Brooke Collison

We are one day away from departure. That means the final stages of packing, unpacking, repacking, unpacking again, shifting, discarding, sorting, and squeezing in have about run their course. My 30 pounds of books has become 20 pounds. I look at the ten pound discard stack on the floor of my office and wonder if I shouldn’t pull one out of a suitcase and slip a replacement in. Nope. I’ll stick with my last set of choices.

An interesting email came from Kenya last week--a request to teach a short course on palliative counseling. The topic is interesting to me, I have some experience in that area, and I was pleased to think about a course which would have personal meaning for me as well as have critical importance for future (or current) practitioners. The only hitch--the five-day short course would begin just two days (or less) after stepping off the plane! I said, "Yes."

In sixteen days my wife and I will board the first of three planes for a very long trip to Nairobi, Kenya. We will meet the chair of the Counseling Department at the airport and hope to find a good night’s rest before making the four-hour drive to Kenya Methodist University the following day. I don’t anticipate being in good thinking shape after 25 hours of flight from Portland, Oregon to Newark, to Zurich, to Nairobi, so I’m trying to have a good framework in mind for one of the courses I will teach—Human Growth and Development.

In a few weeks, my wife and I will travel from our Oregon home to Meru, Kenya, where I will be a visiting faculty member at Kenya Methodist University (KeMU) during the September trimester. A clergy friend who has been taking volunteer groups to Kenya for several years made a suggestion to my spouse, Joan, that, “Brooke ought to volunteer at the Methodist University in Meru.”