Ok, so I haven’t posted any blogs from this month. They’ve all been about Uganda in February. But I’m here to update you.
For the month of March, our team was sent back to Eldoret, Kenya to work with our same contact Patrick. We were here in January and helped plant a church. but had to leave the day of the first service. The World Race has never sent a team back to the same contact before so this was a really unique opportunity for us. We got to hit the ground running when we got here because we already had established relationships and knew how everything worked and where everything in town was. There was no “get to know you” phase that we had to go through.
Being on the race, I’m constantly moving around and you give up the right to have any kind of home or permanent establishment. Its tough to even culture shock because you’re never in one place long enough to get sick of it or have a really tough time. Well, for the most part anyways. Our first month in Kenya was the longest month on the race so far and we stayed in one place the whole time. March has now become the longest month because we arrived back in Kenya at the end of February. So basically, on the race, there is no “home” or sense of permanency. But when we got back to Eldoret, it was like coming home. Eldoret has been the closest thing we’ve had to a home this whole time. I was a little disappointed to not be going to Tanzania with all the other teams, but we were coming back “home” in a sense, and that was really nice.
March has been much different than January though. Last time we did alot of open air ministry and “crusades” as they call them out here. This time around we have been doing lots of door to door visits, praying for people and inviting people to church. Several people have come to Christ and its been amazing. We’ve been helping run the church services by leading worship and preaching. A few of my teammates have taken on a street kid ministry and its really incredible. Visit http://joebunting.theworldrace.org to hear in more detail what is being done to help these glue sniffing street kids.
I had my birthday at the beginning of the month and that was really fun. One of my teammates dressed up like the Green Power Ranger and recruited me into his superhero league. Keeping with the theatricals, I jumped out of bed with a super kick and we pretended to fight bad guys all the way to the breakfast house. Upon arriving I was handed a steaming cup of coffee with just enough milk and sugar – it was perfect. Then we had breakfast pizzas and somehow my teammates found strawberries out here. It was delicious and wonderful! My birthday cake had a Canadian flag made out of strawberries on it. They had to tell me what it was though, cause it was kind of mutilated. It was hilarious.
About halfway through the month I started not feeling very good. It wasn’t really bad, but a few of my teammates had malaria so I thought I’d rather be safe than sorry and get tested. My blood came up clean but the doctor said that my malerone anti-malaria medicine could be masking it. He said I had the symptoms and thought I had it, despite the blood test and gave me the healing medication. I started to feel better after a few days. So maybe I did have it. But I’m just going to say I didn’t.
So thats a bit of what life in Kenya has looked like this month.
