The Kenya Experience

^" Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you." - James 1:27

 

Although I really don't like the word "religion" because it makes people think of rules and people like the Pharisees, I thought this quote was good for starting to tell my story of my experience in Kenya. I have had people ask me what we were doing in Kenya, and the basic concept of it all was caring for a group of orphans in Kenya who needed to know that they matter to someone. I think the most surprising part of my whole trip was to learn that even though AIDS is an epidemic taking parents all over the continent, some of their fellow people are treating these orphans as if they have done something to deserve losing their parents. 

As most of you reading this know, I have spent the past several months planning and fundraising and working for my sister, Kim, and I to go on a 10-day mission trip to Kenya. Many of you have helped in some way, whether through donations or through prayer so I wanted to be sure to update everyone on how the trip went since we just returned this past Sunday, Aug. 12. I really hope some of you will be inspired by our story because there is nothing special about me or my sister that allowed us to travel halfway across the world to love on some kids, but there is something special about our God. 

I really don't know how to go about this because this will probably be a long post, however, I feel some people who donated may want to read all about our trip, so I guess I will just write this on a day-by-day basis of my trip. If you want to read all of it, I think that's great. If not, at least this will be a way for me to remember our trip and journal about my feelings of it all. 

Days 1 and 2

So let's start with the travel it took to get there. Wow! I had no idea how difficult it would be to get to this small village in Busia, Kenya. First we got on a plane to London, which was about a 9 hour flight. Here is a photo of Kim and I on one of the planes we took. We were so excited because we had individual TV screens in our seats so we could watch movies. 

Then we had a quick 2 hours in London, which because of it being during the Olympics it was a whirlwind just to get through all the lines and security checks that we were rushing just to get on the next plane to Nairobi, Kenya. 

Our flight left London in the morning, and since it was about an 8 hour flight, it was dark when we were landing in Nairobi. We were so happy to be in Nairobi when we finally got there. It was nearly 18 hours of being in a small tiny airplane seat!! It was just difficult because you couldn't stretch your legs much and it was really hard to sleep.

After we landed we went straight to our hotel in Nairobi called the Grace House. It was nice and we even had internet, so I was able to post the picture below to Facebook. Before I left my 7-year-old son, Jadon, asked me to take one of his special bears with me to keep me company. It is a girl bear named Rocky Fastpaw (he has a great imagination) and he said, "Maybe you can take her with you places and take her picture to show me." So I started taking pictures of Rocky most places we went. Here is our first one at the hotel in Nairobi. 

Day 3

We only got to sleep a few hours that night as we had to be up early to be back at the Nairobi airport I think by 7 a.m. to catch a flight to Kissumu, which would have been a 4-5 hour drive but it only took us less than an hour to fly there. 

 This one was taken just after we landed in Kissumu.

 After we landed in Kissumu we thought we were going to be picked up by van hired by Buckner International, which is the organization in charge of this whole trip. However, we had a little mishap. Apparently, the driver accidentally put diesel fuel in a van that took regular gas. So, we had to wait at the airport for several hours while they emptied and flushed the engine of the van. One thing while we waited though is we got to interact and talk to some of the kids from a local school. They had come out on a field trip to watch the planes take off and land. 

Its funny to look at the photos and see how they are dressed and how cold they look you would think it was winter. On that morning it was cooler than usual for them, which it was probably in the upper 60s. We thought it felt great after coming from 108 degree Texas heat.
 

Here they are watching the planes. 
 

We landed about 9 a.m. and by the time it was lunch time and we were still waiting at the airport, we decided we would all cram in a smaller van they had ready so we could at least go get some lunch.  

Here we are about to go. We were just happy to be leaving the airport finally!

Here we are finally eating lunch. 

So I think it was about 2 or 3 p.m. when the other van was finally ready and we headed to our hotel in Busia, which is kind of the county we would be staying in. I believe the town name was actually Bumala.  So we took off for the 2 hour bus ride to our hotel. That was definitely an interesting experience. The roads are basically made out of dirt, so you can imagine the condition they might be in. Yes, lots of potholes and lots of going back and forth from one side of the road to the next depending on where the holes were. I was so tired and tried to sleep a little, but everytime I started to doze off, we would hit a bump or pothole and my head would bang into the window. Not a great environment for sleeping! 

