A Motorcycle for James!

What a great pleasure it was for Wild Hope to be able to partner with Reality church in Carpinteria and the Russell kids to provide much needed transport for our great friend, James Ole Kukan.

James is one of those golden people, a man of integrity who has lived his values with grace and consistency over all the years that we have known him. It is our great privilege to have him on our board of trustees here in Tanzania. His spiritual oversight of our Artisan Project participants is invaluable.

Caring for the needs of multiple congregations over many miles out in Maasai, James has a whole new freedom to get to these far flung places now that he has these snappy wheels.

Of the many things we appreciate about James, his wisdom and insight into how best to bring appropriate, effective, lasting assistance to Maasai communities is one that we call on again and again. James is a gift to Wild Hope and to his people. We love that we get to be a part of providing this gift for him.

Have You Seen our 5 Minute Video? Enjoy!

Here's a video we've used to provide visuals to the stories Wild Hope is part of here in Tanzania. We are privileged to serve in these ways. Enjoy!

Wild Hope 2009 from Trevor Byron Borden on Vimeo.

Real Talk About HIV/AIDS

(Photo: Students attending our Health and HIV/AIDS class.)

"Why are Tanzanians dead because of HIV/AIDS? Why are Americans not dead because of HIV/AIDS? Why?"

The questions left by students in the question box last week were nothing if not frank.

HIV awareness campaigns are not new to the gritty urban settlements of Africa. What is less common in these communities is an environment of freedom where every question can be asked. But can this subject of HIV/AIDS, taboo even after years of education, really be dealt with candidly?

Enter: a little team of folks from Trinity Presbyterian, Santa Ana, California, and a little team of Wild Hope staff here in Tanzania.

Now, give them five days with forty high school aged young people and let the learning begin!

To our great delight, the team from Trinity stepped up to the challenge with grace and boldness. The forty Tanzanian students who attended Wild Hope's Leadership Academy module, Health and HIV, were truly blessed.

Every evening, the questions/comments box was filled with slips of paper--

"What can I do when I know I have HIV/AIDS?"

"Most of the bosses they want sex with girls to give the job and the girls say yes because they don't have job, nothing to eat, so they agree."

"I know 20 people who have died from HIV."

Preparations each evening were sobering, yet God was faithful to grant wisdom and insight. By the end of the week, the comments reflected the thankfulness students felt for what they had learned and the environment in which they had been led.

Seasoned teachers from a local school affirmed that the permission to speak openly was a big step forward for all of them. The students already know, first hand, what HIV/AIDS is. Yet for many of them, this was the clearest information they had received on cause and prevention, not to mention the myriad of related issues that surround the disease.

This is the beauty of bridging cultures-- we can take each other to new places and be changed for the better as we journey together.

Our visitors from California might not be able to quantify exactly how their experience with forty kids in a severely challenged neighborhood within Arusha changed their lives. They'll just know that it truly did. The young Tanzanians who attended won't forget what they heard in honesty and freedom regarding topics of grave importance. From practical health tips to matters of hope and faith, they've been impacted and inspired.

And we are the lucky ones! What a joy it is to bring our friends from opposite corners of the globe together. What a pleasure it is for us to play matchmaker :-)


(Photo: Ashley Sparks of Trinity with one of the students.)

Sharing a Link...

Read Lisa's blog entry, "Watching Africa Blow Away" at her BLOG

Reflections on Summer: What Others are Saying :-)

(Photo by Joel Phillips)

We just wanted to share a couple of lovely comments we’ve received from students who participated in our summer adventures.

Liz Thaete, a recent graduate of Westmont College, says:

“I went into my trip to Africa knowing that it would be a series of unbelievable experiences, including teaching and playing with Maasai children, hiking along beautiful waterfalls, and getting up close to amazing animals.

