We did help the other teams get on their ways and then left
the Little Daughters of St Joseph at around 9am. We had enough time to drop our luggage off at
Rosa Mystica, because Sunday morning traffic was very light. We arrived at the Springs of Life compound
around 9:35am and were met by Pastor James.
It was very good to see him.
Sofia, Bishop Bakari’s wife was also on hand and we caught up with her
on the happenings of the last 2 years since we had been able to serve in
Kibera. Worship got under way promptly
at 10am and it was once again a very moving multi-faceted experience. There was liturgy with chanting by the
pastors. There were children’s choirs,
children’s solos, praise band music, adult choirs doing both standard hymns and
native Swahili songs with incredible harmonies and the hypnotic songs that were
lead of by female leads and choir responses.
The sermon was delivered by a guest preacher and Pastor James translated
it from very good English into Swahili, with some humorous results at times. No one laughed louder than Pastor James. The service ended after nearly 3 hours with
us singing the last hymn, filing down the stairs while still singing and going
outside to form a large prayer circle.
After the prayer, we were dismissed with the Benediction. We spent about the next half hour catching up
with old friends, introducing the new team members to some of the people we
will be working with this week and making arrangements for the start of the
clinic on Monday. We will be at the
church by 7:30am, traffic will be light because there is a school break at this
time, so we won’t need to leave Rosa Mystica until about 7:15. We should have the physical layout of the
clinic in place by about 8am, have a devotion and last minute instructions for
our team and the volunteers and hope to be in operation by 9am.
After church, we went to the Junction Mall, right by our
lodgings, and had lunch with Catherine and Shara, one of our LCMS missionaries
based in Nairobi. I bought some Kenyan
coffee and had the beans ground for my drip coffee maker. I like the Kenya AA coffee, one of five
varieties. I think it stacks up to pure
Kona coffee in Hawaii. The Kona we get
on the mainland is a blend made with Columbian coffee to hold the high price
down. My pure Kenyan will beat that any
day of the week. It was 990 shiilings
for half a kilogram, or about $12 for a little more than a pound. A little treat to myself! We got our water, snacks, hand sanitizer and
paper goods for the clinic at Nakumatt in the mall, a store that is very
similar to Wal-Mart. Business is very
good there, since the recent attack on the nearby Westgate Mall has put the
main competition in the area out of business.
No one knows at this point if and when Westgate will reopen. We got back to our rooms around 4:30 and
everyone got much needed naps and showers.
We are about to have dinner at 7pm. I’ll lead a short devotion on what it means
to be a missionary, we’ll do some refresher training on the autorefractor and
we’ll finalize what we think the beginning layout of the clinic should be for
good traffic flow and for sharing the Gospel effectively. We’ll turn in early tonight to keep our
energy up for what I hope proves to be a very tiring first day of the clinic.
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