Out of Africa

Recently, an old friend sent me a photo from my time in Kenya in 1982-84:

Basketball game at Nyeri Baptist High School with me reffing. 
I'm the one with the beard.

Those two years were in many ways the most important of my life. had just finished college with a math degree and did know what to do next. I had spent half my senior year in Germany, and I knew I wanted to keep traveling. When the opportunity to teach math at a small school in the highlands of Kenya presented itself, my only hesitation was that I would be working for the Southern Baptist Church.    

I had grown up in a small NC town attending a Baptist church, so I had an idea of what I was getting myself into. However, I was pretty ignorant of the larger changes occurring nationally with the growth of the Moral Majority and the push towards fundamentalism that the Southern Baptist Convention was experiencing. Seminaries and other SBC systems were being purged of people who didn't believe the "right" way. I nearly got purged before I even got started.

But that's another story for another time.

Once I got to Kenya, I loved it. The school schedule was three months on, one month off. During my month off, I went on safaris, camped where I had elephants and hippos around my tent at night, caught malaria (a great weight-loss approach), and went through a drought where the town I lived in was without water much of the time. I decided clean water was important.

Who knew?

The depths of my ignorance were unfathomable, looking back. I knew little about Kenya's colonial past. I knew little about civil rights. I knew little about world events. But in Kenya, coupled with my previous time in Germany, something stirred. I had always loved reading, but I'd read mostly fiction. In Kenya, I began reading Newsweek cover to cover soon after it was delivered to the newsstand near where I lived. I read history books and political science. I am thankful for all the things I'd been exposed to in college, because I could build on them as I continued educating myself.

It was during one of the school breaks, on a trip to Island Camp in Lake Baringo in the Rift Valley, that I briefly spoke with a retired professor from the University of Wyoming. I told him of my interest in water resources.

"Consider coming to the University of Wyoming," he replied.

And that's how I ended up in grad school there. That's another story. Soon.