What I didn't expect is what truly made the trip so rich, and is what I remember most fondly: the community that was built amongst everyone in the group, that emerged in the simple times of sitting around the fire or sharing tea on the front porch. I can't imagine a better opportunity than getting to go on a wild adventure that will stretch you, getting to do that alongside people who are your brothers and sisters in Christ, and being led by an amazing family who calls the area their home and knows how to make the most of the time spent adventuring.

I absolutely loved it and can't wait until I end up returning for a second visit....”

Sara Humes, beginning her second year at Westmont now, writes:

“The Safari With a Purpose was a wonderful, creative way of immersing us, in every aspect, in local culture. I loved working with the children and unconditionally loving on them. Teaching and interacting with them sparked my interest of teaching English and helping cultures that might not receive the essentials that they need. I liked that we were able to help with local villages in even the smallest ways, while still seeing the countryside and going on exciting adventures.

The pace of the trip was also very steady and was not too tiring. Every day brought new adventures, even when we relaxed in Arusha or at the campsite. I also loved talking to people and praying with others. I felt truly at peace with myself and joyful many times throughout the trip. I felt that our group grew very close while we were there and it was nice to relax and have time to reflect on the trip. Now that I have had a taste of Africa, I have a hunger for the place and am very confident that I will be returning in the near future.”

As for us, we loved having these amazing folks with us. Every blessing on each of them as they get back in to life on the other side of the pond ☺

Safari with a Purpose

Our second team of the summer is off and away on their safari of service and adventure!

This particular team has been brought together by Jesse and Trevor and they are leading the crew of college friends. While this is their initiative, we can't help but be pretty involved. There's too much work in the preparation and too much fun in the journey for just 2 Borden Boys :-) And having older, (read "More years in Africa,") folks around is never a bad thing.

What a blessing it is for us to host people as they experience Tanzania. How awesome that we get to be a part of their service and growth. We love to see hearts and minds opened by God as friends engage new cultures, new landscapes, new issues, new joys and new relationships. Culture, the environment, hunger, justice, service, poverty, wealth, wildlife, responsibility, faith, values and fears are all things that a trip like this brings up in the hearts of the participants. Conversations around the campfire are good.

Challenges are always a part of it as well. This photo was taken on Saturday before the early Monday departure...



But they pulled out on time this morning, big grins on all their faces.



May this be a beautiful time for each one. May they be a blessing where they serve and may there be lasting benefit in each of their lives as well.

We Harvest the Beans :-)

The April/May rains failed in parts of Kenya and Tanzania, leaving many of our friends struggling as the dust blows where grass should be growing for their weakening herds.

With this reality close to us, we don't take for granted the rains that we received on Wild Hope's acreage outside of Arusha. For whatever reason, this general area was blessed with quite a decent rainy season and we have been harvesting the first fruits off of the land.

What a precious thing to be involved in the rhythm of the earth as dry ground softens under the rain, nourishing the hidden seeds and encouraging them to sprout and grow. What a lot of fun to watch the plants mature and produce and then to finally bring in a harvest.

Our bean production (grown amongst the maize and replenishing what maize depletes) wasn't on a very large scale but we're pleased with it none-the-less. We celebrated the good gifts of our Creator as we enjoyed our first meal with home-grown beans in our burritos.

This is a beginning for us. We look forward to years of multiple types of harvests grown in sustainable, environmentally responsible ways. With hunger and the degradation of the land being ongoing concerns in sub-Saharan Africa, we hope to work together with our neighbors to see these issues decrease.

We sure wish you could stop by for a plate of beans and rice with us :-)

Bundles (and Bundles!) of Beads

Every month bundles of beaded products are brought in to the Wild Hope team here in Arusha. But Wild Hope's artisan-made products begin to take shape miles and miles and miles from where they end up on display. Carefully threaded onto the stiff wire and bent by the strong, skilled hands of our Maasai friends, the products first take shape in the remote villages where our friends live.

From the village, the product is loaded onto the backs of donkeys and walked for half a day to connect with a friend who has a Land Rover. The Land Rover delivers the product along dirt trails to the closest "public transport vehicle" which travels along the paved road to Arusha. It can be a 2 day process just to bring the product in to town.

