The Call - New York Times 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. Skip to next paragraph Jackie Nickerson for The New York Times The Messengers: The Mapleses with Rikinoi, a family friend, in Kenya. Should missionaries in Africa be trying to convert tribal peoples? 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. Rick, his wife, Carrie, and their two daughters, Meghan and Stephanie, moved to this mission outpost in September 2004. Once, their home was in Danville, Calif., an affluent suburb about 30 miles outside San Francisco. Their house "cost a pile," Rick told me, remembering what he termed "my other life," and Carrie recalled the sunken Jacuzzi and the high ceilings and the curved staircase that they draped with garlands at Christmastime. Rick, who is 43 and whose thick, gray crew cut and slightly round cheeks give him an air of constant buoyancy, was a salesman for a company that marketed combustion engines. Carrie, three years younger, with an angular face and a quieter voice that suggest a different, more private kind of resilience, was a nurse who spent most of her career working with pediatric cancer patients. "We were really happy with our life," he said. We saw about 25 years ahead, and we were happy with what we saw. We were talking at the dining table in their mission house, down the path from the church. Both house and church were built by the American missionaries whom the Mapleses have replaced. Shabby but serviceable, the small cinder-block house has running water from a tank that is mounted - along with the church bell - on a metal tower in the front yard. The refrigerator operates on kerosene. In California, the house might belong in a slum; here it is luxurious. It sits just outside Kurungu, a town in name only, near the edge of the desert, much closer to the Ethiopian border than to Kenya's capital, Nairobi, which is a 12-to-14-hour drive away, mostly on dirt roads. Kurungu's three or four shops, dim stalls of dusty shelves, rarely sell more than lard and tea leaves, sugar and salt. The local tribe, the Samburu, are seminomadic herders of cattle and camels and goats. Scattered throughout the valley and surrounding mountains, they live in manyattas, settlements of huts, about four feet tall at the high points of their sloping roofs, covered in thatch and animal skins. A good portion of the Samburu diet - perhaps most of it - consists of milk and cow's blood, blood drained by cinching a rope tourniquet around the base of the cow's neck, then shooting an arrow into the side of the neck (without killing the animal) and letting the dark liquid spurt into a wooden tankard. Much of Africa, and certainly much of Kenya, one of the continent's most Westernized countries, hold a mix of the modern and the timeless. But around Kurungu, the modern seems to have barely penetrated. Their wooden bells clacking softly in the still air, the herds graze, tended by the Samburu, whose bodies are draped in wraps of brilliant cloth, whose necks and foreheads are resplendent in beads and burnished metal, whose hair is dyed with red ocher. Daniel Bergner, a contributing writer, is the author of "In the Land of Magic Soldiers: A Story of White and Black in West Africa." His last cover article for the magazine was about the private military in Iraq.