House Renovation: Week 2

They seem to be moving quickly on the demolition of the interior/exterior. I think they start pouring foundation this next week. Crazy.

House Renovation: Week 1.5

Here are a few pics of our house renovation project from the first week and a half. You will see pictures of guys taking down the garage & a tree (sadly...but soon to replaced) as well as the remains of the "disco deck" and the house minus its sidewalks/steps. There are some interior pictures, namely the space where the kitchen used to be, the progress of the big family room, and a shot of the office (there are beautiful wood floors under that carpet!). Stay tuned.

mb

Christmas Card Disclaimer

For all of you who couldn't believe how incredibly huge our Christmas card photo was, please give me a moment to explain.

As you may know, we use Amazing Mail to send out our Christmas card every year. Usually, K is in charge of actually sending out the card. This year I, MB, did the honors.

We scrambled about a week before Christmas to find a photo we liked of ourselves and alas our sweet sister-in-law handed the photo in question to us just in the nick of time. I of course was not thinking about how our faces filled the entire frame b/c our usual card is the size of the average postcard or a 4x6-inch photo. No big deal.

So I am in the "formatting" section of Amazing Mail when I see different postcard shapes & options. I get very excited, thinking "Oh wow! I can add another small picture by the address line...perfect for the dogs." And, "Oh wow! I can include ALL my text!"

Alas, I am swept away by the joys of modern technology & the choices it offers. I end up choosing the card that gives me all of these options & more without taking time to note the SIZE of the card. It's huge. And our faces fill the frame. These two facts combined made for a shocking surprise in your mailbox come Christmas. And for that, I apologize.

Please know we were not trying to send you the biggest picture of all your friends & family. We were not trying to take up the most space on your refrigerator. And we were not trying to say, "Look at us! No really, LOOK at us!"

Thank you for your attention. And happy new year.

Snapshots of Egypt & India

It's so hot in India that chili peppers just wash up on the beach. I found 2 on the beach this particular morning.
These are our good friends M&K & their lovely Baby L.

Indiana Springs is the bottled water of choice in India. God bless em'.

T & I beside T's new super-eco-friendly ship of the desert.

Kids at our friends' orphanage in Chennai India. http://www.sangitacharitabletrust.com/.


P&G at the Pyramids, posing with the Sphinx.

Egypt & India

In October I took 2 friends, T & P, to Egypt for a week. I got back mid-December from a trip to Chennai, India with another friend M.

None of these guys have traveled much outside of the USA. All of them are interested in different cultures & people & global news & politics & so forth. So it was fun to take these friends to two very exotic places & introduce them to our friends in Egypt & India.

On the plane back from Chennai to Frankfurt, M asked me why I invited him to go to India. I didn’t have an immediate answer for him, which took me by surprise.

MB & I are big believers in introducing our friends to each other. & we are big believers in getting people together & seeing what happens. So naturally we want our friends from all over the world to get to know our friends from Indy & the US. & vice versa.

After going to Egypt, P & his wife are helping with support for one of our friends there. & after going to India, M is interested in supporting one of the kids at our friends’ orphanage. This is wonderful. In our partnership training sessions, MB & I teach that good relationships are the foundation of good partnerships. What MB & I really want is just for our friends all over the world to get to know each other. & hopefully by getting to know each other, we can begin to help each other & to work together.

So we want to take our Indy friends with us to meet our friends around the world. & we want to bring our friends from around the world to meet our Indy friends. & then we want to sit back & see what happens.

Random Pics from 2006

Pictures include: MB's birthday dinner in CO; Khayelitsha, South Africa, Alek, Syd & Max, friends in Indy, Halloween, & respective family pics.

2006 Christmas Card

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

We are very happy to be back in Indianapolis after 2 years in the DC area and half a year in South Africa! We’ve enjoyed our friends, family, and our city immensely.

