To answer your questions

Here’s my two weeks in sentences: I went with a 24 member team with Engineering Ministries International to Kijabe, Kenya to develop a comprehensive master place for AIC Kijabe Hospital. We evaluated their future size and services, their current facilities, their utilities and storm/waste water management, and gave them a report visualizing their future expansion and laying down the steps to accomplish it.

They say even the longest journey starts with a small step. Well, this particular journey started with a 5,000 mile 10-hour flight from Portland to Amsterdam, followed by a  4,000 mile 8-hour flight to Nairobi. Our tired team dragged itself off the KLM plane and started to gather at the passport/visa check point for our first full team-meeting. We needed to get acquainted quickly, because for the next 10 days we would be spending nearly every moment with each other.

We drove to Kijabe the following morning, and had a day and an evening to settle in, rest and get to know one other. That evening we had a marathon testimony sharing meeting, which went a long way towards breaking the ice. Some very heartfelt stories and some very personal secrets were shared, and it helped bond this group very quickly. And we needed that, because the following morning we were going to realize just how large a task we were dealing with.

Africa Inland Church (AIC) Kijabe Hospital is a respected church in the east-Africa region. They’ve been around since the early 1900’s and have been growing and expanding their services to meet regional needs. They currently have 265 beds, with departments for pediatrics, men’s and women’s in-patient wards, maternal-child health, maternity, ICU, surgery theatres, specialty clinics, dental clinic, and out-patient care. They are an extremely busy hospital, seeing between 350-450 outpatients every day.

To keep up with this growth, AIC KH has been adding buildings as the need arose without too much forethought into planning for greater growth or testing the stress on their services infrastructure. They didn’t deal with a problem until it actually arose, which is a more typical African attitude. It’s not laziness, it’s just a cultural difference that when there isn’t a problem yet, it’s not worth dealing with. But recently the hospital leadership has been adopting a more pro-active attitude, and that’s why our team was brought along to help them assess where they currently stand and how to get where they want to be in 10 years or so.

This sort of hospital campus inventory and master planning process is normally conducted over several months, if not years. We had 10 days to do it. But our talented team was eager to start, and split up into several specialty groups, including Pediatric architecture, hospital/housing architecture, master planning, landscape architecture, electrical, water/wastwater, stormwater, and geotechnical. Myself, I floated into doing different tasks for hospital/housing architecture and the master-planning groups. Many others had over-lapping roles, but it seemed like everyone was eager to take on additional work and share information that would be useful to other groups.

After 10 days it seemed to me like we had our good-news and bad-news groups. The architecture teams had the good news, showing what the future for the hospital could possibly look like. But our services teams had to deliver the bad news, that there would need to be a lot of ground-work (literally) done before anything starting taking shape above-ground. Our electrical, storm-water, and waste water (aka “The Poo Crew”) had to be pretty blunt about the current infrastructure situation. As the hospital had grown over the years, the services had been added ad-hoc with no overall plan and no regular maintenance. Their current infrastructure was barely covering their needs, and not really working once it left the hospital. But softening this news was this sentiment, that by taking better care of things like their wastewater, the hospital would be a good witness to its neighbors downstream. And in a church-overseen hospital, this idea of being a good witness went a long way in convincing people that the need wasn’t some Americans unaccustomed to how things work in Kenya, but a chance to be a good witness to their community.

It took three hours to prevent our results, which we took from literally nothing to about 80% of a DD (design development) phase. It was a hopeful and sobering meeting, but afterwards the 20-some hospital and community representatives told us that our work had opened their eyes to the challenge before them and made them eager to start engaging some of the ideas. My team was very proud of our work, and we’re glad that our report was well received.

In a couple weeks the hospital staff will give us a final response to our presentation, and then in the following month or so EMI will finish its final report.  Two members of our team also felt called by God to return to Kijabe next year with their family to help over-see the initial phases of the new improvements. The hospital has been lacking a construction project manager who can be fully dedicated to ensuring quality construction and be on-top of the local architect and contractors during the construction process. These two volunteers will be aiding the hospital leaders with that without adding any expense to the hospital payroll.

The future looks bright for Kijabe, and I think God really used our team in a very significant way. None of our team will ever get into Arch Record for this, or land a better job or get a cash bonus; but we know we contributed to building the Kingdom of God in those 10 days, and getting to take a little credit for that is a far greater honor than any earthly recognition.