A Plane is always waiting

I’ll make this short, as I have a million things to do. I leave home first thing tomorrow morning for my fifth trip to Kenya. Every time I start planning such a trip, I intend to get my ducks in a row, get myself in good mental and physical shape, and not run around like a crazy nut the last few days trying to get everything done I should have done weeks before. And here it is, almost crunch time and my ducks have run amuck, my foot is still aching (though not nearly as bad as it had been a few weeks ago), now I have a horrible pain in my right arm and can only lift it to shoulder-height and well, basically a hundred of those things are not going to get done.

But I’ve gone through this every time I’ve gone to Africa. The first time, in 2006, I was just plain a nervous wreck because I had never taken such a trip. In 2013, I had just taken up running and was already having heel pain. I came home alone after two weeks, with a cold and leaving my daughter there for the next three months while she tried to figure out if we were really going to start our own nonprofit and how that was going to work. In 2015, I had bursitis in my hip to the point that just five days before we left it took me three hours to get off the couch one morning because of the pain. Just last year, my mom had died just two months before the trip, so even though I was for once physically sound, my head and heart were absolute mush. Returning to Africa then was maybe the best thing for me, except I came home in an even worse state emotionally.

And here I sit with my left ankle in a brace, knowing that I can power through the pain but wondering how much damage all the walking is going to do. And my right upper arm, killing me and kind of reminiscent of that hip bursitis, just not even allowing me to move that arm in every position it should go. (Of course, that reminds me of another trip to Kenya, this one in 2010 when Val went there for six months and I had a frozen shoulder most of that time.)

I know. When am I going to say, “enough, your body really does not want to go there again.”

The very first time we went to Kenya, our team leader said that all kinds of bad stuff may happen leading up to the trip and it is all Satan trying to make you stay home. If that’s true, it is pretty scary that Satan is that vested in my travels, right?

Well, no matter, I believe that God has got me covered, no matter what afflictions assail me and no matter where my travels take me. Away I go.    

Seems there is always a plane waiting to whisk me away. 

With Val in 2006

With Val on the back of a motorbike in 2013

With Denise and Maggie in 2015

With Val in 2017