Flexibility is always important when serving oversees – it is most definitely true here in Kenya.

On Thursday Kelsey gave a challenging devotion at a local women's fellowship and Ann taught the first part of her series. Both went great! Ann however had her second talk bumped and will be doing part two on Sunday. The latest praise is that students in the village were given an unexpected three day weekend this week. So we changed plans for the youth as well. Today we taught the youth ultimate frisbee, sang some songs and then divided the group according to age. The young ones where given the planned vbs material and the older ones received our first challenge about remaining sexually pure. The children and youth are very attentive and eager to learn. We were also able to project the World Cup on the side of a building tonight and everyone enjoyed great fellowship together. Things are going well at this half way point in our trip. Stephen Husk is the only team member how has gotten sick and he is feeling much better already! Here are a couple short notes from Caitlin and Nathan (written yesterday).

6/10/10

So many of you may be wondering, what exactly are we doing about 8,000 miles away in Kenya? So far most of our team activities revolve around the children in the village. Everyday this week we have been meeting in the field across from Dan Okall's house to host a VBS for kids younger than 1^st grade. We spend about 30 minutes playing football (soccer) with them. They run circles around us, literally. Most of us are pretty much lacking in Kenyan football skills, except for maybe Tyler (Nathan thinks he's good though). After the kids are all tired and worn out from soccer we start a VBS lesson. On Tuesday, Ashley taught about teamwork. Wednesday, Nathan taught on perseverance. Today, Ashley and I taught about strategy/God's plan. Teaching has been a little difficult because the kids are too young to know English yet. Our good friends, Seth, Milton, and Joseph have been kindly translating everything for us. As far as we know, we're doing a pretty good job. Our latest VBS task is having them memorize part of 1^st Corinthians 9:24- 25 “run in such a way as to get the prize”. When the lesson is finished, Matt, Ashley, Stephen, Nathan and I lead worship songs. We have taught them to sing “Everlasting Love”, “Every Move I Make”, and “Undignified” with motions. They might be better at football than us, but I think we're better dancers... maybe. At 5:00 pm half of us go to Dan's to teach computer skills to the high school students and older and the other half go to the resource center to tutor kids up to 2^nd grade. Mark, Stephen, Jay, Lily and Leah have been teaching computers while Nathan, Matt, Ashley, Tyler, Kelsey, Ann, Bill and I have been at the resource center. We have found that all the kids are quick learners and very intelligent. Then at 7:00 pm the kids 3^rd grade and up come to the resource center to be tutored and to work on their homework.

-Caitlin Raines

Hey hey hey, this is Coffey bringing you the word of the day! So as much as we have been doing, there has been quite a bit of fun going on, and we thought it would be a good idea to enlighten you all. To start, Caitlin has a trait that has become very legendary on this trip, her fear of birds-- there are many chickens running everywhere! She has a tendency to jump and become startled when a chicken runs out in front of her. We all do miss everybody at home, and other things. I personally miss having more than three meals a day, but as Tyler said, the food here is good! Everybody shares a room with somebody else, but Mark and I have to share a bed, Bill and Tyler think it's very cute. Mark randomly spasmatically jumps in his sleep. Moving on, something that all of us enjoy is seeing the stars. Out here we get to see so many of them, and we can see the milky way glow! It's so beautiful! We also got to go to the cliff where the plateau ends, it's so incredible! When I went out there the sun was about to set but there was a break in the sky right above Lake Victoria, so while everything was sort of gloomy, the lake was golden and glowing! The way of life here is very different, I'm not used to having to drink things that are not water, so far I've had tea, milk, and coke... I can't wait to go back to water... Anyhow, the life is much slower, Matt and I were talking earlier and we decided that when we get home we are going to promise to hang out with people at about 3 and not show up until 5:30 and while they are calling us trying to get a hold of us we just won't have our phones, it's very peaceful not having to deal with them for a while even though they can be convenient. As for learning the language, Ashley knows the most Swahili and I the most Luo. I taught my family how to teach the formalities of their language, I was surprised to find how easy their language is, there are no irregular verbs, there is only one type of verb conjugation, and there is no subjunctive! Here is the present tense conjugation:

I... A__________ We... Wa_______
You... I__________ They... Gi________
He/She... O__________ for example, ringo means to run

Aringo- I run
Iringo- You run
Oringo- he/she run
Waringo- We run
Giringo- they run

-Nathan Ghantous