I made it to beautiful Kenya, Africa! We’ve been here about a week and a half now and I wanted to share what I’ve been up to!
We arrived in Kenya on April 2nd and I immediately thought about my first time in Africa, which was a mission trip to Zimbabwe in 2011. That’s where my heart was first opened to overseas missions and here I am back in another beautiful country of Africa!
Our squad spent the first night together at a bible college an hour outside of Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. We set up our tents and slept in the COLD! We haven’t been cold since month one in Guatemala. After months of 100+ heat index, we were very grateful!
The next morning our squad spilt into our teams to travel to our set ministries. My team is paired with another team this month. We are working with a contact one of the other team’s guys worked with as a kid. We began driving through the beautiful countryside, seeing lush green grass, wild zebras, and those “fun African trees”. As we approached the city we kept driving further and further in as the beautiful scenery quickly turned into…the slums. Our ministry is based in the slums of Nairobi. Streets are covered with trash, mud, and more trash. It is currently the rainy season and it makes everything on the ground a sticky mud! The smell is indescribable. There is not a place in the States that even compares where we live this month. People live off of less than $1 a day in tin shacks, AIDS/HIV runs rampant, and a satanic presence lurks around every corner.
Our team is working at a different place than the other team we are staying with. We travel 20-25 minutes by foot through the slum “streets” hopping from muddy rock to dried stepping places praying we wont slip and fall on the disgusting ground. It can be entertaining because kids constantly yell “Mzungu, Mzungu!! How are you??!” (Mzungu is ‘white person’.) I feel like I’m in a parade sometimes as kids excitedly yell to us and try to shake our hands while adults stare or laugh at us trying to make it through the muddy streets slipping every few steps.
We work at that school on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on Saturday mornings we help with a soccer clinic. We help at a local school or maternity clinic on Wednesdays and Fridays. The clinic has 80-100 births a month! We get to watch babies come into the world if we want! (I currently haven’t been over to see one yet, but I will before the month is over.)
Working at the school looks different everyday. We visit classrooms and sing/talk with the students. Sometimes we go and make home visits to see where kids live and talk with their parents and pray for them. On Thursdays a few of us go to a group called “Compassion”. The group is made up of women who have HIV and are basically on their way to dying. They come to this group for bible study and support. To earn a living they make jewelry and sell it, especially to visitors like us who come to volunteer at the ministry.
Next Saturday, April 20, the girls on our teams are putting on a mini women’s conference for teenage girls. Our theme is Identity and we will focus on how they see themselves in Christ. I am so excited because #1- I’ve always been on the receiving end to conferences, never on the planning side. And #2- In Malaysia I really began to have a heart for girls that age and wanting to help them and teach them how to view who they are in Christ and not find their identity in boys, comparison to others, rejection, low self-esteem, and all the junk girls that age are bombarded with. Ah! They are worth so much in God’s eyes and I wish that I personally realized the magnitude of that before the age of twenty-six.
So that’s our time here so far in a nutshell! Thank you for your prayers, because they are much needed and appreciated!!
