rain

Hi. We are well. We are now into the short rainy season, although we had a lot of rain since August so the contrast hasn’t been too marked yet. On Thursday we had a particularly heavy thunderstorm – with huge hailstones – in late afternoon. People here have planted their second crops for this year and the maize is growing up strongly.

Last week we had a trip to Kisumu and Nairobi. In Kisumu we renewed our visas and applied for registration as “aliens” – visions of little green men? In Nairobi we met up with Terry and two of the leaders of Elim Kenya who helped us in the process of applying for work permits. Hopefully these will get approved soon, which will allow us to stay in Kenya and work as “missionaries” for 2 years before they need renewed. We enjoyed our trip, doing some shopping, staying in guest houses and getting some meat in our diet again! Nairobi is getting increasingly busy, and the traffic jams get worse!

Back here we are continuing our work with the church leaders. We are planning an “Encounter” weekend for them, based on those done in Paisley Elim. We think the first one will need to be just for a few English speakers, some of whom could then help us with the next Encounter. Running the event over a weekend may not be suitable so it will probably be run over two days in two successive weeks. This weekend Ian is speaking in church on Sunday. Today we were at a special church meeting held at the home of a man who got into some trouble, was in jail for 2 months (it could have been 10 years if he had been found guilty of assault) and has subsequently come back to God and to church and turned his life around.

Some things are frustrating here, like inefficiencies, erratic internet connection, and the length of time it can take to achieve some things. And Hilda’s very slow progress in learning Dholuo! But on the other hand there are lots of encouragements, so we have lots of hope for the future. Health is such a major issue for people here. Recently we visited a young man who is HIV+ and who had been very ill the last time we saw him – his father had lost hope for him. But this week he was so much better we didn’t even recognise him!

We’ve established that people can get onto the national health insurance scheme if they make contributions of KSh160 a month (just over £1). This will basically pay for any hospital costs, but not surgery or out-patient costs. Even this amount will be beyond the means of many people, so we are looking to see if we can set up sponsorship of people to get this insurance provided.

We’ve just finished reading “When Helping Hurts” for the second time together. It’s by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert and we would recommend it to anybody interested in working with the poor either in the developing world or at home. We’re now reading “The Purpose-Driven Church” by Rick Warren and finding it really useful for our situation here.