Each month, Peter Ole Kukan and 2 or 3 of the Artisan women deliver the wares to Tammy, Grace and Philemon. Together, they now begin the 3 day process of sorting, counting, scrutinizing for quality control, paying, making new orders, assisting the women as they supply with new stock, and sending the little party of Maasai friends back out. When the delegation gets home, the process begins again with 80+ women launching into the work to fill the new orders.


The lovely ornaments and decorations move along to buyers. Some of them end up in high end tourist shops in our town. Some of them end up in Europe, New Zealand, Australia and the U.S. All of them provide a fair trade for traditional artisans who would not necessarily find employment otherwise.

We love the story of how the product gets from village to town. Even more, we love the stories of families provided for by the faithful work of these skilled women. Proceeds go back into the project, building communities in far away places.

Dreaming Bigger :-)

The Nyota Football Academy is dreaming bigger dreams. Why stop with just over 100 young men being coached in soccer AND life skills? Why not press out, expand boundaries around our ideas and reach for the stars?

Our stated purpose is to transform a community through sports-based character development and life-skills training. And that's been off to a great start. We believe that Whole Life Coaching can train Africa's next generation to be leaders of influence on a community and a national level. We want to see these young men live up to the name Nyota, ("star" in Swahili) and be just that on the field and, even more importantly, in life.

In order to implement the dream, we have qualified coaches teaching skill and strategy to our U-10, U-12, U-14 and U-16 teams. Along with the soccer skills, we provide after school training modules to insure that these young athletes have what they need to reach for all of their potential. The foundation of education is still not strong enough in Africa so we're also keeping kids in school with our scholarship program. The Nyota Scholarship Fund helps current students on track and gives assistance to those who are looking for further training after graduating.

But why stop here?

The Nyota guys and all of us at Wild Hope are excited about our friendship with the well-experienced leadership of MYSA in Kenya. As we've invited them down to get to know us, they are calling up bigger dreams in all of us. We'll be talking much more about this as plans get under way but here's a little taste of the ways our dreams are taking shape...

Let's build a real football pitch (soccer field) with level ground and drainage!
Let's start this September with 30 boys teams and 5 girls teams!
Let's get more intentional about HIV awareness training!
Let's up the ante on community service and get all the kids involved!
Let's have 50 boys teams and 10 girls teams by 2010!

We're excited :-)

If you want to know more, please write us at team@wildhopeinternational.org

A Delightful Light... A Kind Gift... A Changed Life

Perhaps the biggest blessing for our recent visitor, Tehur, was the relationship she developed with Josephine and Eva. Jo and Eva are the ladies who produce all that lovely dry fruit in our kitchen. Earlier posts will have told you about how they are generating income through this small business venture. We are delighted for them!

Though Tehur doesn't speak Swahili and the ladies don't speak English, the 3 of them just hit it off across the language divide. Tehur was touched by the joy apparent in their lives, despite dramatically challenging circumstances. Their lives were one of the ways that God spoke to Te while she was with us.

As Tehur's time came to a close, she felt led to give a gift of a hundred dollars to Wild Hope. She could feel in her gut that this gift was hers to give, even though she knew she was returning to no job in Portugal and this literally was the last of her cash. We didn't say anything either way, knowing that sometimes people need to follow the promptings that God gives them, but also knowing that people need to weigh emotions against good sense.

A few short days before Tehur's departure, she arrived in Byron's office with her gift. "I really want to give this," she said.

Then Byron had a thought. Why not take this gift and get something really useful, a true blessing, for Josephine and Eva? They had been such a light to Tehur... How could she bless them?

Enter the D.Light. This wonderful little solar light was developed by a former Peace Corps volunteer who saw how dangerous, expensive and un-green kerosene lanterns are. With its own little solar panel to charge it up, this light has 3 brightness settings and can run for 20-200 hours, depending on which setting you use. It also has a little jack that can used to charge up a cell phone. How cool is that?

