Watson & David

Watson: For you specifically, I want to get a sense of how that transition was.

You said you were very successful as a wedding photographer. I know for me, I only do photography as a hobby, but I get that feeling of joy when I get the perfect picture, and edit it, and I’ve given a few people some of my productions, and I’m so happy.

And to go from that, where that doesn’t directly translate.

For Arianna, her medicine translates directly.

But you, there was a time of trying to fit into this huge jigsaw puzzle that is Kijabe, there was a lot of faith and trusting in God, how was that like? How did you end up where you are and in what you are doing.

David: Wow, you are so good at this, that is a great question.

For me, photography was not an end, it was a means to an end.

I love creating things, I love exploring, and doing things that I’ve never done before. That’s the part of photography I loved, creating something out of nothing. This was not here before, and now it is, you’re bringing something new into the world. That was the part I enjoyed most about photography.

That definitely translates into the work I do with Friends of Kijabe now. There is not a definite map, a definite script.

There are concepts.

Watson: Like a framework.

David: There is a framework, that’s a good way to phrase it. There is a framework for my job, it’s very people-focused, it’s relationship-focused, a big part that I enjoy is it is creativity-focused.

How do I call people into the work that is happening here, how to I let them feel engaged with that, how do I give them something that resonates with their hearts?

It’s really interesting and challenging.

Most days, I wake up and what I do during the day, I did not know existed when I woke up.

An email comes through and there is a new challenge or problem to solve, that aspect is really fun.

But finding that place was a challenge.

What realistically happened is, I never found it on my own. When Ann Mara - she had been working to start Friends of Kijabe for several years - when she and Mike were transitioning to Ireland, she said “Hey, here’s this thing, can you make something of it?”

And my answer was, “I have no idea.” (Laughter)

But I called Arianna’s uncle, John Richter, and he was the exact right person.

He said, “Let me go down the hall and talk to my friend.”

And six weeks later Friends of Kijabe existed, and the next question became, now what do we do with it?

Watson: Now we have a non-profit.

David: A little bit like photography, it is a season, in the back of my mind, I’m always aware of that.

How do I build something where I’m both completely in the center of it, outside of me.

Watson: Self sustaining.

David: It (Friends of Kijabe) won’t ever be self-sustaining in the sense where it can run on its own, but how do I give other people the tools where they can carry it. It’s a really fun, interesting challenge.

Watson: I see.

I like how you started by saying you were somehow able to boil down to the core reason of why you like photography so much.

Once you said that statement, it clicked in my head that as a creator, a content creator or as a creative, you definitely had a place to plug in. Even if it didn’t exist before, or it wasn’t clear in the beginning. It’s something that God worked behind the scenes, to get Ann Mara to approach you, and then you had the exact right person to call, and the exact right processes that went through, and Friends of Kijabe is now existing and is functioning in such a way.

Sometimes I look at the beginnings of something like this, and then I imagine ten years down the line how those people will be looking back and wondering, “How did this begin. How did they go through the initial teething problems? And how did they get the first tens and hundreds, and millions?” because I believe it will be millions.

David: It really is interesting and that journey. . .

I feel like, at least in our family, there are two kinds of people, the Arianna’s and the David’s

And Arianna is the one who knew, from the time she was 5 years old that she wanted to be a doctor in Africa. Intellectually she had no idea what that meant, but she literally wrote down on paper, “I’m going to Africa.”

For me it was the total opposite, where I’ll wake up and not know exactly where I want to go during a day. So, we balance each other out very well in that sense.

That leading, and continual doors opening, and the orchestration. . .

You hear people sometimes talk about God’s tapestry, like weaving of a tapestry.

That is so unbelievably evident in my life. I can look back and say, Wow!

This led to that, this led to that, this led to that.

It’s nothing I would have imagined 15, 20 years ago, that I would be in these places. But it’s amazing, it’s really good.

Watson: For a creative like you, whose 9-5 is creating content, and you find out in the morning what you need to do that day, how do you keep on top of your to-do list? How do you stay productive?

David: The biggest challenge is being productive in the right direction.

And even with work there are lot of things like that, there are things that take a lot of time that don’t yield results and there are some that are simple that are the most important. Trying to remember to make the most important thing the most important, that’s the biggest deal.

Watson: Prioritizing your tasks, and like you said, it’s an 80-20 principle. 20% of your work is what ends up achieving 80% of your outcomes.

Now, at the beginning of your week, Monday through Friday or for you, Monday through Monday. How does your day look like, how does your week look like? How do you project and know I’ll spend these days doing this project and these days doing another project?

David: I do like the way you phrased that, because that’s the way I view my work, project by project. Even making a podcast or doing my emails, I still see those as an individual thing.

Sometimes I can spend 8, 10, 12 hours on one email, putting it together. That’s not phrased exactly right, that’s not phrased right. I need better picture, I need another story. It can take significant time to put those together.

