MedSend Blog

By MedSend physician E.K. and his wife, M.K.* E.K.: We were invited to visit the family of one of our good friends, who live in a nomadic village. After our second and last day of visiting, the boys really wanted to see the camp with camels and cows. We were told the camp “wasn’t far”

Julie and I had a close walk with the Lord before we were married. She was a career missionary from New Zealand working at an orphanage in Mozambique. Just before I started medical school, the Lord sent me on a short-term mission trip at that same orphanage. We have been married now for 15 years and God has given us five beautiful children and as many of you know, one of our children died at an early age. I went to East Africa with my pastor for two weeks and the Lord lit a fire in my heart for missions work in there. I called home to tell Julie and she said she had a peace about it, but she wanted the Lord to call the children also. At that time, the children were listening to the biography of Amy Carmichael and the Lord used it to inspire them to missions. Ultimately, the entire family was on board. Don’t get us wrong – we loved our lives in the U.S. The church, the Christian school. I loved my patients, I loved working at the hospital and I had a decent salary. Everything was good. Why leave?

Living cross-culturally is a near constant school in the wonder of how others think, feel, and process differently. The lessons abound, the perspectives shape us, and the yet there is the sense (and truth) that we will always be “other.” One arena where we feel most alien is in collective vs. individual thought. We have so much to learn about how our people view community. To illustrate how extremely essential it is for them: in interviews done by others, the great majority of our people agreed with the statement that they would rather go to hell with their families than go to heaven without them.

There are not many times that I feel that you desire medical stories and testimonies of my days in medicine here at Kijabe. In fact, most of you who read our blog are not “medical” at all and I fear you would find these stories boring or confusing. But some stories need to be told, especially when there is nothing “medical” to explain what happened.

“The last several weeks have been full of tragedies, both here in the US and around the world. Death, disease, hatred, anger and frustration seem to fill our lives and can be overwhelming. If I have learned anything from these events, I have learned that we all need to show more love to everyone and begin to live as though we really do care about the people around us. This love must be unconditional and be simply love. You can each be a light in your community but you have to stretch yourselves. I hope that today’s story will be a challenge for you as it was for me.”