Of course we’ve been globetrotting, visiting friends in places like Egypt, India, Britain, South Africa, St. Croix, DC, Texas, Colorado, and NYC! We’ve been visited…by friends from South Africa (two dear friends & their daughters were neighbors for 2 months), DC, and elsewhere.

We’ve been running (& swimming & biking). MB participated in her second sprint triathlon this summer & Kyle ran his fourth marathon this fall.

We’ve been renovating…or are starting to. We’ll post updates to our blog.

MB’s been, um, boarding. She joined 2 boards this year: Horizon International and the Harrison Center for the Arts, where she also just opened her first darkroom. She’s also been working on a photography curriculum and opening a small independent theater also at the Harrison. Fun stuff.

K’s been trading…stocks & options and as well as doing a ton of work for the International Sports Coalition & keeping Flat Earth Records alive. We’ve been adopting…a dog that is. Again, check out our blog to meet Max(ine), Syd’s new sister. Our blog address is new: http://www.mbandk.blogspot.com/. Here you can read more & see lots of pictures.

We end the year feeling grateful for each of you & for the blessing you are in our lives. We are grateful for the lives God has blessed us with. And we look forward to 2007 with great anticipation. May you each be blessed this holiday season.

K + MB
Syd & Max

Introducing Max the Wonderdog

Syd has a sister. Three weeks ago, Kyle & I adopted another dog. Her name is Max, short for Maxine.

Max, formally Juju who was formallly Dixie, is a Katrina hurricane survivor. She was five months old when the Catahoula rescue found her last December & brought her to Austin, TX where she lived until July.

A woman here in Indiana had just lost her 14-year-old dog & her younger dog, Stuart, was dealing with the death of this older dog badly. So this woman decided she needed to get another dog for Stuart. I still don't know what made her look at the Catahoula rescue in Austin but she did & found Max. She had Max flown to Indy where she planned on of course raising her.
Well, apparently she & Stuart weren't bonding...she is still a puppy & of course wants to play & have a buddy & Stuart wasn't having any of it. So she decided the best thing was to find Max a new home, which was really hard for her b/c Max is such a sweet dog.

K & I were on a date killing time one evening & wandered into Three Dog Bakery to buy Syd a treat or two. On our way out, we see this ad with a picture of Max & are amazed at how much she looks like Syd. We had been talking about getting another dog soon b/c Syd will be nine in February & we wanted him to train our next dog while still being young enough to enjoy the new dog. So we decided to to set up a play date with Max.

After three different play dates (one of which included two nights with us & an evening of Stone Soup with tons of people & kids), we decided to keep her. She didn't go home after that last play date...

So that's the story! She & Syd play great together. She's really sweet & is quickly learning our house rules. I am a teensy bit allergic to her saliva but K thinks that will pass. And we love her lots!

ISLS 2006

The sports ministry school is one of two schools that brings us to Stellenbosch, South Africa every year. This year, there are 28 leaders from at least 15 countries. (I'll count and provide the correct number later...) They are amazing...again. Our seminar on Partnership went great. We taught both schools together this year, almost 50 leaders from I think 30 countries. We had a wonderful first week with them at Wortelgat, the adventure training camp they experienced. Many team building exercises & experiential learning opportunities were had there!

Here are a few photos from our brief time with these leaders.

Home & More Pictures

Well, we made it safely home yesterday afternoon after a very long trip. We are grateful that the trip went smoothly with no problems...we travelled through Heathrow so we were unsure of how it all would go.

I updated our two prior posts with some pictures so be sure to take a look. Also, below are some picture highlights from the trip. Enjoy!

