Easter Sunday
April 1, 2018
Today we arrived in Kenya. Waiting for us at the airport were two staff members from the Kenyan Parliament who expedited the process of passports and customs. Waiting for us outside was a delicious assortment of Kenyan friends and helper who helped us load our 54 suitcases. My heart always leaps when I meet these dear friends at the airport. In my humble opinion they are some of the finest people on earth.
As soon as we parked our bus in the compound it was surrounded by hundreds of kids who couldn’t wait to greet our team. Believe me the feelings were mutual. We had to use special force to drag our kids inside to eat dinner and get settled. The presence of those eager children raised the level of expectation for tomorrows sports camp to a new level. Everyone is so pumped.
For the first 6 days of our mission to Kenya we will be staying at the new conference center on the grounds of the Kimbo All Nations Church. Kimbo is one of the Churches that Worldcomp Kenya has partnered with to serve the poor and needy in Kenya. It is located in the city of Kimbo, 20 kilometers from downtown Nairobi. Our first two days of Sports camp will be held here. It’s a great place for us to start because the facilities are particularly suited for our outreach to kids.
We have a very long history with Kimbo Church and Pastor James Wasonga. It was here some nine years ago that Worldcomp took a step of faith to dig our first community well. It’s a long story but let me give you the short version. The entire village of Kimbo, some 50,000 people had no clean water, because the water systems built by the British 75 years ago were completely broken down and no one had the money to fix it. To make matters worse, construction workers working on a nearby highway cut the last remaining pipeline which carried rust colored water to the area. As we visited the church on a Sunday morning 9 years ago we felt led of the Lord to raise the money to sink a deep well on the church property in the hopes of serving the community. We went out on the grounds and prayed together that the Lord would bless this project. The Lord helped us to raise $28,000 and when the bore-hole diggers came to dig the well they hit an aquifer (an inexhaustible source of clean water) on the very spot where we prayed. This is an unusual well! It has produced an enormous amount of water. It now feeds 7 large tanks, two of them more than 1 kilometer from the church, and the people of the Kimbo community come day and night to fill their buckets with free water. The community now calls the church “The Well Church”.
It is now 8:45pm and every team member is exhausted. Tomorrow we start our ministry of love to the kids of Kenya. Keep us in your prayers, especially for our health.
More to come tomorrow.
P.S. If you wish to share a word of encouragement with the group please respond to this email and I’ll pass it along!