Kenya - Her Second Home - Val's Story, Chapter 10

No matter what adventures in employment, living arrangements, or relationships she became embroiled in, Val held onto her love of Kenya from that first trip in 2006.

A year after she flunked out of college, the African continent began calling her. She found an organization online which would set her up to volunteer in various places throughout Kenya for as long as she wanted.

          I was apprehensive. Reviews on this outfit were generally positive, but who knew how reliable they were. I found a number for this place, and they sounded reputable enough on the phone. But again, lies can flow as smoothly as a river in the springtime.

March 29, 2010, her stepfather and I watched Val’s plane take off from a local airport. I studied that plane until it was less than a speck in the sky, my heart filled with such a mix of emotions that I felt frozen in place. And time. She’d be gone for six months.

          We stayed connected mostly through random texts. For years, I had watched with an evil eye as co-workers constantly checked their cell phones throughout their workday. Now I was one of them. Living seven time zones away, Val could text me at one in the afternoon to tell me how her day had been.

          She worked at an orphanage in Thika and a clinic in Saikeri. She learned about the camps for internally displaced persons, where hundreds of families had to relocate after losing their homes due to post-election violence. While there, she met a young Kenyan who was starting his own non-profit organization to help these people. She stayed in touch with him for nearly fifteen years.

          But she felt most at home in the tiny Maasai village of Saikeri. The local people she cared for at the clinic were kind and good-natured. 

         The scenery was magnificent. Wide open spaces where bony cattle grazed and skittish gazelles warily watched for predators. Even herds of zebra or occasional giraffes would wander across the plain near the small brick room she called home.

          Towards the end of her six-month stay, Val rode a crowded bus to the coast of the Indian Ocean. She volunteered for a while at an even more crowded orphanage, and then she and another volunteer took a break to stay at a house on Diani Beach, with its white sand and laid-back atmosphere.

          She came home in October, safe, sound and tan. Three years later, she talked me into returning to Kenya with her.

~~~

As I write this, I’ve been to Africa eight times, each time for about two weeks. Val? I think she’s taken seven trips, but if you total her time there, it’s much longer, close to a year altogether.

          When Val and I traveled to Kenya in 2013, we planned to start our own non-profit organization to work with schools and orphanages, improving the lives and futures of those children and their families.

          It was an uphill battle from the start, but Val dug in her heels, spending hours researching how to apply for tax-exempt status, how to host fundraisers and recruit volunteers, and what projects would work best in the country she loved.

          I took a friend of mine to Kenya a few times, and Val took her husband, her brother, and several friends on different trips. Every time either one of us came home, we were filled with stories and memories. And dreams of when we could go back.

          Unfortunately, after ten years of working on our own nonprofit, we had to let it go. All the time, money, and effort we put into it wasn’t paying off. Prospective donors preferred to give their money to an organization that helped local people, and we ran out of people willing to make the trip themselves to work on one of our projects.

          But Val never stopped loving Kenya. The chaos of the streets of Nairobi, filled with motorbikes, matatus, and trucks carrying loads piled unbelievably high, hearing shouts of mzungu when anyone saw us pasty white foreigners. The combined smells of diesel fuel, sweat, and burning charcoal that filled our nostrils daily. The children with their faces and clothes covered in dirt, but with toothy smiles and waving hands whenever we looked their way.

Those children! Whenever any of the boys or girls at the schools, orphanages, and villages we visited spied Val, they would gravitate towards her, grabbing her hands. She would pick up the littlest one, and the child’s fingers would run through Val’s long hair. Val would make a goofy face, and they would all laugh.

She loved them all and loved their home. She carried them on her back and in her heart. If she could make the life of just one of them better, she would cherish that.

Landing on her Feet - Val's Story, Chapter 9

The one activity Val embraced during high school was the drama department. In Middle School, she tried band, choir, and basketball. Before that, she had been in dance for one year. None of those things were her niche, though, but freshman year she tried out for the one-act play. She made the cast and continued being involved in the three plays the school put on each year. Until her senior year, when she started walking down a slippery slope. 

          I’m not naive enough to think that she hadn’t been drinking alcohol at parties with her friends. Maybe that’s why the shrink said I shouldn’t be her best friend; what could I say to make her stop without breaking our friendship?

          When I discovered she was smoking pot on a regular basis and even skipping school, I had to lower the boom. I convinced her to go in for counseling. She grudgingly went, but as I had learned years before while attending Al-Anon meetings because of her father’s addiction, you can’t force someone to quit if they aren’t ready. 

          On the day of her graduation, we had a huge argument. She was going to go to the house of one of her new and sketchy friends to get ready for the day. I went berserk, telling her the only reason I was going to graduation was for the foreign exchange student she had convinced me to let live with us the past fall. The party afterward would be for that girl from Portugal, not for her. I felt betrayed – so much for being best friends.

          Somehow, we got through the day, and no one was the wiser. We got through the summer, too. Val managed to hold down a job, but only so she could use the money to support her drug use.

          She had been accepted to a college a two-hour drive from where we lived, wanting to get a degree in social work so she could work with disadvantaged kids. Kids who were more messed up than she was.

          Halfway through her first semester, we received a letter that she wasn’t attending class and her grades were barely passing. We had a long talk. She said she hadn’t realized the freedom she would have at college, no one dragging her out of bed in the morning and forcing her to go to class, no one checking what time she went to bed. She had formed a friendship with one of the maintenance men in her dorm, who sold her whatever drugs she could afford.

          Needless to say, when she came home for winter break, she carried the letter that said she'd been kicked out. She got a D in one of her classes, but she failed the rest completely.

          We moved her things home after Christmas. 

