weekend festivities

Greetings bloggers. This is my first visit to the blog for posting purposes, so yeah I know im a slacker but im here now. Im here to report our festivities for the weekend. If you would like a setting for my current position, I am sitting in our guest house/apartment place, slightly perspiring due to a small dance party that just occurred as the power flickered on and off for a bit (and I know what you’re thinking—a natural strobe light!) and its now approaching 10 pm and peeps are settling in to the journaling/sleep prep time.
Sooooo, time traveling a bit back to Saturday. We had a rest day but we got to practice our hospitality skills all day as we visited with various all stars of the mission field. We had visitors from the LIA international board meeting come by on their way out of town, and eventually got to meet Dr. Florence at last. It reminded me of the awesome opportunity God has given each of our team as we get to spend the summer surrounded by people doing big things for God’s the kingdom. We also had a life-changing experience Saturday in town. We all went to java house and had some ridiculously delicious milkshakes—I mean you cant come back from that. But seriously I felt like Saturday was very challenging and eye-opening as we heard intense stories from the various mission fields of our visitors.
Here in Africa, Sunday is the day after Saturday, I mean I know there are time differences between here and America and it confuses me a bit so regardless of the day, it was awesome. We went to church (same one we did last week) and it was amazing once again. The sense of community never ceases to amaze me. The congregation is so welcoming and was even sad to hear we wouldn’t be around next week. We heard a sermon on worship being a lifestyle and having a divine appetite. It was very challenging—as is everything I encounter here. The faith of the people I am surrounded by simply blow my mind, I just feel like crumbling to the ground in comparison. I am so small and so far from living how God wants me to. And if you were to ask any of our team I think they would agree that the general theme of the time here has been prayer. Everything is soaked in prayer, as it should be, and it is so refreshing. Which brings me to today (Monday), our day of prayer and fasting. We got to spend somewhere between 4 and 5 hours in prayer for LIA ministries, departments, nations of influence, staff and even snuck in some personal prayers. It was an amazing way to kick off the week. This weekend provided a lot of thinking time, which I usually don’t like, but it was amazing to look back and see all the things God has already started working in my life. He is simply blowing my mind and we’re not even two weeks in.
So that’s the weekend, as far as I can remember. God’s doin big things fo sho.
Blessings,
Molly Russell and team

Friday May 27

Hey Faithful Followers,
I hope we find you well, safe and blessed as we are here. Today started off like every other normal day, woke up at 5 am and started my quiet time. Got in the shower at 5:20 and the power went out at 5:21. In a matter of five seconds the lights went completely out, casting me into darkness along with freezing cold water falling down on my head. After crawling on the tile for a few seconds, I located my towel and dressed myself and headed back out to the kitchen. In the morning we had more awesome training. We learned about Kenyan culture (some things not to do), and how to do short term missions without doing long-term harm. The latter created a lot of discussion and reflection on previous missions experiences.
In the afternoon, we visited one of the medical clinics in the Kibera Slum. This particular clinic that works with LIA is unique from nearly every other one because it isn’t free. The reason behind this is because they are trying to help the people of Kibera get out of the culture of “free.” There are over 1 million people living in the Kibera slum, and over 1000 NGO’s. Nearly all of the NGO’s provide handout after handout, perpetuating a cycle of poverty by providing relief from immediate needs without developing a way out of the perpetual poverty.
We came home to no power, but thankfully the internet we’ve been borrowing was up and running. I checked my email and found good news in my inbox.
Flashback to last night (Thursday).
Gus, his wife Rose, and their 5 month old son Nathaniel came over for dinner. We have begun to share our “life journeys” with each other and our country hosts, Gus and Holly. I went first and shared about the journey I’ve been on since being born, including the whirlwind that’s been the past two years. At the end of my story, I shared my calling life and my spiritual gifts. I shared that my calling was in medicine, and even though I haven’t been accepted to a school yet, I knew that’s where I was called. I know where the finish line is; I just don’t know how long it is between here and there. At the end, everyone laid hands on me and prayed.
Fast forward back to present time.
Everyone is cooking dinner in the dark. They were preparing chapatti fajitas the old fashioned way. The cheese came from the goat Katie milked in our back yard; the veggies were picked from the field across the way by Molly, the fruit from the trees off the streets, the chapatti was made from the maize meal that Elise ground up and the beef from the cow that Nicole slaughtered. Meanwhile, Austin was washing his pants on a washboard in the river and had to be signaled home for dinner by light signals from our lantern. The meal was cooked over and open fire, and we sat and ate together by lantern light.
Our power came back on after our friend Collins came and looked at it around 7:30pm. We then enjoyed watching LIA’s documentary, This Is My Normal. Everyone except me, because well, I had to share my good news with a lot of people, and thank God. And in case you’re wondering what this good news is, well, I was accepted to medical school at the University of Toledo :-D
Sam and the Mi2 team