Road Trip with Ruby

On a more humorous note, we had quite an adventure while our friends J & M from Indianapolis were here visiting. The morning of their first full day with us, we all pile into the car (a.k.a. Ruby) to head to a game reserve four hours from our house. (Mind you, these friends had been on a plane for 20+ hours only a mere 12 hours prior…and they are both over 6-feet tall!) We arrive at the game reserve, stay the night, and have quite an enjoyable time. (K & M were reunited with Sam the elephant from the movie “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” However, Sam didn’t seem to remember our prior meeting. So much for the old adage about elephants not forgetting…)

On day 2, we pile back into the car for our four-hour ride home. About two hours into the trip, our car dramatically starts overheating! To make a long story short, we essentially end up coasting 10km to the nearest town, which also happened to be a pretty big town, hoping to find a mechanic at 4:30pm on a Friday afternoon. Again miraculously, we find a mechanic & he tells us he thinks it’s the water pump but can’t actually do anything for us at this point in time. Our two options are to 1) stay the night in this town two hours away from our house and deal with it in the morning (which would be tough on a Saturday…very little is open) or 2) call a tow truck and get towed back home that very evening. We all agree that we should just try to get home. So the tow truck comes two hours later and we get the car up off of all four wheels on a flat-bed tow truck.

However, there’s not nearly enough room in the cab of the truck for all four of us AND the driver. So what option do we have but pile back into the car (which is now nestled nicely on top of the flat-bed truck), buckle in, and hope for the best! There we are, bumping & bouncing around on top of this truck in the rain, no heat, no radio, foggy windows from all of our breathing & laughing. Just when we think it can’t get any more bizarre, the tow truck driver turns on his yellow lights on top of the cab…which happen to be RIGHT at eye level for us! Oh, what a night.

We had started for home that afternoon at about 2pm and didn’t get home until midnight. But thank the Lord we arrived back safely & got to wake up in our own beds.

Just in case you thought the story was finished, wait…

So we leave the car at a VW dealership near our house where it would sit until Monday when someone could look at it. On Monday, they get it right into the shop, tell us it is indeed the water pump, replace the pump, and call us to tell us the car is ready to be picked up that very day! Amazing service. So we go to pick up the car thinking this bill is going to be HUGE, what with a two-hour plus tow & a brand new water pump. We get the bill and we owe…R63! That’s less than $10! We couldn’t believe it. The service agent told us that everything, even the tow, was covered in the warranty. We only had to pay for new antifreeze.

Crazy stuff.

Our friend Abel

OK, OK, we’ve been surprisingly busy here in Stellenbosch hosting friends & colleagues. & yes, we’ve been having African adventures of very strange natures. & we’ve been able to reconnect with a lot of our friends here. So we haven’t updated our blog as much as we should. Sorry.

The purpose of this short note is to tell you about Abel. I met Abel in Western Uganda in the town of Fort Portal. I was there last year with our friend S. S was making a video for Horizon International, an organization which supports AIDS orphans & communities afflicted by AIDS (http://www.horizoninternationalinc.com/). Abel was part of the local Horizon team that took us around.

MB & I have a good friend, R, in Kampala who attended the sports school in 2000. I had been trying to coordinate a meeting with R since I had found out that S & I were going to Uganda. R eventually met us at the airport as S & I were preparing to fly back to South Africa. We introduced R to the Horizon team from Fort Portal & encouraged them to get to know each other & to work together. S & I were thinking that soccer could be a great tool for gathering people in the villages of Western Uganda & then Horizon could help the villagers with HIV education, medical care, food packages & life skills.

The Horizon team gave R a ride back to his house after we left & as far as I knew, no real relationship or partnership had been developed.

Then when we arrived in South Africa a month ago, we visited the Community Transformation school where we help. The first people we saw were a couple from India that we know who are attending the school. & standing there talking to them was Abel, who promptly informed me that he too was attending the Community Transformation school.

I was shocked & thrilled to see how a last minute meeting at an airport in Entebbe, Uganda could lead to a young man committing three months of his life in a foreign country away from his family & friends. Abel will be learning about how to evaluate the needs of his community in Uganda & develop strategies & projects to address those needs.

& that is why MB & I are excited to introduce our friends to one another, or as I like to say, get our friends together & see what happens.