The Vacation Bible School camp we were doing that week was being put on for kids who are in the Buckner International program in Busia, Kenya. Just to explain a little, Buckner has headquarters out of Dallas. They are a wonderful organization dedicated to helping orphans around the world. You can read more about this group by going to www.buckner.org. Anyway, Buckner accepts kids into their program if both of their parents have passed away. Most of the kids are living with a relative of some sort and receive assistance from Buckner as long as they stay in the program. These kids get wonderful social workers that check in with them and make sure they are doing well in their school and try to address any problems that may come up. 

Buckner has a wonderful worker overseeing their program in Kenya named Beverly, or Bev as we called her. She is the one in the photo of us in the van. She met us at the airport in Nairobi and was with us most of the time until we left for London. She was so wonderful in making sure we had everything we needed, but she was also so caring and wonderful with the children. We need to make sure we are praying for these fantastic workers that Buckner has. 

Rush Creek has been coming to Busia to put on a Vacation Bible School for these kids for 5 years now I believe. So we have a great relationship with the Buckner people and the children. Our group this year had three people who had been previous years, so the kids actually knew them and remembered them. It was so incredible to see these relationships. Anyway, most of these kids already have a relationship with Jesus, so our job was to just to give them the tools they need to develop this relationship even further. We had themes we were teaching, such as God created them for a purpose, God created all things, and God has a plan for their lives. This is so important for them as many of them have fears just of being able to survive their environment. But I will get to that more later. 

We were able to do the Vacation Bible School because the kids were on a school break. So we were supposed to go meet the kids on Saturday afternoon at the school we would be using, however, because of the van issues we got there too late to do that. So everyone was a little bummed that we would have to wait until Sunday to meet them. 

Day 4

Early Sunday morning we headed up to the school to meet the kids. We were orginally supposed to have 50 something kids, but some of the kids actually had testing to do so we ended up with a group of 26 kids. Even though some of the group was disappointed, especially those who had been before because there were some kids they didn't get to see, I think it worked out good because we really had a small group of us so I think it was easier to handle being only 26 of them. 

We pulled up and some of the kids were outside waiting for us. It was such a strange thing because we walked up and were immediately welcomed by these kids who were strangers to most of us. They said "Jambo" which means hello or welcome in Swahili and some of them even gave us hugs as a welcome. All of them had the biggest, warmest smiles I had ever seen. 

After we spent a few minutes with them, we decided to go to a building in the back to have church service with them. Since we brought our talented worship leader Eric Phillips with us, and Stacy Bailey was his wonderful accompanying guitar player for him, we started off with some worship songs from home. 

The kids picked up the songs right away. I guess some of them remembered songs from the last time we were there.

I was really moved though when they decided to sing some of their songs for us. Some of the songs were in Swahili, and some of them were in English. I must say it was quite a moving experience to be sitting in this school room, with faded blue paint chipping off on the walls, and I look over and there was this lone wooden cross hanging on the wall. Then some of the girls were singing in the most beautiful swahili voice that was echoing in this little room. Even though I didn't understand what they were saying, I knew they were singing about God. I remember thinking, "God is definitely here in this little room here in this small little village across the world." It was so amazing. 

I have been trying to figure out how to upload videos here because i have one of them singing. However, I can't seem to get it to upload here. I guess I will have to post them on facebook page.

After our praise and worship portion, many of the kids got up to recite scriptures they had been working on. These were all done in English and there were several of them who excitedly got up to do this. It was so wonderful to see how proud they were of themselves when they finished. Then our youth pastor of our Mansfield West campus, Wes Jones, preached a message on running the race. This tied into what we would do after service.

After the church service, we separated into four groups to put on Olympic games. This was to help us get to know some of the kids better, and just to have fun with them. We had to pick a team name, which our team was The Bears, or as we tried to teach them to say, "Da Bears." We got that name because when we said we needed a name for our team, one of the girls Betty said "How about Teddy Bears?" So we thought Bears might sound like more of a force than Teddy Bears. Hahaha!!

Here we are with our team Da Bears.

