a beetle, and, actually doesn’t fly. It won’t even bite or sting you. The peculiar creature, though, has a toxic venom within its lymph system, that spews out when someone crushes it. John found this out when he slapped his neck and killed one of these arthropods. The venom spewed out and burned his neck. The pictures of it, which my wife saw, were just awful. Imagine!
The scene reminds of the movie Aliens, in which the alien creatures have acid for blood. When injured, their blood splashed and injures their opponent. Creepy.
How is it that a venom so vile could circulate the beetle’s body without harming it? Why is the liquid nourishment for the beetle, and morbidity for a human? Did the Creator allow the insect to evolve this defense, or was the animal created with it from the beginning? Did Adam name it, as he named all the other animals? Is the bug cognizant of its power? Why did the Creator allow such dangerous critters into His planet? Quite imponderable.
I just read a book about the explorers Lewis and Clark. In it, Thomas Jefferson says, “The art of living isn’t avoiding pain, it is learning how to endure it.” I think that is pretty good, as long as we can all agree that avoiding suffering is still a noble goal. And as long as we can believe that there is something more than that about the art of living.
How do we explain why this missionary couple does what they do, risking their health from known and unknown dangers? I think they have something much more alive than Jefferson’s impression. They know they are servants to the One in whom the answers to all the mysteries, include the problem of pain and suffering, reside. While Jefferson may have worshipped logic and reason, these Kenyan adventurers worship the suffering Son.
Risking “it all” for a remote tribe makes sense only within the framework of Jesus’ command to love God and love your neighbor, those who are image of God bearers, and precious. Have you ever realized you were more shocked and mortified by the death of someone who looks like you, than you are of someone from a different language, race, and religion? We are all ethnocentric. But we are all no less than that, favorites of Him. We all are His beloved, despite, in a vulgar way, that deep down in our insecurities, we see ourselves and our race as most valuable.
This couple, who are allowing the Artist’s Spirit to weave their lives in, out, and through sufferings even as bizarre as the Nairobi Fly, gets it. Despite the permanent neck scar, they understand and live out the beautiful art.