From London to South Africa

K & I arrived in South Africa two weeks ago Monday for a month-long visit. We flew here via London where we spent a few days with L & M, two of our very good friends from our time in DC. I will post pictures when I can. (I've been having trouble posting pics so far.) We walked all over London, took a boat ride on the Thames down to Parliament, ate at this great spot where you can pay a few pounds for as much bread, butter, & jam (all made from scratch) as you can eat, found a classic London pub to enjoy some brews & fish and chips, and saw many of the famous sights of the city. We also saw where K stayed during his summer abroad program while at Baylor. L & M have a beautiful flat with a great view of the Eye, Big Ben, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Tate.

Upon arriving in SA, we quickly reconnected with A & E and the girls, who we are missing after having them as our next door neighbors for 2 months. We have resettled into our place here. Our friend who is staying here while we are away had it looking immaculate. And we have just returned from almost a week of adventure training & team building at Wortelgat with the ISLS (International Sports Leadership School) group. It’s another great group this year. I will post some pictures of our week with them. We've only briefly met the leaders attending ALICT (African Leadership Institute for Community Transformation) though so far we are yet again impressed by them. K played a significant role in getting one young man from Uganda here to South Africa from his trip last fall to Uganda. He will write more about that later.

M was with us from London over the weekend during a business trip to SA. And J & M from Indy will arrive this evening for a 10-day visit. They will celebrate our 5-year anniversary with us on August 17! The weather is fair, the wine is sweet, the people are tremendous, and we are good. Thanks for the many prayers & well wishes as we left. We appreciate you.

Love k & mb

Us in a classic London pub.

Earlier this year...

We spent one week in Cairo, Egypt recently. Cairo has a population around 16 million. It is a huge & ancient city. Home of the pyramids & the pharaohs. Home of up to 4 million Sudanese refugees.

Cairo is old, creaky, chaotic, dirty, sprawling & ramshackle. The traffic & the dust are choking & ever-present. Traffic lights & lanes are meaningless. The Egyptians drive like maniacs. It is hard to imagine & maybe even harder to put into words, how bad the Egyptians drive. Simply put, they only worry about their car & where they are going.

Thank God for the Nile. Yes the river is polluted & sometimes smelly but it does give the city a break from the never ending sprawl of traffic & buildings. & there are few things as nice as a sailboat ride on the Nile at night with friends.

& thank God for the Egyptians. Their hospitality & their food are wonderful. We in the West could learn a lot from their warmth, generosity & general love of life, regardless of how much & how hard they have to work.

I got to know my wife in Cairo in November 2000. We were both attending debriefing meetings after the first major model of a kids sports ministry event. We spent 4 days in meetings & 4 nights running around Cairo with our Egyptian friends until the early hours of the morning.

This visit we didn’t stay out until the early hours of the morning but we did reconnect with friends from Egypt & from around the world. Once again we were at meetings with 1,200 people from the region who were learning about how to use sports to create positive change in their communities. The 2 of us led a 3 day workshop on the power of partnering.

The historic Christian community in the Middle East has been around since Jesus. But the Christian community’s influence has dwindled over the centuries from persecution & from emigration to the West. It is exciting to witness thousands of people from traditional Christian families throughout the Arab world join together to help build & encourage their communities & their countries whether it is by running camps & drug rehab centers, providing food & shelter for refugees from Sudan & Iraq, or providing sports & recreation opportunities for kids throughout the region.

From Egypt, we flew to Chennai, India.

[written while in India]
What do you say to an Indian who tells you that India is the best country in the world & you are in a dining hall in a Catholic seminary in the mountains of Coonoor, India & you are surrounded by 100 other Indians? That’s what I wondered tonight at dinner.

& now I’m listening to Ben Folds sing a farewell to Elliot Smith. & it’s sad. & chilly. But quiet. & I have to wonder like the lead character in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, ‘Did I listen to pop music because I was sad, or was I sad because I listened to pop music.’

Thank God for the little pleasures like a few sips of Bakers’ whiskey after an exceptional Indian meal. For a Catholic retreat center on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere in India, the food is amazing. I’ve never had egg curry until now but it is fabulous. Like every meal I’ve had here in India.

