KEEP BUSY FOR ME - TILL I COME

WORK HAS BEGUN making ready for the building of the NEW Jacaranda Cottage.   The house on the right is Tyndale Cottage; the new house will be just halfway between Tyndale and Drakelely which is out of sight to the left of the photograph.    The picture was taken from just in front of the existing Jacaranda Cottage.     FOUR tree have had to be cut down, and the hard job of getting their ROOTS up and out of the ground will commence next week.     Their felling has left the compound looking bare and barren.      Three Jacaranda trees and one Fir, had to give way to the building plan as otherwise - if left standing - they would have been in danger of falling on the house.     Always sad to see them go, non the less, but we shall be replanting.         The Foundation is already marked out, and soon as our guests arrive from Huddersfield in the UK we shall have a short Ground Breaking Ceremony after which serious building works will commence.      Everyone very excited and the children wanting to see some new development now every day.

IN September 1985 we started to build Testimony School, the other side of the road in Testimony House Compound.    There was a stand of giant Blue-gum Trees, more than a dozen standing just where we proposed to build.      My Diary records the day they came down.
"CRASH.     A slow tormented creaking, and rending filled the air.
WHOOSH!   A hundred foot Blue-gum tree crashed unwillingly to the ground, and the ground grunted at the impact, a hollow THUD stopping the heart for a moment of time.   That tree I reckoned had stood for a good seventy years, one of a family of maybe twenty or so.   Great GIANTS that watched over the house and gardens protecting them from the prevailing wind.    But they stood in the path of progress, and exactly where we proposed to build the Primary School God had put on our minds.      I felt a tremor of sorrow as I watched that first tree fall, and surveyed its broken glory, inert and grounded in front of me.   Only minutes before it had stood majestically, almost indestructibly permanent in its image, and so proudly anchored in the earth, head in the heavens, confident of wind and birds.   History was in every inch of their growth; beauty in every curve of branch and trunk.   I felt an almost guilty pity for the tree and its fellows.      But the School had to be built.    And all the trees were sacrificed for it." 

Alfred Joice Kilmer 1886-1918

               TREES           

I think that I shall never see 
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth's flowing breast.

A tree that looks at God all day
A lifts her leafy arms to pray.

A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of Robins in her hair.

Upon whose bosom snow has lain
Who ultimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me;
But only God can make a TREE

And yes you are right - I do have a great love of Trees.     Joyce Kilmer, which name he wrote under, was a Catholic, and a great love of all that God made and created.    He was killed by a snipers bullet in the last year of the 1st Great War.   He has a beautiful face I think.     A young man of talent much loved by his wife, also a poet, and their 5 children!!

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Rev Moses and Miriam Ongonga

YESTERDAY one of our Old Boys, who was brought up in Testimony House with me and Esther since he was about 8, had a close shave with DEATH.    And not him only, but in fact his own immediate family as well as three other other families connected to himself and wife Miriam.

Moses Ongong'a is a senior Pastor in the Africa Inland Church, ministering at the AIC Fellowship Church here in Eldoret.     It was a Public Holiday yesterday, and they thought to take a day off from their busy schedules and go for a trip down into the Kerio Valley.    They travelled in a small bus together belonging to the Church.     The road down into the Valley is steep and treacherous, chiseled into the face of the escarpment.   It zigzags downwards with many sharp bends, dropping at least two thousand feet. On the way down a small vehicle overtook them and then cut in close in front of them. The bus driver endeavoured to avoid any hurt, braking and steering to the escarpment wall, but the other vehicle then blocked his path so that he had no alternative but to change course,and swerve to the right - to the precipitous edge of the road.    The bus skidded and fell upon its side, tipping down and sliding helplessly.     A small child of 12 years, the son of one of the passengers, was flung out of the bus as it fell, but then somehow feel underneath, and was killed outright, the bus careering on downwards to what must have seemed certain doom.     BUT, as they all were screaming and crying out in their terror, calling on the Name of Jesus, the bus suddenly STOPPED.      In the downward fall beneath them two small trees were growing, sticking out from the side of the valley wall about 100 metres or more from the road above, and caught the bus and held it in its headlong descent.        Pastor Moses had two very deep cuts on his head, and was hospitalised for a few days, but otherwise apart from a few others with cuts from broken glad, all remained safe.       Knowing the road well, as I do, and listening to the account first hand from Moses, there is no doubt the Hand of God delivered them.     Not just their 12 year old nephew but ALL of them might be DEAD!        And the small vehicle   ?     It did not stop, did not pause but pressed on and away.     Was the driver drunk, incapable, or vindictively wanting to cause horror?  We do not know.  

The SUN is shining  brilliantly from a clear blue sky.      But there is a chill in the air,    Looks as if the weather here may be set for the next few weeks - although apparently in Nairobi it is raining cats and dogs.      Recently my attention caught by a sudden and amazingly detailed scientific claim that the SUN, our Sun, is COOLING!     Apparently it has come to the end of what is said to be a 250 year cycle.      For the next 30 years it will turn its attention inwards, during which time it will not give out the heat we are accustomed to.      Global Warning is seemingly now on the junk heap, and we have Global cooling.      I am intrigued because the weather this year here in Kenya has been much cooler than usual generally speaking.      Well it IS amazing, and also UNHEALTHY that the world media not having enough crime, perversion, corruption and unpleasantness generally must also serve up various Doomsday Prospects to keep everyone on edge - regretfully without any encouragement for any of us to put our house in Order.      The FACT that Jesus is on the way BACK to finish what had begun when He left is ignored by the Media.           THEY will not regard HIM.       Might even be the fault of the Church.       Still my bet is on HIM to here with us before the Great Freeze or the Great Melt Down, or anything else.

God Bless you all, and keep you sane and solvent during the run up to the Commercial Climax of the Year.      Yield not to Temptation, no matter what.      Keep sober in all that you contemplate, and BE filled with the Spirit of God.      Hopefully we will then all be Blessed in the days ahead no matter what is happening in the world around us.

Sincerely as ever in His Great Love

John Esther, and Daryl Green