Milk and Electricity

Milk was the topic of conversation at lunch today.  Jennifer poured big glasses of milk for both kids and for herself and said that we should all enjoy it now because we don’t know how often we’ll be drinking milk over the next couple of weeks.  This was news to the children (who, like many elementary school kids, are used to milk anytime they want!); even though we’ve coached them a lot about food I guess we hadn’t talked much about milk.

My 7 year old wanted to know why we might not have milk – which led to a conversation that the people we’ll be visiting in Africa not only don’t have money to buy milk, but they don’t necessarily have a refrigerator that works.  This was also news.  “Why doesn’t it work?” they asked.  Answer: because in many parts of the world there is not a steady generation of electricity,  and so even if you have a refrigerator it doesn’t make sense to store milk in it, because if you lose power for very long (which happens with some frequency) your milk will spoil and you will have wasted the little money that you have.  All this conversation led my daughter to pray, thanking God for her milk and for the electricity to keep it cold – and also to pray that God will help those children who don’t get cold milk when they need it and those who don’t have steady electricity.

That conversation – and that prayer – is why our whole family is going to Nairobi, and not just the grown-ups.

We leave tomorrow afternoon.

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