Three Tidbits

Scene One
Three of us block professors go together to a staff home for dinner daily. Nancy Crawford is a Wheaton College graduate and has a PhD in psychology. Dr. George Mitchell is my pal from Glasgow, and myself.
Last night we climbed an outside staircase to the apartment of a newlywed couple—Elias and Chepcha. They were married one month ago to the day. We celebrated that first milestone.
She is not a looker—but what a cooker! “Mom taught me well,” she says. She only said about ten words the whole hour we were there.
Chicken – tender! Mixed vegetables. Potato salad – different. Chapattis, of course.
We three were all tired from grading exams all day. We hoped the conversation would take care of itself. It did.
Nancy knows the protocol—she lives in Nairobi. So she smoothes out all the right things to say, while George and I chime in with comments and smiles.
We ply Elias with questions, as he is now teaching apologetics here. He was one of my students some years back and went on for a philosophy degree. He was also teaching at a Scott satellite school in the north. It has about 40 students now, who no longer have to uproot and travel far south to this campus. Elias has also done live satellite radio programs. He would give some teaching on the Gospels or Psalms and then take calls and answer them. Not only was this live and unrehearsed, but the radio staff would go home and he would be running the whole station at the same time. Guy must be pretty good, that’s all I can say.
This reveals some of the fruits of the laborers here at Scott – a college only 47 years old but having a huge impact. We find Scott graduates in leadership and in teaching positions all over Kenya (and neighboring countries, too), often starting churches and schools in the toughest parts of the land. That includes urban Nairobi with all its crime to very arid outposts to the north where white folks seldom last long. We told Elias that he “has done us proud” as his Mwalim—Teachers. The little we do God multiplies in surprising ways.
Scene Two.
After chapel each morning we all take chai. A single cup of sugary tea and milk that is standard all over Kenya—maybe all over Africa.
George usually heads for the tiny refreshment kiosk next to the chapel after he has taken his chai. He likes to buy a Sprite and sit in the shade of the mango tree to jaw with students. He told me that yesterday there was a middle-aged man there just standing about. It’s someone we see from time to time on campus. He is not a worker here so far as I know.
George notices these people on the fringes. So he asked this man if he would like something to drink. “Yes, please,” came the reply. “Would you like a slice of cake to go with it?” “Bread,” he replied. The girl tending the kiosk sensed what was going on and found a bunch of slices of bread to serve with the drink. The man took it, went to the bench a few feet away. The half-loaf of bread was gone in a matter of minutes. Right in our midst, George had found one of the many in Kenya who are on the edge of deep hunger and he provided him that basic food—daily bread—for this day at least.
Scene three
A knock on the door this afternoon while I am grading my daily quizzes. I suspect it is couple of kids looking for George and his daily handout of balloons.
No—it is two of my students asking for a visit. Patience and Stella. Patience is a slim vivacious girl with fine features and a lively way about her. Stella is quieter but the smile is just as broad. Stella wears a leg brace that bespeaks of polio. She walks slowly with an awkward gait. But she is always cheerful.
They want to know my grading system for the midterm they just got back. So I explain.
Patience recently asked a teacher why he had a PhD degree but had never studied philosophy. He did not know. So I explained to her the medieval trivium and quadrivium division of academic subjects and how everything not theology was philosophy on those days. So that’s why biologists and English professors get a Doctor of Philosophy degree. I can tell she will explain to him with great relish.
I ask them what they think they will be doing in ten years time. Patience is going to go on for a master’s degree and go into ministry as a pastor, even though she may have to study part-time while supporting herself. She says that Scott is very much harder than the Kenya universities. Scott graduates are taken by the universities without an entrance exam because they know Scott grads typically take up to 10 subjects at a time when the average university student is struggling with the standard four. “We have to write papers here all the time, so there is no big challenge for us at the universities,” she boasts. Small college—but big reputation and big impact. The faculty here—now almost all nationals—is doing an outstanding job. So our church’s investment here over the years is well placed.
Stella wants to serve “somewhere in the world as a teacher.” She has a call to go overseas as doors open to minister the Gospel. “Maybe even the USA,” she says. I think that would be great. Here is a black woman, unpretentious, with a handicap, who would not seem a threat to anyone anywhere. What a great potential she has to go to the Muslims, the Hindus, the tribals in Africa, or to the lost in Europe or America. God has given her a great vision.
They apologize for coming “without an appointment.” I thank them for letting me get a glimpse into their eager desire to serve the Lord.
Our God knows what He is doing—outwitting the wise of the world every day with the likes of the least of these that the world mostly ignores.