Kenya Prayer Update #6

Hello all, hope you've been well. I have!

I have a good couple things to tell you guys about, and it's going to take up two emails I anticipate because they only let me send so many photos in a single email.

I'll get right into it. On Friday, we officially broke ground on the new church land, and began levelling it to prepare for foundation work in the coming weeks. This new land is just about 50 meters down the road and across the street, so it's a real close move, but CCELD will own that land rather than lease it as we do the current space, and it will be a full acre of land rather than the roughly half acre we have now.

This is going to be the main construction project out here for the foreseeable future. Over at the other land owned by Great Commission Ministries (as a reminder that is Pastor Josh's missionary organization) the first four children's homes and the powerhouse have been completed in exterior, just the interior work remains, and that is much less than what has already been done. I'll send some photos of that land soon; I was actually there yesterday for a football (you Westerners call it soccer) game and it completely slipped my mind.

But for photos with this email, I've got a new view of the land on Saturday after a lot of the ground breaking work had begun. If you compare it to the photo I sent in one of my earlier emails, you'll see that a lot of greenery is missing. There's also the huge iron gate that will be set in the outer wall of the land (everything worth protecting is walled here). That thing was hand welded by a guy here on uneven ground and it came out beautifully. Very impressive welding. The structure that looks like a giant cinder block is a pre-existing structure that will become the elevator shaft for the new building. Praise God for His hand evident already in the starting of this work, and pray that He will continue to bless it and protect the workers as the work progresses.

More for you in this one. This past Sunday was the 13th Anniversary celebration, so of course I got another picture of the chairs because they were pretty cool looking from the kitchen window on the second floor. The service was packed, we set up extra rows of chairs during and still people had to stand in the back and in the lobby. Afterwards we served food to everyone and then later in the day was that football game at the land.

I like food and I like making food, so now you get to hear about the food. One of the foods they make here is called mandazi. They are kind of like fried dough balls; pretty simple in composition but very very tasty. I got to help with the frying part on Saturday as we made them for Sunday's meal. There was a whole assembly line process going on -- Henry Ford would have been proud. Once the dough was made, there was a station for rolling the dough out flat, then a station for cutting it into mandazi shapes, then a courier or two running trays of unfired mandazi to the two stone and brick stove frying stations, and finally there were the two to three folks at each sufuria (big pot) doing the placing, turning, and scooping of the mandazi. You can see in the photos some mandazi frying and then some finished ones in a different pot.

My last photo is of my new friend Zion and myself. He's great. His parents also gave him a cool name (I can relate!) We watched the football game together and played some tag with the other kids afterwards.

Some prayer requests for the upcoming days --

Pastor Josh is over his food poisoning, so that is very good.

This coming week we'll be hosting a mission team from the States and they fly out today, actually in about an hour I think, so pray for travel mercies for them and for a productive and God-glorifying week of service with them here when they arrive.

I know we'll be doing some evangelism and food distribution, so be in prayer for those ministries this next week if you would, that God would use His servants to make more servants!

I think that is all I have for you tonight, so I will sign off. Baadaye (later!),

Zion