Last Thoughts Before We Board the Airplane

It has been so nice having Katherine blogging on this trip as well.  I have been so busy running around all day that I haven't had a whole lot of time to blog, so it is such a relief to know that Katherine has been keeping our friends and family informed about what is going on.  If you haven't been following her blog, I encourage you to take a look at it.

http://steppingoutinkenya.blogspot.com

She is a much better blogger than I am anyway, and I'm glad that you have gotten to see her perspective of the trip.

I want to make sure you know that even though I haven't been writing a lot, I have been trying to tell the story of our trip with pictures and captions.  I have been posting the pictures to facebook, but I just now made the album public.  So, when you get the chance, go take a look at our Kenya pictures at:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150819319791582.395549.521941581&type=3&l=75af9775df

We are in Nairobi right now, staying with Larry and Hollye Conway, our missionary friends here.  Katherine and Hollye ran off to shop for gifts at the Masai market, and then we are going to be leaving for the airport in a couple of hours.  So, I don't have a lot of time to write just now, but I will try to briefly recap some recent highlights of the past couple of weeks.

* We finished rebuilding the Home of Kenneth Oala and his wife Nancy and we had chai with them in their home.  They are the couple who lost their house and their daughter in the fire last Sunday.  I have lots of pictures of building a house in rural Kenya, and it's really pretty interesting.  Go take a look.  The house will not really be finished until they plaster the walls with a mixture of mud and manure, but we have to let the mud walls dry for two weeks before that work can begin.

* We distributed another 112 Luo bibles at church on Sunday.  It is hard to describe how grateful this community has been to receive the Bibles.  After we started our Bible distribution a couple of weeks ago, I started noticing as I walked around the community and prayed with people in their homes that they would often have their new Luo bible proudly displayed on the coffee table.  Many of the older widows in this community speak nothing but Luo, and they are so happy to finally have access to the scriptures.  Many others in the community speak some English, but they say that it is so much more effective to be able to read the scriptures in their "heart language."  It cost about $3000 to purchase these 316 bibles in bulk through the Kenya Bible Society.  We went ahead and funded this out of our own pocket, but if you are interested in helping out with this work, Katherine and I would be very grateful for some assistance.  We have received about $200 for this purpose already from people who have been following us.

You can contribute to Huruma House through PayPal at:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=ZL89WKHAXM2GJ

You can also mail a check to Huruma House, 4010 Cougar Way, Abilene, TX, 79606
Or if you worship at Willis you can give a check to Scott Darrow when you see him.

* Sunday was my last day to preach at Marera Church of Christ before we left.  The place was packed and a lot of people had to sit outside.  One of the church leaders here asked at the beginning of the service if anyone was interested in being baptized today, and four people came forward.  I haven't been preaching any sermons about baptism (my primary focus here has been to help the existing Christians in this community to grow deeper in their faith), so I was a little bit surprised at the response.  After they came forward, I spoke for a few minutes about what baptism was all about and about its significance in our journey of faith.  Then another 6 people came forward to make their confessions as well.  So we all walked down to the river, and Daniel Owino (a local church leader) and I waded out to a deep place, and we baptized 13 people.  It turns out that 3 additional people also decided to be baptized once we got started.  Kenneth Oala, the man whose house we rebuilt after the fire, was among those who were baptized.

* Over the past week, I started having some meetings with some people that I have identified as leaders in the community of Marera.  We put together a group of 18 people, most of them widow ladies, and we created a new community-based organization called "Hope for Marera."  I am really excited about the opportunity to work with this group in the future, and I am so glad that I know and trust the members and the officers of the group.  We decided to spend a couple of years just implementing some income-generating projects to earn income for the CBO.  Then once the CBO has some significant income, we plan to start a nursery school for some of the neediest orphan children in the community where they can be fed and educated.  The 18 members of the CBO are going to do some cost-benefit analyses of various income-generating project ideas, and then Huruma House is going to fund the best of these projects as money for Marera becomes available through donations.  Katherine and I are going to start funding the projects ourselves until we are confident that the CBO members will work well together.  Then once we are satisfied with their performance, I hope to be able to open these projects up to other interested donors as well.

I have so much more I want to tell you, but if Katherine gets home and finds the kids still dirty and the suitcases unpacked, I don't think "but I just HAD to blog" is going to get me off the hook for making us miss our flight.

We land at DFW airport at 9:45am on Wednesday, and Marty and Marilyn Turentine have offered to come pick us up at the airport in Vernon Williams' suburban.  We love you and miss you, and we will see you very soon on the other side of the ocean.


Lord, You are the good shepherd.  I surrender to You my fears about the church and the community I am leaving behind, and I trust that they are safe under Your watchful guidance.  Amen.