May 26, 2011

We have been in Kenya for 1 whole week now! It feels like we have been here for much longer (in a good way). The past few days we have been doing training in the morning and then in the afternoon we have been going to Kibera. The trainings have been so helpful. We have mainly been talking about the culture here in Kenya. We are learning that it is very different from the United States! Sam experienced this first hand. In Kenya it is completely appropriate for 2 men to hold hands as a sign of friendship. The other day Sam was just standing there minding his own business when a Kenyan started holding hands with him. Sam was caught off guard and he says, “it was one of the most awkward situations of my entire life!” Haha:) We have also started learning a little bit of Swahili, one of the languages spoken in Kenya. Most of the Kenyans speak 3 languages. They speak Enlglish, Swahili, and their mother tongue. We are going to learn lots more Swahili next week. Yay! For the past 3 days, our team has been going to Kibera in the afternoon. Kibera is one of the largest slums in Africa. It is 3 miles away from Nairobi. On Tuesday, we divided into groups of 2 and did house visits in the slum. We were able to hear stories and pray with the people whose houses we visited. We were all astounded by their faith and their perseverance. These people work hard every day and have so much hope. They may be materially poor, but spiritually they are rich. As we walk through the slum all of the kids yell “mzungo, mzungo” (white person, white person) and run up to shake our hands. They are so cute and so full of joy.

Thank you to all of you who are following our blog. Miss you and love you all! :)

May 23, 2011

Mi2 Intern Trivia:
Fact: there are eight Mi2 Interns this summer, seven in Kenya and one in Poland. Three of them have tattoos on their left wrists. Who are they? Answer at the bottom of the entry.

Elise Omi
Molly Russell
Molly “RayRay” Ray
Katie Lane
Nicole “Commander/Chef” Ponton
Sam “Prophet Sam” Scott
Kate Sawyer
Joana “Powerhouse” Hufhand

Friends and Family,
Hello from Nairobi. So far Kenya has been wonderful. Our team is really clicking and we’ve been blessed to have awesome leadership from Life in Abundance. Life in Abundance is a truly wonderful organization whose model of empowering the indigenous church to serve its people is how I, and the rest of our team, believe things should be done.
The 22nd was our first Sunday in Kenya, and our first church experience. We attended Innkeeper’s Fellowship church with our friends Holly and Gus. (As a side note, the friendly faces of Holly and Gus are the faces you want to see after a 24-hour travel affair). There were about 30 people, including our team of 8. The service was wonderful; we spent the first 45 minutes in prayer and the next hour in worship, followed by two half hour sermons. Afterwards we were invited to a meet the pastor session. During the service something incredible began happening to me.
During worship, I had half a sermon come to me as we were singing so I stopped and took the time to write it all down in case I managed to forget it. At the end of worship, Pastor Julius stood up and announced that he would not be giving the sermon today, that in fact, God had spoken to one of the people here in this church, and that one of them would be giving the sermon today. Now, I think it’s important to let you all know that our team had been forewarned many times about the very real possibility that we would likely be expected to give a sermon without any prior warning. This idea has never bothered me, I’m used to teaching and doing so only partially prepared, too. But when Julius said those words, I’m pretty sure I had a heart attack and if anyone had looked back at me, I’m sure they would have thought I had seen a ghost. To me, this was one of those terrifying moments when what you have professed to believe becomes a little too real for comfort. Here I was sitting in church and the pastor was prophesizing about me, at least so I thought. After what seemed like an hour, Julius called up another member of the church who had planned to preach all along. As the cards fell, it turned out that were wasn’t any prophesizing at all, but the event did expose me to a reality I’m not sure I had ever truly believed before. I was terrified, not because I was going to have to speak and teach publicly with no real preparation, but because of the possibility that prophecy was being done right in front of me. It’s a lot easier to “believe” in some parts of the Bible without having seen them happen. There is some pretty insane stuff happening in the Bible, and life is much more comfortable when people aren’t turned into pillars of salt and a man whose flesh had been flayed off, rose from the dead after three days, and rolled away a monstrous boulder to top it all off.
I was terrified during church because what I’ve “believed” and professed to be true was actually happening before me, and everything I believed to be true was becoming very real, and if that was real, so too is everything else that I’ve “believed” including Jesus’ commands. My cheap faith was exposed for what it is.
The stakes have been raised. In life, just as in poker, with greater risk comes greater reward and my bluff has been called. Now all we have to decide is how we are going to respond. We can rise to the occasion or quit, and we must decide this everyday. To carry our cross and follow, or to deny our Christ and say he is nothing more than an ordinary man. It’s not always so clear, but the Lord has a way of providing discernment when it’s needed.
The rest of our day was filled with fellowship and fun time for our team. Nothing major EXCEPT, it was Elise’s 20th Birthday! We sang happy birthday several times and in several locations. Elise even ate red meat (she never eats red meat).
We had the opportunity to meet another team from America that is here working with LIA. They’re a group of college students from Hope International University and they arrived after spending a week in Ethiopia, and are spending another week here in Kenya. We got to know them a bit and had birthday cake with them.
A few fun notes about life in Kenya, in no particular order:

