Where in the world...

Where exactly are you going?  What exactly are you doing?  We have gotten this question in various forms many times!  Let us tell you a little bit more about the place to which we are going...
 Many people in the US have not heard of Kijabe, Kenya, but the town, the mission station there, and the hospital have a rich history.  Kijabe is a small town overlooking the Great Rift Valley in central Kenya.  By car, it is about an hour northwest of Kenya's capital city, Nairobi.

A view of the Great Rift Valley

 Kijabe is the home of Moffatt Bible College, a respected training institution for future church leaders.  It is also the home of Rift Valley Academy, a boarding school primarily serving the children of missionaries on the continent of Africa.  Most pertinent to our role as pediatricians, it is the home of Kijabe Hospital, an outstanding hospital which was established in 1915 and seeks to glorify God through excellent medical care, evangelism, and the provision of training for Kenyan medical and nursing students, medical residents, and dentists.  The hospital provides a wide range of services, with a particular emphasis on the surgical correction and rehabilitation of children with a wide range of birth defects.  We feel blessed to be joining the existing team of pediatricians who are caring for children with a wide range of medical problems such as prematurity, neonatal sepsis ("blood infection"), asthma, diabetes, a wide variety of infections, burns, trauma, and many other diagnoses.

Kijabe Hospital

 With only a month to go before we depart the US, there is a great deal of excitement and anticipation in our family.  Certainly we also ask ourselves if we are ready...physically, mentally, spiritually.  In our case there is also the intellectual challenge of caring for some conditions that we have not seen for a few years, and for other conditions that are new to us.  This creates some angst and uncertainty for us, but the beauty of this uncertainty is that it drives us right into the arms of God, for He alone is the only steady rock upon which we can steadily lean.  Ideas and treatments change in medicine, but God is eternal and unchanging, which is a great comfort in this crazy world.

Rick & Sarah
Raleigh, NC, USA