~~~

 To say those first few weeks that Val was home were tense would be an understatement. She spent a lot of time in her room, sullen. Most of her friends from high school were either away at college or had moved on. I told her I was disappointed in her, but that she had to do something with her life.

          One morning, before I left for work, I told her she had to get a job before the end of the week or look for somewhere else to live. She could no longer be a freeloader. Through some of her craziest years in high school, she had managed to keep a part-time, after-school or summer job. She’d cleaned cabins, bussed tables, and bagged groceries. She could do whatever she wanted to do; she just needed a kick in the pants.

          She stuck out her jaw and did what she was told, for a change.

Later that same day, she showed up at the clinic where I was working. She was there to gloat.

          “I got a job,” she announced, and I thought she might sassily add, “nah, nah, nah, nah, nah,” next.

          A woman from our church hired her to be a waitress at her restaurant. Val had no experience, but her new boss told her that was what she looked for in new hires. That way they could be trained from scratch.

          It was the first in a long line of waitressing jobs she held. And being a people-person, she did well in all of them.

          Before long, she moved out of the house and into an apartment with a girl she knew from high school. Over the next few years, she moved to different living arrangements as often as she switched jobs. But somehow, always landed on her feet. 

The Hospital Stay - Val's story, chapter 8

The next morning, I took Val to see her provider at the clinic where I worked. She curled up on one of the tables in an unused exam room and slept while I tried to work and her provider made phone calls. Finally, Bellin Hospital in Green Bay agreed to accept her for depression and said they had a room. Then we waited to get approval from our insurance company.

          Hours later, I loaded her into the car and drove home to pick up a few changes of clothes, her toiletries, and other essentials. It was dark by the time Jim met us halfway there to drive with us the rest of the way to the hospital.

After the long admitting process, we said our goodbyes. It was a Thursday night, and we assured her we’d be back on Saturday for a visit.

          “I don’t want to stay here,” she said, holding back the tears, a stricken look on her face.

          “Baby Girl, it’s only for a couple of days,” I reassured her, hugging her tight. “We all just want you to feel better.”

          ~~~

Over the next few days, I had phone calls from the psychiatrist who was seeing her, asking about family history, antidepressants she had been on, and other questions of that nature. Our visit with her on Saturday was quiet and awkward, but she said she was doing okay, anxious to get home.

          On Tuesday, we met with Val and her psychiatrist before they discharged her. He had two concerns.

          First, she had a hard time concentrating on getting herself better. Instead, she was more committed to helping the other patients, delving into their issues, supporting their treatment. Naturally, the staff reinforced to Val that she was there to help herself and that the other girls in her group were not her problem.