1. Life in Nairobi isn’t too different from life in the states except, the roads are bumpier, you can’t drink the water out of the faucet, and there’s no A/C. In general, life here is rawer than it is in the states, while the standard of living for us isn’t much different. It will change once we get out of Nairobi. Today we go into the Kibera Slum, the largest slum in Africa.
2. Driving in Kenya is the closest thing to real life Mario Kart. Aggressive driving/walking is a must, you have to dodge random inanimate/animate objects, and the borders of the road/lanes are more like guidelines than actual barriers.
3. Relationships take priority over agendas. This is truly wonderful. As Americans, we spend much of our time captive to schedules and the idea of upward mobility. It’s easy to forget that God has placed us in the situation we are in at this time for a specific reason. We are called to love people, and the Kenyans do this well.
4. Kenyans know the power of prayer. We have spent multiple hour prayer blocks with them on several occasions already. They know that if we want to see God move, we need to be on our knees before our Lord. It’s challenged many of us in our own devotions and prayer lives.
5. Holly Garrett is an awesome host, we are very grateful for her leadership, and for the AWESOME leadership within LIA. We are blessed.
6. It’s amazing how many compliments you can get on your physical appearance in the market from people trying to sell you things.

Prayer Requests:

Restful sleep- our team has been struggling to get consistent restful nights. Some of us have been bothered by bad dreams and others by jet lag.

Team Unity- we believe we are together as a team for a reason, and that there are those who would wish to see us divided. Pray for unity and strength.

Humility- it’s easy for us as Americans to come in and assume we know how things should be done, but the truth is we are here to learn as much as we are to serve.

Trivia Answers:

The three interns with left wrist tattoos are Sam “Prophet Sam” Scott, Molly “RayRay” Ray and Molly Russell.

Love and Grace,

Sam and The Mi2 Kenya Team

May 21, 2011

Jambo rafikis! That means “hi friends!” ☺ We had another amazing day in Kenya. God is continuing to humble us and teach us. The highlight of the day was going to a prayer meeting for a church here in Nairobi. The pastor first talked about the importance of prayer and how it is essential to the church and our lives. We prayed for a few hours. We admire the faith the Kenyans have and their belief in the power of prayer. We also walked to Nakumatt, the local grocery store in Nairobi, to buy food for the next few days. For dinner we made chicken fajitas…yum! Tonight, we welcomed an additional member to our team, Austin. He came from Alabama and will be staying with us for a month or so.

Alright we're pretty tired so we'll update you again soon. Thanks for stopping by.

First Full Day in Kenya

Truly what a blessing and honor it is to be in Kenya and to work with Life in Abundance. Last night we arrived at the beautiful and welcoming LIA guesthouse. Graciously, Holly gave us a brief orientation of the guesthouse and how things work, which was awesome, we would be lost without her. We all got settled into our living areas and crashed into our beds. This morning some of us woke up thinking “Where am I?”, but once we were all up and had some breakfast in our bellies (a few of us tried these mini-bananas, they were delicious) and Sam led us in a morning devotion, we were ready to start our day. Holly led us from the guesthouse down a few blocks and corners to the LIA: Kenya office. It was actually “freezing” for Kenya this morning, but still warmer than the U.S. so we were happy. One very important thing we learned was to be careful while walking sidewalks because Kenyan drivers can get pretty aggressive, especially in the rain Holly warned us.

