Finally & Forever by Robin Jones Gunn

Author:Robin Jones Gunn [Gunn, Robin Jones]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2012-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

12

The first hour and a half of the journey, it didn’t matter who Katie was sitting beside. All her interaction was with the beautiful scenery in the Kenyan highlands. She had her window open and kept the camera on her phone busy.

The town they drove through was packed with people on foot. The car was slowed down on the narrow road when they got stuck behind a local man on his way to market. He and his harvest of what looked like sweet potatoes were on a cart made of flat wood planks that was hitched to a skinny donkey. The man stood on the cart with his legs apart and his hands gripping a length of frayed rope. It seemed to Katie as if they were watching an extra in a movie about the Middle Ages. Nothing here had changed in hundreds of years.

Nevertheless, the shops that lined the main street of town showed evidence of the influence of Christianity on Africa over the past half century as well as the technology of the twenty-first century. Most of the shops had their names painted somewhere out front, and most of the names hinted at some sort of biblical reference. Katie saw the Guardian Angel Beauty Shop, the Alleluia Grocers, the Holy Ghost Laundry, and the Shekinah Glory Mobile Phone Store.

The Shekinah Glory Mobile Phone Store had a bright logo for the cell phone service provider painted across the entire side of the building, and they had a line of people waiting to get in.

“Are they having a sale?” Katie asked.

“Probably not.” Eli’s dad glanced to the side of the road and kept driving.

“Then why are so many people at the cell phone store?”

“Nearly everyone in Africa has a cell phone,” Cheryl said.

That surprised Katie.

Jim added, “The number of people here who have computers or even laptops is very low. More Africans use mobile phones per unit than any country in the world.”

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“In other words,” Cheryl explained, “an East African village might have one hundred twenty people living in huts and have a generator to produce limited electricity. They have no televisions or computers. But they have a mobile phone.”

Katie wondered if things were more advanced in the villages than she had assumed. She never pictured cell phones in any of her mental images of life in Kenya’s remote regions.

“It doesn’t mean the cell phone service is always reliable,” Eli added.

“A lot more things here make sense than you think at first glance,” Jim said. “People are quick to adapt. Kenya has moved ahead of most African countries with their school program, for instance. The government pays for eight years of school for children and includes lunch. In many rural areas the parents send their children to school so they will be fed that day. In the past they kept them home from school so they could work in the fields. This started in 2003 and has been quite successful.”

“I have noticed lots of children walking along the road.

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