The best weeks for me are the weeks where I start out and I have nothing planed. Or maybe only one or two things, so when interesting things come up I can pursue them.

I’m not a naturally organized person. I don’t know if you’ve met Ree’L, but she and her husband Jason moved to Kijabe a few months ago. She’s super-super organized, loves spreadsheets, and she’s been helping me with the hardest part of my work, which is accounting.

I can do it, but it’s just not my skill set. I’m glad I worked on it for the last year-and-a-half because I understand what’s happening. But to have somebody else who loves that to say hey, “here’s my numbers, let’s look at and discuss it.” Being able to hand off things that are life-draining, offloading some of those things, that’s been really helpful.

I’ve done that to Salome also.

One of the temptations for me is to be in the hospital, doing things that don’t move Friends of Kijabe forward. Not that they’re not important, but do they have strategic purpose. Are they moving us toward big goals?

Watson: Are they high-yield?

David: Exactly.

One of the things that has changed for me is because of John Richter, our board chair, our board guys and Ken Muma – sitting together and saying, “What is the purpose of Friends of Kijabe?”

And we decided I should be doing the one biggest thing that there is.

This year we decided that is fundraising for operating theatres. So instead of me having 27 jobs and trying to juggle all of them, I have one job and then multiple ways to accomplish that.

That has been unbelievably freeing, because when someone comes up to me in the hallway and says, “Can you come up with money for this little thing,” I can say, “no that’s not my job this year.”

Not that it’s not important, if I can, I’ll try to help them think about how to succeed. But I’ll try not to take it on to myself as my responsibility.

My responsibility is, “What does the Director General say, what does my Board Chair say?”

Watson: I think it’s really important for creatives to have clarity about the big picture and the big goal so that you don’t end up getting lost in your own mind. You can have so many ideas and so many projects that you begin and reach half-way and another great idea comes in and you want to start.

But the really big goal reigns you in, but gives you more freedom do really dive deep, to your heart’s content.

David: That is a fantastic way to phrase it.

It’s been really fun, and a big mental shift for me.

Arianna’s family - I keep mentioning them, but they are all amazing - I was talking to her aunt a little while ago, and she said, “When you’re really going to see success is when you get crystal-clear about your message and the change you are making.” I feel like I’m on the verge of that, it’s in my head but I don’t fully know how to articulate it. But keeping the main thing the main thing is a part of that.

We’re 103 years into Kijabe, and what does it take to make another hundred years possible? What steps do we have to do today to get to forever?

Kijabe Forever, how do we get there?

The answer to that a lot of times is not another blood pressure cuff.

Really, it’s getting people to work as a team on the most important things, then moving to the next most important thing.

Ken Muma said, “David, why are you fundraising for that over there?”

“Well, because it’s a need.”

“Yeah, of course it’s a need, there are so many needs. But if you do this one big thing, it can do many. It can fund, maybe not all the things, but thirty of them instead of one need.”

That’s the difference between meeting needs and actually being strategic.

Watson: I see, it’s like synergism. When you pool all your energies together, they multiply, don’t just add up, they multiply on top of each other, and you have a bigger impact together than alone.

Wow, that must have been a really interesting meeting.

David: That’s the big change that I hope will continue in the coming years. That’s why we’re doing work as a hospital on culture change. To get people to view each other as part of a team, working together, for the good of everybody. It takes a lot of time and a lot of repetition, a lot of meetings, but it’s really, really valuable. It’s fun to watch happen, and fun in my little way, to be a part of it.

Watson: You mentioned doing stories, and the accounting part of your job. As far as what you were given from the DG, are there several ways of meeting that goal as a department or Friends of Kijabe, under which you can have little projects?

Like stories, part of that is podcasts, photos, and something else. Do they all fall under something big, like a main three or four?

David: The core of it is how to build a team, a wide, diverse team who is very engaged.

I’ve thought a lot about different stakeholders this year, there’s expat missionary doctors, Kenyan missionary doctors, partner organizations like Samaritan’s Purse and Bethany Kids, our Friends of Kijabe board, and donors who have either served as doctors here or are connected to doctors here.

That’s more how I think of it. How do I serve them, how do I give them what they need?

The way I think of it, this is God’s ministry, this is God’s mission in Kijabe. We get to partake in that, we are stewards of it in some sense.

How do I enable people to participate in what God is doing here?

That is the core of my job.

What do I need to give them to be involved, to come along on that journey?

This was a big turning point last year, I read some book, it was terrible, but the title was amazing: Who Do You Want Your Customers to Become?

Instantly, I thought, “Who do I want the people around me to become?”

There are donors, my kids – who do I want my kids to grow up to be?

Who do I want my wife to be, how do I want her to succeed?

Thinking of people not as static, but as we’re all on this journey, and how do we build the journey together, how do we go together?

That was a really powerful image to me.

