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The Bainbridge Rotary Club met for their weekly meeting at the Kirbo Center on Tuesday. The guest speaker of the day was Christian author Kemala Tribe, a Bainbridge native who has lived and travelled abroad for years, and has now returned to the Southeast.

Tribe first spoke about her travels with her husband Kevin, who worked as ship’s officer. “Eventually my bad boy biker husband became captain of the biggest, newest, highest-tech drill ship,” she said. “Because Kevin was a ship’s captain… I got to travel a lot.” Some of the places the pair visited included Singapore, South Africa at the end of Apartheid, and even Punta Arenas, Chile, during the middle of the Falkland War. Their ship left Chile by way of the Strait of Magellan. “It was just majestic. I don’t think I’ve seen a landscape like that anywhere in the world, just craggy, craggy cliffs with matching islands,” she said, “and you would have to stop in a little cove or inlet… you had to wait for the tides or currents to shift before you could go through some of the passages.” According to Tribe, their boat also purchased several large bags of crab from a Chilean fishing boat along the trip. “So for weeks, sailing up the coast of South America, Kevin and I, when he got off watch at 1600 hours, we’d sit on the deck, watch the sun set, eat crab that the cook had picked for us, drinking Chilean wine,” she said. “That’s what going to sea should be, and it’s not anymore! I’m glad I got to experience it, that’s what Kevin promised me.”

Tribe then went into her journey to a religious writer. “Even with all that, when the adventure really started, was when we rededicated our lives to Christ,” she said. “Life has been wild ever since then.” According to Tribe, she and her husband had disagreement over what church to join, with her being raised Baptist and Kevin being Pentecostal. “For years Kevin and I just fought about where to go to church and never went, but once we rededicated our lives, then we were serious about finding a church home, and that was a challenge,” she said. “That conflict between those colliding denominations just reinforced my determination to find out from God, what His opinion is, because it’s the only one that matters.”

Tribe cited her search for the truth of God’s word as an influence in her decision to write. “I don’t care if you got saved five minutes ago, or if you’re a pastor with a huge congregation, been in the pulpit for decades. None of us knows it all, and none of us has it all right. How could we, God is infinite,” she said. “That’s why I write.”