We learned right away just how much Kenyans love to sing and dance because they told us to come up with a cheer or something for our team, and immediately we began working on songs. Most of the songs really had nothing to do with the Bears, but it was fun listening to what they came up with. One of the songs we did was about a ball, but it was just so different than what our kids would have come up with. We stood around in a circle and rolled the ball to someone and they said, "I take the ball," and then everyone would repeat after them. Then they would say, "and put it here" and then it would go to someone else. 

Anyway, it was a lot of fun hearing what they would come up with. We got to hear each group's songs and cheers at the beginning of our "Opening Ceremonies." Here are some photos from the opening ceremonies and some of our singing and dancing with our groups. 

Then we started off with a relay race, then we had a two-legged race. Here are some photos from these games. 

This was a fun relay where they had to travel with the ball, but they couldn't touch it with their hands. Here Max and Micheal from The Bears work on their teamwork skills.

We also had a game sort of like volleyball only without a net. We had to hit the ball to each other in a circle without the ball touching the ground. This was not our group's strong suit. 

The last game we did was a huge hit with the kids. We just had them play the limbo game and see who was the last one that could go the lowest. They really enjoyed this one. 

We did win one of these games, but I can't remember which one. I think we came in 2nd place overall for the day, so we didn't do too bad. And the most important part is that we all had a lot of fun.

At the end of the day we had a little time leftover, so we decided to pull out the paper and crayons we had brought for the kids. They immediately just started drawing, and it was so interesting to see what they drew. Most of the papers had something to do with God or Jesus loving them, some of them even used their drawings to tell us that Jesus loves us. Here are a few pictures of this time.

This is Michael. He had such an infectious smile. He was always smiling too!

Jeffter shows us his drawing. 
 

 This is one of my favorites and really moved me that she thought to draw this. I think its going to become my new life theme.

Day 5

The next day was Monday and we started off our Vacation Bible School that day. Every day we had worship with songs and a brief message twice each day. They also got to do sports and arts and crafts each day. Kim and I were in charge of arts and crafts, so I didn't get to see much of what they did in sports, except I know they did a lot of jump roping and playing soccer, or football, most of the time playing in their bare feet. 

The first day we were there we decided to go tour a preschool before we went to the camp. The preschool was one that has a water well that Rush Creek raised money and helped put in a few years ago. Here is a photo of it. 

 So we got to meet and interact with the kids that attend this preschool and get to have clean water because of our church. They were such sweet little children. I took so many sweet pictures. I will put some here, but I will post more on facebook if you'd like to see them. 

This little girl cracked me up because she was just so fascinated with my sunglasses.

 

 In Kenya, children are required to learn English in school so most of the kids who are school age, especially those 12 and older, have pretty good English skills by then. The older kids we had at camp spoke even better English, so that made it great to communicate with them and we didn't even need the translators we had. However, when we were at the preschool they didn't understand us much because they were too young to have learned much English. But they sang songs to us, and we got out our balls and played ball with them. It was a lot of fun to interact with them. 

After we left the preschool we headed over to our camp, or Vacation Bible School. Our first day we had the kids decorate flip flops for our craft. We collected donations at our church over the summer so we brought all those flip flops to the camp. Since these kids where flip flops a lot, we decided it would be nice for them to have a new pair. Here are a few photos from that. 

My buddy Petronila really enjoyed making the flip flops, or they call them "flippers". 

The boys really like making them too. 
 

Max shows off his creation. 

We also showed them how to make these things called Sun Prints. They got to go collect things in nature that God made, like flowers, leaves or grass, and then they pressed it on some glass with some special paper that turned colors in the sun. Here are some examples of the finished product. 

The final bonding thing we did on Monday was to do a manicure/pedicure for anyone who wanted it. Really, it was more of just painting their fingernails and toenails, but the kids absolutely loved it. This really was special treatment for them. It was funny too how many of the girls wanted a different color on each nail. Even the boys wanted their nails done too!

It was funny how after we painted their nails, they wanted to paint ours. 

They loved showing off their nails after we were done.

Here is one of my favorite photos. This was Petronila's colorful nails. She was always holding my hand and hugging on me, well not just me but a lot of us, so I thought this was a sweet photo. 
 

 Well since this is a lot of information to write about I am not going to do it all at once. So I'm going to end this post here. But my next update I will start with what happened at the camp Tuesday through Thursday, which was the day we said goodbye to the kids. I hope to get it done soon, that is if I can get out of this jet lag funk!!

Thanks for reading!!