Kenya Mission Newsletter 8 (Friday): We love you

The team took its first real break this morning and visited a number of local sites.  We experienced the chaos of morning traffic in downtown Meru … no traffic lights, no sidewalks, donkey-drawn carts competing with huge lorries (we've been here a week so we can call trucks, lorries), thousands of locals trying to get to work, hundreds of cars (Did you know you could be arrested for honking your horn here?), and then add countless motorbikes.  It is amazing … it is slow … everyone seems to dodge each other and somehow you get to where ever it is you are going.  

One of our stops was at the women's cooperative known as Makena.  They are best known for their amazing work with local women … and their rugs.  If you have ever been on one of the mission teams here, you likely have at least one of these indestructible … and beautiful rugs in your home.  Every year they seems to get more lovely.  This year was no exception.

We hurried back to host the Gichunge staff for lunch at the Thiiri Centre.  This was a first.  We have never hosted the entire staff of a primary school for lunch.   It was something that we had thought to do as we planned our trip.  We knew the leadership of the school had changed and we thought of it as a way to build trust.  The original plan was to do this early in the week.  We learned on Monday that it could not be scheduled until Friday due to the student teachers who were working in the school all week each morning.  We had been experimenting with math games/exercises during our afternoon school visits, but had no idea what teachers felt about them.  

It felt like a one of those dates you made in junior high and then had second thoughts  about doing it.  Did they really want to come?  What would we talk about?  What if they thought everything we had done was stupid?  I suspect they had similar thoughts.  We sprinkled ourselves among them at the tables as lunch began.  We broke the ice by actually doing one of the numbered card exercises with them.  Each table picked a number from their stack from 1-20.  Everyone then had to come up with a "formula" to get that number using addition, subtraction and multiplication.  We all warmed up a bit.  

As good Methodists, we could go no further without eating, so we broke for the food. We then returned to go through two more math exercises we had done in their classrooms including one with decks of playing cards.  By the time we got to showing them the flash cards we had brought and the posters (John and Marcos were heroes AGAIN with their demonstration on using magnets), the room was alive.  We had gone from hearing a pin drop to having to shout to be heard across a table that only had 4 people at it.  Not bad!  We topped it all off with a group picture that actually involved about a hundred pictures.  It turns out Kenyans do as many selfies as Americans do.   Below you will find one of the few that did not include someone taking a photo of the person taking the photo.  It was all good fun … and probably did more to build relationships than anything else we could have done all week … and all for about the cost of a Quarter Pounder per person back in the US.  Amazing.

As we met this evening to plan our Saturday at BLISS, we realized how much we had to be thankful for.  Aside from missing all the awful cold most of you reading this are experiencing, one of our team members pointed out just how many times this week we had been told, "We love you."  It stopped us in our tracks.  Had we said it in return?  We had been working hard, we had traveled all the way here, we had brought lots of stuff … but had we said the simple words Christ has said to us.

All the best from your hands and feet in Kenya,

Kathy, Greg, Debbie, John, Julie, Marcos, and Dixie