          I totally could see that happening. That was my Gal Val. Always helping others. I remembered her on that trip to Kenya, taking the thin hands of the girls at the orphanage, writing letters with them, encouraging them to smile for pictures. She had a heart of gold and would do anything for someone else, whether a friend or stranger.

          And about those friends.

          The second thing the shrink wasn't happy about was that Val claimed I was her best friend. I was taken aback, touched actually, that she would say that, but angry that he felt that was a problem.

          “A teenage girl needs best friends who are her own age. It’s great that she can count on you, but you’re her mother and not her friend.”

          I didn’t care how many years of education he had at whatever fancy university he attended; I just wanted to punch him.

          Yes, Val had friends, good friends who she could count on, who would bail her out of any bad situation, who would make her laugh and engage in ice cream eating contests. But what more honor could a mother have than for her teenage daughter to declare that the woman who gave birth to her was her best friend. And to be honest, she was my best friend too.

          We didn’t argue with this supposed expert; we just wanted to go home.

          After signing some papers and packing up her few things, Jim and I loaded her into the backseat and asked if she wanted to stop for lunch.

          She agreed without much enthusiasm, and we found a pizza place.

          Once seated at a booth by the window, she looked around and found a cute boy waiting on a table across the room. She kicked me under the table and pointed his way. “Isn’t he hot?” she whispered.

          That was my girl. Couldn't keep her down for long.

Spreading Her WIngs - Val's Story, Chapter 7

 Last April, I started sharing stories of my daughter Val's young life. It turns out that now is the time to jump back into it. And today's topic sure does tie in with my last post. As usaul, that's not because I have it together; that's God at work.   

In July 2002, I packed up Nick, Val, and one of her friends, and drove us and our old pop-up camper to Lifest Christian Music Festival in Oshkosh.

I had never heard of it until a flyer arrived in the mail earlier that year, addressed to Nicholas. He was excited and seemed to know all about it, even said he had some friends who were going.

It didn’t take long for Val to become equally excited. It would be three nights and four days of Christian music and speakers on several different stages, with food vendors, lines for the showers, and safe partying late into the night.

The dream of every teenager and pre-teen.

I never imagined how it would change our lives. 

 Val and I continued attending the event for the next several years, with an ever-growing number of girls in tow. The rest of the year, she was involved in a puppet ministry and the youth group at our church, as well as the youth group at another church in town. When she started high school, she joined the drama department and acted in three plays a year. She was busy and seemed to have discovered her place in the world.

While at Lifest in 2005 we both learned of – at different times – a mission trip planned for the following year to Kenya, Africa. It was something I had dreamed about doing as a kid, but by then I felt I was too old for an adventure like that.

Val had her heart set on the trip from the moment she heard about it. She had gone on a mission trip to Mexico earlier that summer and felt called to spread her wings even further. It took a little convincing and a few phone calls to the people in charge of the trip for me to decide.

We were both going to go.

Those two weeks turned out to indeed be the trip of a lifetime. I struggled with being so far out of my comfort zone, but Val’s star shone brightly. She embraced everything about Kenya – the food, the culture, the people we traveled with, the people we met there. She vowed she’d return one day.

The only cloud in her life was that her boyfriend had broken up with her the night before we left. When she wasn’t busy with the kids on the trip or doing work for someone, she would withdraw and break down in tears. Her emotions were a constant roller coaster.

And it didn’t improve when we got home.

I finally took her to the clinic to get her started on an antidepressant and look into counseling. I became so worried about her that I slept on the floor outside her bedroom door at night.

Until the evening she came out of her room and said she had talked to her church’s youth pastor on the phone and told her she was thinking about hurting herself. The young woman was responsible for contacting the authorities, so the police were on the way to our house to check on my daughter. 

They took her to the police station to wait for a county social worker to arrive to talk to her. My husband and I followed in our car.

After what felt like hours, we took Val back home. She promised she wouldn’t harm herself, and I promised I’d take her back to the clinic in the morning.

Coming Full Circle - Kenya 2026, Blog post #13

Today marks exactly one year since we held the memorial for Val. I thought it was time to share what that meant to our friends in Kenya and wrap up this series about our trip. 

