Back to Africa, thanks to anonymous

I have had numerous readers and friends in the community ask me about my next foreign mission trip.

As regular readers know, I went to Nicaragua in 2003 and to Kenya in 2004 and 2005.

Since I returned from Kenya last August, my stock answer has been that, although I want very much to go back to Africa, it was a little harder to raise funds in 2005 and I felt like I needed to give my friends and supporters a year off.

My stock answer changed at about 10:15 Monday night, when I got an e-mail from Gail Drake.

Gail is the co-founder, with the Rev. Debra Snellen, of LEAMIS International Ministries, the non-denominational group with which I've taken my foreign trips. I've known Gail for longer than that, however, because she used to work for Mountain T.O.P., a domestic missions group for which I'm a board member. I had told her several months ago that I would not be able to make the Kenya trip, and why.

Monday night, out of nowhere, Gail e-mailed me to say that an anonymous donor had offered to cover the entire cost of my trip, both the amount that LEAMIS uses to fund the logistics of the trip and the air fare. Between those two figures, this is a contribution somewhere in the range of $3,500 or more depending on what the air fare does.

I'd been thinking about the trip quite a bit this past week. PBS ran an outstanding documentary on malaria the other night, much of it shot in Kenya, and the village featured in many of the scenes looked an awful lot like Ndonyo, where we worked last year. On Monday afternoon, while driving to Nashville to cover a conference, I was thinking about the trip and had decided I would write a novel about a man who takes a short-term mission trip, borrowing from my experience and yet fictionalizing the characters and situations.

The novel is on hold now; I may play around with it some but I'll probably wait until after I return in August and have some more experiences.

I think sometimes we can be careless and self-serving when we attribute this event or that one to God's intervention. But sometimes God's handiwork is so obvious that you have to recognize it. It's been amazing how God has provided for my mission trips over the past few years. My first contribution for the Nicaragua trip was $100 from an online acquaintance whom I knew only through a computer game. I didn't even know her real name until the check arrived in the mail. Last year, when I learned how to make soap in preparation for teaching a cottage industry workshop on the trip, a woman on a soapmaking Internet message board offered to send me two brand new stainless steel stock pots, which I left with the church in Ndonyo to help them get started. I've gotten other unexpected contributions for all three of my past trips.

But nothing compares with this thunderbolt. God is amazing.

Because of my foreign trips and changes in programming, I haven't been to Mountain T.O.P. as a camper the past two summers. I had been planning on doing two weeks of Mountain T.O.P. this summer; I will still get to do one of them, the one in July to which I'm taking several members from my church.

And then, in August, I'm going back to Africa.

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Speaking of Kenya trips, Wilbert Nelson now has a Web page established for his project to build wells in Homa Bay, Kenya, not too far from where I was in 2005. The page is at www.homabaywell.com. Please take a look.

John I. Carney is city editor of the Times-Gazette and covers county government and other topics. His home page is lakeneuron.com.