Missions 101

Jambo again! Our team is excited to report that, while things started off slowly, we have now reached the opposite extreme. Our days have been jam-packed full of opportunity to share Christ. What started as a directed ministry for college student s has now exploded into a Missionary 101 crash course. We are busy at the Nairobi Institute of Technology (NIT) as well as Graffins College, which happens to be a business college. We have had the opportunity to bring the Gospel to three different slums in Nairobi including Githeri, Kibera, and Mji Wa Huruma. We have even visited Hindu temples. Our goals remain the same; developing relationships, discipleship and encouragement.
The college work is a brand new ministry here and we are working closely with Rodney and Kellie White, two IMB missionaries who were given this ministry the day we arrived. It began slowly as we had to wait for permission to go on some of the campuses. It took several days and a handful of meetings on Rodney’s part to get us permission to go to NIT. Our team just happened upon Graffins as Matt S. and Rodney had planned on going to the YMCA while Matt and I visited NIT, but couldn’t get there because of traffic as a result of the Obama holiday(that’s right, there was in fact a holiday dedicated to Obama the day after he was elected.) We typically spend about 2 to 3 hours every other day at the universities. It’s very helpful because the campuses are side by side here in Nairobi. To say “university” is an overstatement. NIT is a 4 story building on a very small piece of property. About 250 students attend NIT, many of them live here in the city. As of right now, only Matt and I (Erin) have permission to go to NIT. Matt Seitz is not able to come because the school officials are weary of too many people. At Graffins , however, the three of us can go at our leisure. Last week the three of us were able to attend a Business Information Technology class where they were learning how to design a website. It was way over our heads but was also a lot of fun. They have a small “cafeteria” on the fifth floor where we hang out with some of the students and eat somosas ( Small, breaded and fried pouches of beef and other stuff), Chipates (Tortilla-like things that are cooked in oil), and Mendazi (Kind of like bread), and drink Passion Juice. We’ve become very good friends with a Christian student named Abel. He is in his early 20s and he works as a manager at a fast food chain called Steers. They sell hamburgers, chicken sandwiches and French fries. He was thrilled to find out about our (mine and Matt’s) jobs in McDonald’s. He has never been to one but has learned about it in school. He has a lot of questions about how to do business and how to do it as a Christian who intentionally lives to serve Christ. We have had some great conversations with him. When we aren’t talking with anyone, we either play ping-pong or pool at the school. The Matts beat two south Asian students 21-19 the other day in ping-pong. But this area is only a small part of the rest of our work here.
Early last week, we spent one morning with a missionary named Ralph. His area of work is with the South Asian population here in Niarobi. These are mainly Hindus and Muslims from India and some of the other South Asian countries. We toured two Hindu temples, one was the Swami Niryan temple and the other was the Shree Sanatan (which has been nicknamed Shree Satan.) At one of the temples, there was a walkthrough museum that basically credited the Hindu religion and India for almost all basic facets of modern knowledge, including the concept of gravity (Funny, I guess Isaac Newton was Hindu.) J. It was interesting to walk through these temples. They were designed and built using no iron, though I’m not sure of the significance associated with that. They were intricately carved from different kinds of specific woods, leaving almost no plain space. Every inch was covered with a carved design, idol, or associated animal. They had bells in the temples that the people would ring to “notify the gods” of their arrival to pray. It was indeed interesting. We all had to take off our shoes to enter the temples and the girls and guys had to separate in one of them. In this same one, the women could only approach the idols up to this rope. This was funny to me because the idols were in this huge glass case and I just wondered how they determined the distance to which it was acceptable for women to approach this glass case while the men still remained separated from the idol by the glass case, just a little closer. We also learned that “gods” are made for every occasion (more than 300 million). If there is not a “god” for the circumstance one is facing, one is made up. Additionally, it seems that the “gods” are ill-tempered and have ill-will for mere mortals. Their prayers and the food they place in front of them (they really do put food in front of the idols) is to appease them. It made me grateful that we serve a God that welcomes all and isn’t confined to a glass case.
Again, from one extreme to another. While the Hindu temples were lavish palaces of crafted, “specially blessed” wood with marble staircases at their entrances, the next couple days we visited numerous slums. Though there was a huge disparity in the amounts of wealth between the two, they housed people equally lost. The slums gripped our teams’ hearts in a different way though. The first slum we visited, Githeri, was with Jerry Stevens, another IMB missionary that has been here for years. We were there for only an hour, but we got our first glimpse of how the poorest of our world live. We drove through tightly-cramped tin shacks that sat in mud. It was really a self contained “fourth-world” village. There was a butcher', little shops where people could buy clothes, wooden boxes jam-packed with chickens. It was strange. It was enough to make you cringe that someone could spend their entire life within this slum. The idleness of everyone there was the other thing that just seemed foreign. We are so used to bustling cities filled with people and their own swamped agendas. These people just sat. Nothing was productive because there was no money to exchange for goods. There was no money for goods because outside the ones with shops, none have jobs or they have jobs that pay so little, it affords only food enough to get by. There are no luxuries, only the most basics, if that. As we drove, we eventually made our way to a small tin building, probably also made with no iron. Its support beams were branches. It was a simple, yet it housed hope. It in we found about 12 Kenyans, hungry to hear and know God. The pastor began our meeting by playing a homemade drum that set the rhythm of worship. We sang several songs and then Jerry demonstrated one of the evangelism tactics we have come to learn called Storying. We left Githeri filled with a hope, that despite the horrible conditions, Emmanuel was there and was at work.
The next day we visited the biggest slum in all of Africa and possibly in the world. Kirbera. Upon arriving, we were encouraged to learn that Habitat for Humanity had begun to build a road and some apartments through the slum, but were then quickly discouraged when we learned of the government’s involvement in the project. We learned that it is not unlikely that the apartments will be taken over by the government, taken from the people of Kibera and rented out to futher stuff the pockets of the wealthy and corrupt government officials. Though Kenya is tagged as democratic, it is not truly democratic. The government is corrupt as well as content to see its people remain impoverished as long as their seat cushions are plump. We waited for the pastor of one of the little tin churches in Kibera, as he was to appoint a guide to walk us through the slum that houses 800,000 people in just a couple square miles. We were warned it was not safe for us to go just the four of us due to the gangs that reap havoc throughout Kibera. It was heartbreaking to again see children, two and three-years-old wandering by themselves, as we learned rape is commonplace there. We passed tin shack after tin shack with flowing sewage inches from their doorway. The ultimate low for me was seeing a little girl with no shoes on stomping in the sewage that had become her playground for lack of a better one. There is no grass, only a dirty mix of mud, sewage and trash in the walkways that connect the tin shacks. The children were the really the only ones with smiles and we were grateful for the opportunity to love on them. They loved to have their pictures taken. After 45 minutes of walking through we returned to the car through literally a hole in the wall that separates Kibera from the rest of Nairobi.
There is so much more to tell you about, but we’ll have to post it tomorrow. Things move slower here, yet we never seem to have enough time. We hope to update the blog by tomorrow morning.
TO BE CONTINUED…