One afternoon when we were out at Anyoraa, our friend Izzo’s safari camp, he took us on a tour of the grounds and explained some of the projects he’d like to build in the future. Beehives, a tree house, a restaurant around the pizza oven he’s already built, upgrading the chicken coop we built seven years ago, a car wash, a day care center for the women working at the water bottling plant, and a vertical vegetable garden.

 The wastewater from the bottling plant next door would continually water the plants in the vertical garden. Currently, much of the precious water is just running off on the ground. It’s good water, but because it has been used in the bottling process, it is not good enough to bottle.

Weeks before our trip, I had told Izzo that we had money left from Val’s memorials which we wanted to donate to one of his projects. When we finally had the chance to sit down and talk to Izzo about the money, he offered to build the vertical garden in her memory and call it Val’s Garden. Of all his projects, he thought this one could be completed in a timely manner.

A few weeks after we got home, on the one-year anniversary of learning of my daughter’s death, Izzo sent me pictures of the completed garden. Life always manages to come full circle. This garden belongs to all of you who gave money during that impossible time in our lives last year. Thank you so much.

The last very special thing our friends in Kenya did in Val’s memory was to have this portrait painted. It will hang in the volunteer house where she spent so many hours working to help the people of her adopted country.

Not at all a game drive but still animals – Kenya 2026, Blog post #12

I am so close to finishing telling you about our trip to Africa, but I gotta get in one today. And promise to close this series with an unexpected blog post tomorrow.

Anyway, our last full day in Kenya, we weren’t done with rhinos when we left four of them behind at the Nairobi National Park.

Meet Tytan, an orphaned 20-month-old Black Rhino, and his adopted sister, zebra Notty. They both arrived at the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in Nairobi around the same time, at the same age. Their caretakers decided to put the pair together and their bond is so sweet.   

It’s easy to tell a Black Rhino from a White Rhino. The White has a wide lip, 

While the Black has a pointy lip that almost looks like a hook to me. 

The number of Black Rhinos in the wild in Africa is estimated at 6,500. As they are considered critically endangered, each one of them is vital to the survival of the species. Once Tytan is fully grown, he will be released into the wild, under constant surveillance. Praying that one day he is able to father many little rhinos, and that one day all rhinos – black and white – can live in peace.

Moving along, though, we also saw the baby elephants at home at Sheldrick.

Too adorable for words.

And lastly, after lunch, we got to feed the giraffes at the Giraffe Center. 

A full day for sure.

If you want to learn more about the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust or adopt one of the orphans, click on this link. 

Nairobi National Park, Game Drive #6 – Kenya 2026, Blog post #11

Our time in Kenya was winding down. It was Friday, July 31. Nick and Jessica would fly home that night, and the rest of us – the three old ladies - would leave the next day. We had to pack in as much as we could that day. But for me, one thing mattered. One thing I was hoping for, almost counting on.

We left early in the morning for Nairobi National Park, which is only a twenty-minute drive from where we were staying. It’s a small park, less than 30,000 acres, compared to Masa Mara which is ten times bigger, at over 373,000 acres. What would we see here that we hadn’t seen already?

We found wildebeest, hippos, giraffes, zebras, antelopes, and a variety of birds. Our driver, Peter, told us that the lion pride had moved south, out of the park and into the Kitengela Conservation Area. Leopards aren’t known to be in either place, so I was out of luck seeing one this trip. But what about the last of the Big Five? We’d seen elephants, lions, and buffalo. What about number five?

What’s that in the brush?

And what is with it? 

Could it be? Not just one Southern White Rhino, but a mother with her baby. 

There are between 16,000 and 18,000 Southern White Rhinos alive today. Their numbers had dwindled to around 100 in 1900, due mostly to poaching for their horns, which some people, mostly in Asia, believe have medicinal benefits. Their comeback is a conservation success story.

Not so for the closest subspecies. The Northern White Rhino is basically extinct, with only two, aging females remaining, living on a reserve in Kenya, protected 24/7 by armed guards. The last male of their species, Sudan, died in March of 2018, at the age of 45.

These white rhinos in Nairobi Park are also guarded night and day. I didn’t want to zoom in on them, so the picture is not the best. But they were there.

After we left the mom and her calf, we found these two bachelors, living their best life, 

even if they were surrounded by safari vans.

We watched them for a very long time. I'm sure they didn't know how special they are.