What I did in Kenya // James Weng
On September 8, 2008 I left Dallas for a missions trip to Nairobi, Kenya in East Africa. I flew to Atlanta, Georgia for a week of training with Adventures in Missions. Adventures in Missions is the organization that I was going to Kenya with. There were 12 other students like me on the team and 3 team leaders. We had classes on culture, evangelism techniques, spiritual warfare, prayer, and other topics relating to missions work. There were also team building activities and worship times.
On September 15, we left for Nairobi. We traveled for about 20 hours and then landed at night around 10pm. We spent a week in Nairobi getting to know the area and learning about the culture and then left for Webuye, a rural town in northwest Kenya. We worked together with ALPHA, an international evangelism ministry, to host a pastor's conference and a youth conference. Both went very well. We worked with more than 100 pastors from the area and more than 200 youth.
We returned in early October and began our ministry in Kibera, the world's largest slum. There are 1 to 1.5 million people living in an area about 3 square miles. Our ministries in Kibera involved teaching at AIM's school there, New Adventure Primary School and working with a small school for orphans and those too poor to afford other schools called the Miracle and Victory Church School. Those that helped with the New Adventures School tutored 4 students everyday for 6 weeks. The students they worked with were those receiving the lowest marks and at the end of the 6 weeks we saw those marks increase significantly. Those children needed to make the best grades they could because their families will depend on scholarships to be able to send them to secondary school. Those of us that helped at the Miracle and Victory school helped the teachers there copy lessons into each student's handbook because the school was too poor to afford a chalkboard. The children there received two meals a day which was vital because many of them were orphans or had parents that could not take care of them.
In the afternoons we split up into two or three different ministries. Some of us would do door-to-door ministry, evangelizing and praying for people as we walked. Some of us would work at a detention center set up by the government for street children. The detention center though wasn't run very well. The children weren't being fed everyday, they slept on metal bunks sometimes without mattresses and sometimes 2 or 3 children per bed. We worked with them once a week teaching them basic English skills, Bible stories, songs, crafts, and games. We also played soccer with them before we left.
After 6 weeks of working in Nairobi, we left for a small mountain village called Eburru. In Eburru, we did a VBS program for about 100 children four times a week and a sports ministry once a week. Our VBS program was only a half day so sometimes we would go to the local secondary school to teach and have a time of worship. Another thing we would do is attend the local small group meetings and just fellowship with the people of the church. Our last week there we built a kitchen building out of wood and mud.
My time in Kenya was amazing. I learned a lot about trusting God and what it means to depend on Him. In Kenya, prayer isn't just something that you do after you've taken medicine or have done all you can to fix something. It's the first thing that people there do because there is no medicine and no money to fix things. That kind of faith and trust in God was revolutionary to me. Something else that God showed me was how the Church as a body is supposed to care for its other parts. Americans are blessed by God with more money than we really need while there are billions of people in the world without shelter, food, or even clean water. Being in Kenya has opened my eyes to the need for the Church to help and it starts with each of us individually. God used this missions trip and the experiences he blessed me with to teach me more about His character and His power and His plan for my life. I do hope to one day return to the mission field wherever God calls me. Thank you all for supporting me and God bless.