Tomorrow at 6:30, I will go to mass with my friend Brian. I figure I might as well get up & attend since the bells for the service wake me up every morning at 6am. Brian has the luck of being brought up Irish Catholic, so he will have some idea of when to kneel & when to sit. But the Father here is about as cool as they come, seeing as he plays volleyball with the boys in his seminary. So this will be my first mass in Asia, which is good & overdue. I like going to mass. I don’t know what I’m doing & I don’t know what it all means but it is nice & the churches are usually quaint & beautiful (like the one here & in Arlington) or ornate & beautiful (like St. John’s in Indy) or just massive like the London Cathedral. My friend Ed from Baylor talked about something I will never forget. He loved that he could go into mass anywhere in the world & feel right at home because the service is the same everywhere. That may sound boring to some but I like that thought of finding something very familiar & hopefully comforting regardless of wherever you find yourself in the world.

first entry in 2006

Well, we've been back in Indiana for almost four months now & are just now writing. For those who are interested, we ARE planning on keeping our blog. Please make note that the new URL is www.mbandk.blogspot.com. And the blog has a new name: Back Home Again.

I know K & I are still processing the time in South Africa and will continue writing our thoughts on that experience as time passes. Since we've been back, we've traveled to Cairo, Egypt and Chennai, India. We have thoughts we'd like to share on these trips as well.

And of course, being back is worthy of its own time in the spotlight. The most current developments occurred in the last four days. Good Friday: My mom's 60th birthday, awesome house church, golf ball-sized hail storm resulting in one broken window in our house & teeny little dents all over the hood of our car. Saturday: Spent in Upland, IN celebrating Mom's birthday & visiting their new lake house an hour and a half away (from Upland). Easter Sunday: Spent with my entire family minus D & S, K's entire family (all kids included), and St's entire family. Very fun. Monday (today): Discovered a racoon had found its way into our little house next door...little muddy footprints & poop to boot. Fortunately it only sat on one new chair... Sigh.

Of course, there is more to share about how we're reacclimating to this place. But the short story is that we love being back. Had you asked me a year ago if I could see myself "back home again in Indiana," I would have said "absolutely not." Not because I don't love our friends & family here, but because I had my heart set on being back in the PacNW. But alas, my heart has done a complete 180, which is nothing short of a miracle. And I am grateful.

m

Uganda Trip Update

OK. I’m 3 weeks back from Uganda. I went with our friend Sean who is a film maker & writer. Sean & I went with some other friends from Horizon International. Horizon sponsors kids who have been orphaned by AIDS in Uganda, Zimbabwe & South Africa. Sean is making a video to help Horizon raise support for more orphans.

We flew from Cape Town, South Africa to Johannesburg & then on to Entebbe, Uganda. The trip was uneventful. South Africa (at least around Cape Town) is a bit like Europe with exotic animals. In a lot of ways it is not Europe & is very much Africa, but a lot of the infrastructure is good. South Africa is hosting the World Cup in 2010. You can’t host the second biggest global event in the jungle somewhere.

Anyway, the adventure began at the airport in Entebbe where we tried load ourselves & our luggage into the ‘combi’ that met us. A combi is a mini-bus, a taxi-bus, usually a Volkswagen van. There were 6 Americans on this trip including Sean & me. & there were I think 3 Ugandans with us. Let’s just say the Americans over packed. After much shoving & sweating to load the combi, we drove 3 hours Africa time (5-1/2 hours real time). The government just finished the highway from Entebbe to the western region of the country where we stayed in a town called Fort Portal.

Fort Portal is surrounded by jungle, kind of equidistant from the gorillas in the mist & the guerillas in Congo. It is beautiful & sometimes dangerous. HIV/AIDS is estimated to be 45%. Congolese rebels swoop in every now & again to rape, pillage & restock supplies.

Silas coordinated our time in Uganda. He is a local pastor who works with Horizon. He & his family give & give & never stop working for their community. Silas is the kind of guy that MB & I look for to help connect & resource.

