African Brothers and Acclimation

Greetings from Nairobi, Kenya! After a hard 8 days of village visits and area church meetings Danny and I are back in Nairobi and are getting to receive our other two team members (Jacob Vaden and Justin Shulmire) from the airport in a few hours. I am greatly looking forward to having them with us and having the extra boost to our team.

The last few days have been incredibly draining, but well worth it. On Thursday and Friday we finished up our village visits by going to the extreme ends of the Kitale church planting work. We visited the leaders of 7 churches over by the Ugandan border. It was quite a remote place - the kind of place where you go on a dirt road for 30 minutes and then turn down an even more remote dirt road and go another 30 minutes. It was about 3 hours away from Kitale. I've been told that I had a rare opportunity to see the real African Interior. The meeting went well and we were able to encourage the leaders there greatly and reunite them with the other churches in the area. I even got to preach a bit and it went fairly well. I was able to share some encouragement from the Word and they were encouraged.

Friday we went way up to a region called Marakwet which is deep within the Cherangani hills. It was quite the adventure just trying to get there. The road was incredibly rough. It was about 10,000 ft altitude and right next to the equator. We got a little toasty ; ). Despite all of that, it was a beautiful place and we were very encouraged by what God is doing up there. We preached and spoke with the church leaders from the area and were able to encourage them and get them connected with the churches in the valleys below. We also had the privilege of being served tea made with sheep's milk (That's right, not goat... sheep). It's been funny to tell that story because we have yet to meet another African who has ever had milk from sheep. : )

On Saturday and Sunday we had meetings at the children's home all day each day. They were great and some good things happened at each of them, but they definitely drained us of any energy we had left. We had the opportunity to hear the regions best children's choir perform at the school. They were wonderful! I also got to connect with some of the grown orphans at a children's home reunion. I spent some time talking with a guy named Steven who is studying Sociology and Religion at the University of Nairobi. He is the first orphan to make it to a University and is doing so much to inspire the current children living at the home. It was really cool to discuss Church history and theology with someone studying from an African perspective.

This week we are going to help the other two team members start to get acclimated to the culture (a much more daunting task than I originally thought) and then have a few meetings with refugee ministries, UN officials (I will post an update on our refugee friend's situation soon - we are still gathering information on his progress), and other missionary contacts in Nairobi as to gather more information in our summer of listening. Pray for our other team members as they battle jet lag and culture shock. Pray for the three of us students as we continue in our language skills. It is so important that we try our best at Swahili as it is seen as a huge relational step if we can try to converse in it. Also, pray from our meetings this week. Pray that they might be effective and that we will hear from God and the people as we continue to listen.