Upon arriving at the Kenya office our friend Gus greeted and introduced us to the Kenyan staff, who are wonderful, and started off the meeting. We opened by singing some hymns acapella, which was a different experience because usually in the U.S. meetings don’t start off with singing, but it was awesome. Then Gus led us in a devotion from 1 Corithians: 12 talking about the church as a body and how all believers are part of the body and brothers and sisters in Christ. During the meeting we discussed schedules, finances and saw a slideshow of some of the areas we will be working in and got very motivated, all while enjoying cups of delicious Kenyan tea. We said goodbye to our friends for the day and began walking to a lunch at a food court called Prestige.

Before we went to lunch, Holly walked us through what a normal Kenyan market looks like, which is where many different booths are set up with fruits and vegetables and other goods. Right next-door was this food court with a variety of restaurants to choose from, such as Ethiopian, Kenyan, American, Chinese and more. It was very interesting because different persons who worked at the different food areas would come up to you and offer their menu, not like in the states where we go and order from the register. Nicole chose a dish called Ingeri (traditional Ethiopian mixed plate) but it was huge and some of use had never seen that dish, so that was cool. Molly “RayRay” ate some samosas from the Kenyan restaurant and Molly Russell ate some good ole cheese pizza, the rest of us added even more variety to the table. Then we continued our adventure into the supermarket to get ideas for meals for the next week or so. Jacob picked us up and we paid a visit to the LIA, International office and had a brief meet-and-greet with the staff members there. Everyone here has been so hospitable and kind, we are very grateful for the community we have entered and the opportunities the LIA is providing for us to grow in Jesus and serve others.

After the quick meeting with the international staff, we had the opportunity and privilege of meeting with an LIA team member who is running a medical clinic in Sudan. Hearing his stories of trial and success was extremely encouraging, and his heart for God and the patients was very moving. We prayed for him briefly and were on our way.

Exhausted and nodding in and out of consciousness, we made our way back to the Kenya office to pick up a few more items for the team. On our way out of the parking lot we got a flat tire and had to walk back to the guesthouse. Luckily it wasn’t too far, and everyone but Katie and Sam crashed for a few hours. We made our first dinner tonight: spaghetti, (delicious) Kenyan chapatti bread, tomato sauce and a fruit salad. Chapati is very similar to naan or flat bread. Then we shared more about our lives and our stories of how we came to be apart of Mi2, laughed, cried, and had a bit of time for devotionals/ quiet time. All in all a very wonderful and productive day, we are so thankful to be here.

-LIA Mi2: Kenya Interns

KENYA!

We’re here!! It’s crazy to think that only six days ago we were complete strangers and now we’re in Kenya preparing for a 3-month experience as a team. Needless to say orientation/ directives was amazing. White water rafting and kayaking were excellent bonding experiences that included “riding the bull”, becoming members of the white water swim team, and inhaling pb&j sandwiches both before and after water time. Sam in particular learned how to hold on to a raft for dear life, as he was thrown off about five times, one of which occurred in a class three rapid. He’s a trooper and, thankfully, still alive.

Thanks to7+-hour van rides and the ever-lovely team theme song, “Eternal Flame” by the Bengals the team has bonded really well and been able to focus on our individual career and spiritual goals for the summer. Our strong bond also helped us survive the 22-hour flight-trek from Kentucky out to Nairobi. Sadly we had to part with Jo “Powerhouse” Hufhand (with one “f”) in Amsterdam as she is off to Poland to change kids lives through camp at PRO eM. We miss her a ton. Elise made a lot of friends in line for check-in and boarding, with Americans and other international travelers, and created many Elise-isms along the trip. We all went over brief testimonies and shared some funny stories when we weren’t vegging out on airplane movies and food. And then we finally made it to Nairobi! Moms, everyone is alive, healthy and in one piece with no lost luggage or valuables. We love you!

Holly, Gus and Jacob all met us at the airport (luckily we’re not too hard to spot) and then took us out for some delicious Galito’s chicken. We are so blessed to have such a positive and supportive team here to guide us through this summer and orient us with a bit of the country. Thank you for all of your love and support. Please pray for our team’s humility, patience, and spiritual growth and let us know how we can pray for you. We’ll keep you posted on our adventures and God’s amazing work. Until next time, be blessed.

-LIA Kenya 2011 Interns