Safely Home

Today our team arrived safely in Madison at 5:30pm Central Time (1:30am Nairobi time). Thus concluded our 40 hour journey that began around midnight Central time on Sunday. We began with a 5 hour drive along pot hole ridden roads from the Masai Mara National Park (where we enjoyed a safari) to Nairobi. Following showers, packing and dinner in Nairobi, we headed to the airport for our flight home. After our 9 hour flight to London, we connected to an 8 hour flight to Chicago which landed safely around 2pm Central time (10pm Nairobi time). Our last leg was a short 2 hour bus ride from Ohare to Madison. As we pulled into the parking lot at Blackhawk, it felt quite good to be back home. Thank you for all of your prayers and support. We will update this blog over the next few weeks with more stories and pictures.

James

Updated Pictures

Hello Everyone,
Holly and I arrived home safely last night and as I write this the rest of the team should be in transit. They will be arriving home tomorrow evening.

I mainly just want to let you know that I've added several pictures into the various postings on our team blog. Hopefully these will help you to put images with the words that are already there. If you have a chance, go back through and take a look!

Joel

Nearing the End

Well, the trip is drawing to a close. The last few days have seen some difficult times and some wonderful times together as a team.

First the difficult: Kibera. I'm not going to attempt to sum up our experience in Kibera, as I feel that would be saying too little about the personalities represented on our team. Future blogs will hopefully involve team members offering their take on Eastern Africa's largest slum.

But I will say this from my perspective: I spent the last year trying to forget Kibera. Not actively, mind you, but in subconscious ways I had created walls that forced those images out of my brain. So to see it again and spend a short afternoon there brought back a wave of emotions and feelings that hadn't surfaced in a while. There was also a marked poignancy to reliving the experience through fellow team members' eyes who were seeing it for the first time. Much of it was surreal.

There aren't words to describe places like Kibera. Even if I could manage to convey a picture of that place, it wouldn't suffice. How do you capture a smell--thick, nauseating, and inescapable--on a computer screen? (If you have time and want a better idea of what Kibera is like, check out the first part of this article that Dave shared with the team: http://www.economist.com/surveys/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=9070714) We sing songs about a God whose love and faithfulness and justice flow to every part of this earth, but I think many (ourselves included) leave that place wondering if God is really present there.

In an effort to keep this post to a reasonable length, let me just say: The key is not to look for God in the location. Sometimes we see God in the grandeur of the mountains and the beauty of the oceans, but miss him when it comes to sewage strewn alleyways through densely-packed mud shacks. But God is unmistakeably present in the people of Kibera (as Katelyn so eloquently put it after the experience). If we miss God in a place like Kibera, then we've lost sight of his connection with the "least of these."

Now the wonderful: Our team has just spent Wednesday evening and all of Thursday together processing what we have experienced here in Kenya. This has been a rich time of being alone with God, then coming together to share how this journey has shaped each of us. And the stories abound! The culmination of these days together was a time of worship and then affirmation of each other that really solidified the bonds that we had formed over the last 2 weeks. God really has brought this team together in an incredible way and this fact was very evident as we celebrated what He had done through each person. And we capped it off by joining Anthony and Jurim (our drivers) and Brian and Debbie (Jane and Ken's children) for a great night of eating and fellowship together at "The Moonflower." It was a wonderful night.

As I write, the team has likely arrived at their Safari destination in the Masai Mara, and Holly and I are hanging out at a cyber cafe as we wait for our flight to leave this evening. We will be home in around 30 hours...

The team may have a chance to blog again on Sunday before they depart, but in the meantime, thanks again for following along with us!

Joel and Holly

Earthquakes?

Don't be alarmed, we are all accounted for! Many of the team members experienced their first ever earthquakes yesterday, although we only really felt one of them. The quakes happened in Tanzania and were felt here in Nairobi as well. We were driving when the first 2 happened, so we would not have felt them enough to distinguish them from the potholes in the road. In fact we had no idea that it had happened. However, last night during our team time together the room started shaking a bit and we all realized that this was some kind of tremor or earthquake. The whole thing lasted around 10 seconds. It turns out that this morning's paper reported around a 5.0 earthquake in this area. I don't know of any major structural damage or injury that happened in Nairobi itself, but the epicenter was in Tanzania, just across the border.

So, a pretty interesting experience, but in case you are hearing it and worrying about us, we are all just fine.

This post will likely serve as our last before we arrive at home. Holly and I will be arriving in Madison on Saturday night, and the rest of the team will arrive on Monday night. But internet access will be sparse until we land.

