Our first ministry contact has been announced!! Team “Mabinti Ya Yesu” (my team of 6 girls and the only all girl team) will be helping the Deliverance Church in Busia, Kenya. I wanted to take the time to explore Busia and share it all with you. This will be my first international home for a month, come August. Busia is a town that lies directly on the Ugandan and Kenyan border, north of Lake Victoria; it is about a 10 hour bus ride from Nairobi, where we will be flying in.
From the NYT’s article “Busia Journal; Where Kenya and Uganda Collide”, “Busia has only one paved street, rutted and lined with scores of teen-age hawkers and beggars and squalid one-story brick hotels, but it is Uganda’s main lifeline to the outside world. Two sets of worn metal gates and a hundred feet of no man’s land separate Kenya and Uganda in this dusty town, which straddles the border. The town has closely reflected relations between the two neighbors, sometimes tense but recently friendly.
In the last decade, the border has occasionally closed down and shots have even been exchanged, but business has never stopped for long… A town of more than 15,000 people, Busia has grown and shrunk as politics have closed and opened the border. It stretches out from the one paved road, with ramshackle huts, mud and cement houses and ubiquitous bicycles. All of the residents make a living from some form of trade associated with the border. Dozens of hotels offer dingy rooms to truck drivers, and clothing shops and restaurants do a brisk business.”
This is an AWESOME photo blog from the same Deliverance Church we are going to in Busia from another team.