We spent our days driving hours out into the jungle on dirt roads to villages & projects. At most we were 60 miles from Fort Portal. It was slow going in an overcrowded combi.

We visited a bunch of people & schools, shook a lot of hands, said a lot of words of greetings, shot a lot of video, felt very overwhelmed. & we let a lot of kids touch a white person for the first time. I was the first white person a lot of the kids had seen. Some thought I was a ghost.

Again, I was struck by how little American pastors have to teach Africans & how much we can learn from African pastors.

I’ve seen a lot of videos of Africans singing & running along side the Aid Agencies van as the van pulls into a village. But it has been 30 years since I experienced it. & I don’t remember much from last week let alone 30 years ago. It was like walking through the Monet room at the Chicago art institute. 10 minutes in there & your mind is blown. 5 masterpieces you can comprehend, but a room of 50 masterpieces crashes the processor.

Going into a village 2 miles from the Congo border & seeing a crowd of 500, half of them kids, waiting for you to come see them, talk with them, take their picture so Americans can help support them is a humbling experience. The kids & the people are beautiful. They are masterpieces. They are poor & a lot are sick. The adults farm, the kids go to school, they all scrape by, they all hope the Congolese rebels don’t come in the night & kill everyone like they did a couple years ago at a school 5 miles away.

Western Uganda is very fertile. People aren’t hungry. Their diet is healthier than mine. They are poor & there is little opportunity for education & employment. It’s probably like a lot of the world, but not places I go to very much. I go to urban places, the big, dirty, crowded cities around the world. Bangkok, Cairo, Nairobi, Katmandu. Few white people go to these villages. Urban poverty is different from rural poverty.

The people in the villages know they are poor, uneducated, in need of help. They have no concept of how rich America is. It is beyond their comprehension, just as their situation is beyond our understanding. They aren’t angry at America for not helping more. They are grateful for any & all help. They are praying for us & our disasters & country. Are we even aware that they exist? I was there…do I remember them when I pray?

Famine commercials on TV have asked me to help sponsor a child in need. I used to think the money only went to give the starving kid some rice. I almost immediately tuned out. I don’t like having my emotions toyed with by the media for financial purposes.

Horizon (& I’m sure Compassion & World Vision & others) use the monthly support to pay for food, medicine, tutoring & sports & arts programs, school fees, school uniforms & all kinds of other stuff I don’t know about.

Around Fort Portal there are about 10,000 orphans. Horizon supports about 60 I think. In some villages, people waited overnight in their best clothes in the hope that we would take their picture & find a sponsor for them in the USA. $35 a month supports an orphan.

10,000 orphans around one small town in one small African country. Obviously disaster is upon us. Obviously it is beyond comprehension. Obviously Africa will be changed forever. Entire communities will be gone in 10 years. But perhaps most surprising, there is hope. People like Silas were working in their communities before Horizon showed up & they will keep working after Horizon disappears or moves on. We met others like Silas. A man who works with Silas moved out of his house, made it a medical clinic, took out a loan & built & started a school for 120 kids.

The world seems very big. The poor & the villages of Africa & Asia seem very far away. They aren’t. Email & airplanes make us all global neighbors. Finding people like Silas is important. We are blessed to know people like Silas all over the world. If you would like to get to know someone like Silas & start investing in a new friend & a community, then please, please tell MB or me where in the world you are interested in getting involved.

I think Chief Seattle said we are all connected. It is true. The world is very small. Investing in one person can change a community. We can all make more of a difference than we think we can.

Jesus said come & see what he was about as he went around helping & healing people. Sean & I can’t wait to go back to Uganda & back to the villages of Africa & Asia & take our families & friends with us. Come with us on a trip & see what it’s all about. We want to find & know & work with more people like Silas, people who care for the children & their communities.

Here is a picture that Sean took while on the trip:

More pictures

Here are a few pictures from our time with G & E and Mar & Court. Enjoy.