Time... and money

Lesley recently shared our observation on the American focus on time, and it seems like just as “a watched kettle doesn’t boil,” such a focus on time never seems to provide enough of it to do some of the finer things you know you ought to do, or you’d even enjoy if you made time.

A departure from that is something I suspected would be different here in Ribe, which I anticipated and hoped for. I longed for the opportunity to begin a new habit of taking time to read before going to bed, and began to do so even before we left the states. I finally finished several of the half a dozen books I was somewhere in the middle of…

Anyway, with this newfound time and habit of reading, I have decided I’d like to read the whole Bible this year – a somewhat daunting task; there are definitely parts I have never read, and perhaps more intimidating by the fact that there exist outlines and plans to follow to accomplish it, so I have put those aside to try to keep it from becoming a “task I must do” and I began with Genesis. [edit: I am now in Exodus and added a Psalm and several Proverbs to my night since I remembered there are so many!]

Reading Genesis [was] good; mostly familiar stories, but a few sections I don’t know well, and passages that I have probably read, but catch my eye in a new way. One of those short passages was Gen. 13:1-2 that states that “Abram went up from Egypt to the Negev, with his wife and everything he had, and Lot went with him. Abram had become very wealthy in livestock and in silver and gold."

This likely caught my eye based on our setting here in Kenya, but for more reasons than you might think! First of all, similar to how “Abram went up from Egypt,” those who have moved to the cities of Mombasa or Nairobi for work frequently travel “up country” (often much further than Tito does when coming home to Ribe) to visit family in their hometowns.

Some "up country" beyond Ribe

More notably in the Bible verses is that, yes, Abram’s wealth in livestock is perhaps most applicable to the villages and small towns around here, and so it stood out to me that God also seems to put an importance on fiscal savings in the details about silver and gold. It is far to early for us to know whether many folks in Ribe are in the position to save much money or if they are pretty much harvest season to the next or even shorter, and we may never really be in a position to determine either way, but I can guarantee they are not on a tight budget because of maxed out lines of credit.

A fascinating development in Kenya is the use of a service called M-PESA that is offered by one of the cell phone and internet providers to store money on your phone for many uses such as pay for products at certain vendors, send money to family and friends, and apparently even pay bills as of recently. I just read an article about M-PESA, and found it interesting how it was actually recognized with a “Changing Lives” award because among other uses, it “was utilized by Concern Worldwide to distribute funds to households in a rural community that was adversely affected by the post-election crisis” last winter.

Yet, even before seeing this article, a friend explained that M-PESA is great not only for the convenience that he’s found it to be, but it has actually provided a means for more Kenyans to save money where they would not have sought out a bank, or even had easy enough access to one. He described that the banks have tried to shut it down with no success and little support from the people, and went on to say that it is a shame that the banks in the U.S. would probably never let something like this even get started.

Well, that is pretty much the basis of why that passage of the Bible jumped out at me with some true life application areas for the people here.