Well term 3 has gotten under way and what a beginning it has been. School opened just 6 weeks ago, but it seems like it has been months. Students came back on Monday the 22nd and school started on the 23rd. Below is a recap of the events that have taken place in the last 6 weeks. I am more and more convinced that Satan is trying to get us off track in our spiritual lives not only personally, but also as a school. Please be in prayer with us.
On the 22nd David and I were getting small things finished for the start of school. Projectors here and there were finished installing and tested. UPS’s were being tested to ensure power was constant to all of our computers and then we had a power outage. No big deal. We have a large 8,000 watt UPS to cover all of our servers and network switches. This time though it failed. All of our servers powered off in a hard way and corruption ensued when they came back on. This corruption affected several of our servers and took quite some time to get them back running. This affected staff and students.
On the 3rd of May we received over 5″ of rain in about 4 hours. This was after having received about 10″ of rain the previous month or so. About 10 pm the chaos started. The Kijabe community started having mud slides. The mud slides last for the next 6 or so hours and did quite a bit of damage to our community. The sad part of the destruction was the death of several children in the community above RVA. A mudslide took out part of the house and killed the kids. The devastation from the slides was unbelievable. Every time we see it we can see the Lord’s protection on RVA and community. It will take years for Kijabe to recover from the devastation.
The month of May has also seen lots of family issues with staff members. My mom was hospitalized in the middle of May in LA while on a short vacation seeing her granddaughter graduated from Master’s University. She was there for a week before being sent home. It appears her cancer has returned and is awaiting test results. Another staff member found out that his father his elderly father has terminal cancer and is very life threatening both physically and spiritually. Another staff member found out that there mother lost feeling in her body from waist down. Another staff member had here mother hospitalized.
About a month ago we got our UPS back that was the 1st problem of the term. It came back repaired, they recalibrated it. We slowly put it back in service so we could do some testing on it to make sure it was working. Everything appeared to be working fine so we put back in complete service about 2 weeks ago. Power was great for about 6 days and then we had a quick blink and our whole network went down again. The UPS failed immediately. After some diagnostics we feel that some of the batteries has shorted themselves out and have shut down the UPS. There are about 100 12 volt 5 AH batteries backing things up. We hope to have new ones from the US in about 2 months.
This weekend was the last thing. We had mid term this weekend. Friday at noon all of the boarding kids went to spend time with there parents or guardians. We decided to go to Nairobi for the weekend and spend some time with some friends of ours at Africa International University. On Saturday we went to one of the parks belonging to the National Museum of Kenya. We went on a hike to see waterfalls, bamboo and a cave. After looking at the caves we took the trail that according to the map was to loop back around to the gate. The trail did not lead back to the gate, but it went anywhere to the gate. Angela, I and the kids walked around for the next hour trying to figure out where we were. We finally figured out what was going on and got out of the park to our car. We then went to the car and went to unlock one of the car locks on the transmission, but it would not unlock. We tried numerous things, but were unsuccessful. We ended calling another missionary who came about an hour later and we used a reciprocating saw to cut the lock out.
As we have gone thru this time of problem after problem we have relied on each other and the Lord to get us thru. The Lord is our rock and foundation. Nothing can take us away from our Father’s hand. Please pray for RVA and the attacks that we are under. RVA has been here over 100 years and since its beginning has been under attack from the evil one. Pray that we would stand firm and rest in our Lord who has in control of everything. Pray that we would be a great testimony to our kids and the next generation of teachers and missionaries.
