Monday, May 16, 2011

Sunday in Nairobi

As mentioned, Lupe indeed did wander down to the kitchen at 4am, I followed an hour later with my camera and found him chopping up about a quarter of a pig, while our two cooks were working on eggs, hand made tortillas and other breakfast taco fixings under Lupe’s direction. Lupe had brought some spices with him, but his salsa was taken away from him during one of the airport searches. It didn’t matter, he managed to make an incredible salsa with fresh ingredients anyway. The 40 or so who had breakfast before heading out to their respective missions were all surprised and it was a wonderful, joyous occasion. On many of our previous trips, it was much more subdued as we encouraged each other and talked about the different challenges and opportunities that each clinic location presented. This time it was pretty raucous and more than one of the other team leaders tried to trade me two or more team members for Lupe. No way, no deal!
As the different groups all loaded up their vans for travel to their respective clinic locations, the leaders all gathered in a prayer circle and Paul lifted up a beautiful prayer asking for a safe and effective mission for all involved and, of course, that many would be saved by hearing the message of salvation through Christ that we would be spreading throughout the country.
We met our driver for the week, Joseph, and he has turned out to be a wonderful guy to be around. He has a good sense of humor, although he didn’t quite know what to make of Howard and I going round and round at first when Howard insisted I ride up front with Joseph in the “Suicide Seat.” This was a reference to a previous trip in which we came to a screeching halt inches from the side of a large truck at a roundabout with Pastor Kevin in the same spot. As the day went on, Joseph told me I was the funniest passenger he had ever worked for. I’m not sure it was a compliment, but we have already had lots of laughs together.
We arrived at Kawangware for the 10am church service. It was wonderful, as usual, and features many readings, several traditional Lutheran hymns and a wide variety of music performed by 2 adult choirs, the teem choir we had been blessed by the previous night and some incredible praise songs led by members of the Conquerors and others. Pastor Zedekiah asked me to come up early in the service to thank Redeemer for the donation of a large bongo and T-Shirts for the teen choir. I expressed greetings from Redeemer and told the congregation we are happy to help them in their ministry in any way we can. Later in the service, I had the pleasure of introducing Tom Krueger as we celebrated the water well project soon coming online with fresh water for the church compound and for the Living Water ministry to the nearby community that it will provide. Tom and I both praised God for this miracle and he also made a point of stressing that we always receive many more blessings than we could ever give when we serve them and their ministry. Leslie proved to be a human “kid magnet” as every little kid flocked to her and sat with us during the bulk of the service. It was a great experience. Pastor’s sermon was based on readings from the Gospel of John and we were doubly blessed in that this Sunday proved to be a communion Sunday. The whole team was communed by Pastor Zedekiah. When all was said and done, church let out around 1:15 and we stayed for a little while to see which congregation members might be coming to Kibera to help us get up and running faster and to also renew acquantances with many of our friends who were in church with us.
From Kawangware, we went to the Junction for lunch, a nice restaurant in a pretty nice area of town. It was chosen for good, reasonably priced food and for its proximity in the same mall to Nakumat, a large store similar to a Super Wal-Mart. It was very busy, being nearly 4 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, but we did get snacks, water, etc., for the early part of the week and we headed to the Springs of Life Lutheran Church to go over the setup of the clinic with the Pastor.
Catherine already had our footlockers and other equipment at the church and we were not able to actually get to setup in the sanctuary for Monday because there was a function going on. We did get some ideas for improved traffic flow for this week that we might try. We went back to our compound, dinner and a good night’s sleep.
Our Internet and phone access has been very spotty and we hope for that to improve as time goes on. All of us are well and are very geared up to start the clinic.

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