The Call

The New York Times Magazine

By DANIEL BERGNER

Published: January 29, 2006

The mission church is scarcely more than a shed with open sides. Rusty beams support a roof of corrugated metal, and a wooden lectern, unadorned, serves as the pulpit. No cross rises from the roof or hangs behind the lectern on the blue-painted cement wall; there is no cross anywhere. The house of worship is almost nothing. But it is too much for the missionary Rick Maples. "I want this to be the last church," he said. "This should be the last church built in this section of the valley."

Mehgan Maples, 12, at first adapted well to the life of the missionary but has lately struggled with yet another new language, witnessing a female circumcision and making friends. With needles nearly bone white, scrub borders the patch of cleared ground - of coarse sand - that surrounds the church. Cactuses, shoulder-high, grow beside spindly bushes throughout the valley, and the vines and stunted trees are studded with thorns. It is a place, this desiccated land in northern Kenya, where living requires severe tenacity. But it is also a valley of abundance. The country's famous game parks are far to the south, yet here miniature antelope leap over the scrub and monkeys idle at the edge of the Mapleses' backyard. A pair of leopards pranced across the yard one evening last year. At the top of the sporadic acacia trees, whose upper branches form a broad, flat, wispy canopy that looks too delicate to support anything heavier than birds, families of baboons move about, feeding on tiny buds. They seem to float on the flimsy treetops.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/magazine/29missionaries.html