It’s different for the different groups, but there are a lot of overlaps, but at the core of that is what you said, it’s stories.

The reason we do what we do is because of stories, right? It’s our motivation.

What story do we tell ourselves about the world we live in and our place in it?

From you talking, a big part of your story is the opportunity to help people, to make communities better, to give people wholeness and life. That’s a really big value to you.

It’s way more valuable to you than money or having a really nice car.

Reinforcing that for people, giving them vocabulary, ways to think about that, ways to speak about that is a gift, it’s a really big gift. Here’s the most important thing that’s happening in the world, this is a significant part of God’s work. Both, “here’s how you can be a part of it,” and “wow, you are a part of it, look at what that means, look at the significance of it.”

For another doctor listening to you talk, they realize, “oh, this is why I went into medicine.” It’s a reminder that this is what the essence of following Jesus is all about. And we have to constantly be reminded of those things.

Watson: That’s true, that’s true. I like that approach. Stories. The stories we tell ourselves affirm and confirm our reasons for doing the things we do. And hearing it come from someone else reminds you of why you started and why you are going on.

I do envy you, it’s an amazing job you do.

David: But you’re a part of it, that’s the big thing. It’s not me alone. That’s the fun part of it now, being able to connect people like you to some who you will meet and others you may never meet this side of heaven. But that you can still somehow have an impact on their lives, I think that’s phenomenal.

Watson: Have you talked to the neurosurgeon, Dr. Kim? I got to hear behind the scenes how Kijabe hospital is able to over a 1.2 million shilling surgery at 100,000, surgeries in Nairobi that cost ten times what they do in Kijabe.

How much he has given of his time, resources, mobilizing friends and mission agencies. Those stories remind me of why I fell in love with Kijabe, and why I want to stay. They give me drive to do more, achieve more and be more. People are doing it and it’s possible.

You know every one person who is helped, that’s a family who is represented, that’s a community, a village, an estate. It spreads out.

All the negativity in the world, in the country. I like to think of myself as a focal point of good. Like in the perspective of God knows if Watson is there, something good is going to happen there. I don’t need to send legions of angels, I just put that guy there, and I know he’s going to change the area. And I put this other person there and this other person there. And the country will change because it’s beginning in those points.

David: One of the next people I want to talk with is Ima Barasa. She said when she talks to Interns, it is in terms of light and dark. We did this today, this is light. We beat the darkness with this specific action, it was a victory for the light.

Watson: I was listening to an audiobook recently called Atomic Habits. He says every action we do is like we are casting a vote. You want to have as many votes as possible for your good habits and few as possible for your bad habits. Imagine every time you do something you are in a polling booth casting a vote.

If every time I’m doing something for a patient, I do my best. If I’m called at three in the morning, I wake up, I take the call, I give my advice, I do what I am supposed to. I am casting a vote to the good. Eventually we’ll have enough votes to turn the tide.

If we lose, we lose by the one vote I didn’t cast. If we win, we win by the vote I did cast.

David: I like that, turning the tide.

It’s an interesting aspect of being in Kijabe and Kenya right now. In your lifetime, it’s gone from a mostly impoverished nation to now a developing nation and it’s on this upward trajectory.

These decisions you’re making and these things that you’re doing have not necessarily been done here before. There is a template and a road map for them, they have been done in other hospitals in other countries. But it’s the first time it’s been done in Kijabe.

These little steps you take will influence far, far downstream.

When you talk about, “how do we set up the 24-hour trauma service?” It’s never been done here before. You know it can be done, but you get to be the first to do it.

Watson: I don’t want to hold out, to be negative for the many months It has not yet happen. But instead I want to contribute to the push to make it happen.

Another example he gives, if there is a block of ice on the table and it’s 15 degrees, then the temperature starts to rise, but the moment it goes from 28-29 and you begin to see it melt, it’s not the one degree change that melted the ice, but the increment of all the small changes.

Every day I go to work, we talk about it, we engage people about an improvement in theatre, the time when it happens the atmosphere will be right, everyone will be ripened. And it will be all the more successful because of the small gains we’ve that been getting all this time. Improving efficiency, training the scrub techs so that the ones at night are just as good as during the day, the equipment at night is just as good as during the day.

David: I like that. I had this moment over the summer, we were in the woods camping by the river. There had been a rainstorm, and there was this one drop on at tree. And I’m picturing that falling to the ground and then making its way to the river and where it joins all these other drops. It’s this huge river, but it’s really one drop plus one drop plus one drop, and all moving in this direction together.

Watson: And all together they are so powerful

David: That’s the beautiful thing about Kijabe, there are so many people actively doing that.

We do fight, there are differences, usually not of whether something is good or not good, but differences of priority.

Watson: It’s more trying to, as you said, but it’s never “you shouldn’t even be doing that.” It is different angles heading forward.

David: Thank you Watson!