The ladies were overjoyed. They literally laughed and danced around with their neat new solar lanterns.

We love these little lights! They are safe and clean and efficient and cool :-) We're hoping to promote them in Tanzania through sales and strategic donations to raise awareness and profile these money-saving sources of light.

And PS 24 hours after Tehur and Byron decided on the lights, Te found out she had a job waiting for her back home in Portugal. A stretch of faith and a kind gift gave Tehur an experience of God's faithfulness.

Win! Win! Win!

Baby Steps toward a Better Earth

In his helpful book, Serve God-Save the Planet, J. Matthew Sleeth makes the following comment:

"God's beautiful earth will not be saved by words or good intentions. It will be saved by humble, anonymous acts like turning off the lights..."

At Wild Hope, we’re taking steps in our attempts toward better stewardship of the earth. While we can’t stop the terrible environmental degradation going on in all corners of the globe, we can begin by taking baby steps of our own that lead to better Creation care.

In our household, some of our baby steps include the following...

We’ve changed several highly used light bulbs for energy saving ones. We plan to change more.

We turn off lights. If we’re going to be out of the room for more than 60 seconds, we hit the switch on our way out. We don’t light up rooms we aren’t in.

We turn off fans in the morning, and often turn the fans to a lower setting once the kids are asleep in their rooms at night.

We often do one load of laundry at night because there is less machinery running in these hours while businesses are closed and this reduces drain on the system.

We don’t have a dryer but hang our clothes in the African sun.

We’ve stopped buying liquid hand soap because we can’t justify all those plastic bottles any more. We’re back to old fashioned bar soap at our sinks ☺

We’ve stopped flushing the toilet every single time it is used. Closing the lid, we save all those liters of water for flushing after the second or third time.

We encourage our visitors to bring their own water bottles when they come to Africa and we fill them from our filters because we don’t want to add more plastic to the environment.

We carry our own bags to the shops and the market.

We reduce our meat consumption because we know that it takes more resources to raise meat than it does to raise vegetables, grain and legumes.

None of these things that we’ve listed require huge transition or dramatic lifestlye changes from us. They are not particularly impressive or noteworthy. They are baby steps and they remind us that we have a part to play in healing the earth. Romans 8 says that Creation is groaning and waiting for the sons of men. We are just taking steps to ease her pain.

How about you? What has your family found that you can do together to care for this wonderful world we share?

Caring for the Lovely Land

Out on our Wild Hope land, large areas have been plowed improperly in the past. A big rant about the damage done all over Africa by poor plowing practices won't help here and the question remains as to why small farm owners plow up and down the slope? Don't they know that the topsoil is being stripped off their farms? Don't they realize it is eroded by wind and water, poured into the streams and eventually dumped into the ocean where it kills the coral reef and puts all other marine life at risk?

Possibly there is no concern for marine life so far away. Few local inland farmers would have had resources available to travel to the coast and be impressed by the warm Indian Ocean. Understandably then, there may be little regard for her, but aren't they driven sufficiently by their own desire for successful farming to keep their topsoil?

But it's just not always as simply as that.

Plowing properly requires that you move horizontally across hilly areas instead of creating furrows that run straight down. And while this seems obvious, the actual size and shape of your farm plays a big role in whether this is an easy task to accomplish. To plow along the contour and not up and down may seem like a simple task. But if your farm, like all your neighbors' farms, is a skinny strip of land that was divided out for you by family, it's quite possible that your skinny strip is short on horizontal and long on sloping hill.

To plow properly you will have to manuever the tractor in tight turns that are difficult to accomplish while pulling a plow. It's so difficult that the whole idea starts to feel way too complicated to be worth it.

"Topsoil shmopsoil. Reef? What's that? My kids need maize and beans NOW."

This weekend, Wild Hope is taking a few friends to a seminar that teaches biblical care for the earth as applied to farming. God's heart for the earth is big and passionate and we are thankful that we can begin planting the seeds of that heart among some of our friends here.

