![]() Once, their home was in Danville, Calif., an affluent suburb about 30 miles outside San Francisco. Rick, his wife, Carrie, and their two daughters, Meghan and Stephanie, moved to this mission outpost in September 2004. They seem to float on the flimsy treetops. 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. A pair of leopards pranced across the yard one evening last year. 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. It is a place, this desiccated land in northern Kenya, where living requires severe tenacity. Cactuses, shoulder-high, grow beside spindly bushes throughout the valley, and the vines and stunted trees are studded with thorns. With needles nearly bone white, scrub borders the patch of cleared ground - of coarse sand - that surrounds the church. "This should be the last church built in this section of the valley." "I want this to be the last church," he said. But it is too much for the missionary Rick Maples. No cross rises from the roof or hangs behind the lectern on the blue-painted cement wall there is no cross anywhere. Rusty beams support a roof of corrugated metal, and a wooden lectern, unadorned, serves as the pulpit. ![]() The mission church is scarcely more than a shed with open sides. ![]()
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