So for now, thanks for following along, and look for more postings (with pictures!) as we return. Thanks for all of your support and prayers!

Joel (for the team)

Joyful Worship

This is also a catch-up blog and was written on Wednesday night! Since arriving in Kenya, we’ve participated in incredibly joyful worship at the Nairobi Chapel Sunday morning service, Beacon of Hope morning worship and Bissil Tuesday night worship; I hope the sounds of the women’s voices at Beacon of Hope and the images of the men’s dances at Bissil stay with me forever. On Tuesday morning, the message shared with us at the Beacon of Hope was especially poignant. I was reminded of how universal God’s words are across thousands of years or thousands of miles and although the burden facing the women at Beacon of Hope can be beyond words; I’ve never heard God’s promise of hope loader than I heard here. We’ve truly been blessed to participate in God’s plan at Beacon of Hope.

Linda

Catch-Up Blogging

Dear friends and family,

I've been elected to write the team's first "catch-up blog". The last couple of days have been pretty hectic for us, and with today's time for R&R&R (rest and relaxation and reflection), I will try to fill all of our supporters in on what we've been up to.

On Thursday we found ourselves still recovering from our first attempt at a medical camp in Bissil the day before. We were all pretty drained physically and emotionally, so we slept in and started the day at Beacon's new site in the mid-morning. We had planned on spending the day preparing for Saturday's huge medical camp (the first official function at Beacon's new site!). However, when we arrived, we were instantly greeted by a missionary and four of her helpers from Elmbrook Church in Milwaukee! The five of them have been traveling to different sites in Kenya, hosting sports camps for kids. We instantly joined forces and put together a great day full of genuine smiles from the kids (and adults!) as they went through four different courses: playing with a huge parachute, rolling a gigantic blow-up ball, navigating an obstacle course, and challenging Joel in soccer. At one point, one of our team members observed that most of the children had never seen grass before, and now they were playing drip-drip-drop (much like duck-duck-goose) in Beacon's huge, grassy backyard.

On Friday, we dedicated our time to medical camp preparation. We again sorted medications and poured cough syrup for hours, and again we were blessed by great conversations that blanketed our mundane tasks. That afternoon, 7 of our team members went on our first home visit in the Kware slum. We met a woman who had only disclosed her HIV-positive status to her mother, and her mother had sought out Beacon to help them work through her daughter's diagnosis. We arrived at the home they shared and were instantly blown away by how welcoming they were - both women greeted us as if we were their closest friends. Even when we explained why were there and that we had been informed of her HIV status, the woman was still very gracious and allowed us not only into her home but also into her greatest point of vulnerability. We told her about all of the opportunities Beacon provides for HIV-affected and/or infected women, and also about the medical camp we'd be hosting the next day...

...And Saturday, we arrived at Beacon early to meet the other 85+ volunteers for the medical camp. The day was filled with great opportunities to serve the Rongai community. Lots of us learned how to direct foot traffic in Kswahili (co-cha is "come" or "follow me"), and at the warmest part of the day several team members helped by offering cups of cold, clean water to the patients in the waiting areas.

We came back to Gracia last night and had some time to process our day and our trip so far as a team. Many of us feel like we are dealing with sensory overload, and processing what we get to see every day is just too daunting. At lunch today we talked about our innate desire to record everything, to capture memories before they fade, to journal and so on, just in hopes of remembering what we've experienced. But for a lot of us, finding the words to explain the last week has not come with any sort of facility. I think we will be ruminating over our Kenya trip even still when we get back to the states, and probably in some sense for the rest of our lives.

One song that we've sang in several team times seems to be closest to sufficient for starting to articulate our Kenyan experience so far:

"I have been blessed...now I'm gonna be a blessing
I have been loved...now I'm gonna bring love

I've been invited...gonna share the invitation
I have been changed...to bring change, to bring change."

Thanks again for all of your support and prayers.

~Mandy

Making Friends

One of the best things for me in Kenya has been talking with many of the people whom we have met here. We are learning so much. The staff at Beacon of Hope have been incredibly open with us, allowing us to ask any question and sharing about their lives, their communities, and Kenyan culture. One of the girls that we have been able to get to know the best is Loretta, a young mom who volunteers at Beacon. Loretta joined us for lunch today, and we were able to find out a lot about her life and her view of the world. It is so cool to travel around the world and to find people who love God and love people. We are excited to have the opportunity to visit her house next week and to encourage her as she has encouraged us.

Paula