We're also thankful that we can be a blessing to the Wild Hope property.

Last week, Byron sat on a tractor with a local neighbor and corrected past damage that was done through improper plowing of land on the land we now oversee. He just didn't want to watch another rainy season come and channel any more of the topsoil away. So Byron and our Tanzanian neighbor worked together to re-shape the land, restoring her natural lines as best they could.

They were pretty satisfied with the result.

And here's a little secret: when the job was done and the land was returned to her naturally protective shape, Byron says he thinks he heard the earth that he was standing on let out a soft sigh of relief.

It's just a small start, but it feels good to bless the very ground of Africa.

Sometimes it's the Little Things

Eva is one of the lovely ladies in our fruit drying project. We've told you about her before. She's the one with 2 young children and husband who walked out on them.

Eva is a pleasant presence in our house as she carries in baskets of heavy mangos, bananas or pineapples. She washes, slices, dries, packages and sells fruit with the energy and commitment of a mom who knows she's making a big difference in the way the future will play out for those 2 little ones she loves so much. Eva also makes us laugh, which is a nice plus since we share kitchen space at this point in the project's life.

At Christmas we decided that Eva needed a simple mobile phone. For work, you know? Also, for life outside of work. The project could afford to buy her one so we bought one and then started her off with the gift of a phone card to get her going with minutes.

Eva's parents live far from our town. I'm not exactly sure how she did it but Eva got a number for a neighbor at home who had a phone and arranged to call her Mother and Father on Christmas Day.

It was the first time Eva had spoken to her parents in over 5 years.

I almost fell over when I heard that.

Byron asked her if she cried.

She smiled really big, nodded her head, and said, "Yes."

A $35 mobile phone and a little bit of credit? That's all it took to be a blessing? This tiny gift made the most precious difference to Eva.

Sometimes it's the little things.

Little Rays of Hope

Mr. Ndetu is our night guard. I like him a whole lot.

I like him a whole lot and wish, for his sake, that he had a better job than guarding our house at night.

That's how security works in many parts of Africa. There is no 911 or 999 to call and security is the responsibility of the private citizen. We hire Mr. Ndetu. He arrives on his bicycle to our house at about 5:30 p.m. and he leaves again next morning some time between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m.

During the hours between, he hangs out. He visits with Byron if Byron is puttering in the veggie garden or in the work-shop. He helps us feed the dogs and rabbits and is generally a pleasant, if very subtle, presence. He brings his pack dinner and every night, before I go to bed, I make him a thermos of chai. I'm sure he dozes off from time to time. He also tells the dogs to stop harassing hedgehogs.

Ndetu takes his work seriously. When Byron and the kids were away and I was home alone, I got a bad flu that knocked me out. He knew I was sick and so he didn't leave in the morning till he saw that I was up, even though that was about 3 hours later than when he would have normally headed for home. "Just wanted to know that you were alright," he told me.

Ndetu's daughter just passed her exams and has been admitted to secondary school. Surprised, he went to see her teachers. A pass is, truly, no small accomplishment and her teachers shocked him further with the news that she passed easily. She's a strong student. He just didn't know it.

Secondary school will cost him. There are all manner of hidden fees that seem small to us, but are overwhelming to a family like Ndetu's.

Byron asked Ndetu if he wanted this for his daughter. We know that Ndetu's own father had not sent him to school because someone needed to herd the cattle. He has told Byron that, sadly, herding didn't take him very far in life. The cows are gone now and here he is, staying up all night to make a living.

"I'm a good worker, " he said.

"People like me. I could have a much better job in life if I could read and write. Yes, I want this for her."

Together, they worked out a way to make it happen.

"You're giving your daughter what your father couldn't give you," Byron told him.

"You're a good dad."

So much struggle in Africa.

One young girl I know is taking a step forward.

Little rays of hope for tomorrow.

-lisa