Thursday: August 10, 2006; 9:12 AM CDT

[Mike:] Thank you for your prayers. I slept soundly on Tuesday and Wednesday night. That makes it much easier to deliver the lectures each day. The first Pastor's Book Set just ended a couple of hours ago and it was a tremendous blessing. These pastors are great lovers of our God and have such joy in their hearts. They were so appreciative of the conference and every one must have thanked me half a dozen times. They each received 60 books to start a very fine library of their own. Most of them have very few books, perhaps only a Bible. The gift of this many quality resources in several areas from preaching to commentaries to pastoral care is a great blessing for them. Their joy at receiving these books is very evident, and in this case, the pictures are worth more than any words I can say. God is so good. Today while I was finishing with the pastors, Lorna took a tour of the city with short term missionaries from SIM. It was a prayer tour and they saw some troubling sights. Here's Lorna to say more:

[Lorna:] Nairobi is a city of about 5.3 million people. On our tour we visited the most impoverished and most affluent areas of the city. Kibera is a slum only a 20 minute walk from the Fregerio's SIM compound and home to an estimated 1.3 million of the city's inhabitants. It's Africa largest slum area. It's impossible to adequately describe the poverty conditions of this huge area, but I'll give it a go. Our first view of the slum was just a sea of metal roofs running into each other surrounded by hords of Kenyans and trash everywhere. There are no toilets (you can take it from there), very limited running water, no electricity in most areas, and certainly no trash cans. Most of the homes are 10 by 10 shanties with dirt floors. People are flooding into Nairobi from the country to find work and end up with no employment and living in Kibera. It was shocking to discover that our tour guide was a resident along with his wife and three children. His challenge to us at the end of the tour was how could we best present the Gospel to those people. I had trouble responding since I was still trying to pick my jaw up from the floor. Maybe I will be able to access my feelings about the tour by the time I'm back in Michigan, but I doubt it. I do know that I'm glad I went and I am certainly going to be praying for the people of Kabira and the SIM missionaries who are working there.

[Editor's note: to get a clearer visual idea of what Lorna's writing about, see photos of Kibera by clicking on this note.]

[Mike:] Lorna and I will be out of computer range from now until Sunday, as we are going on a Safari to see the jumbo, simba, twiga and perhaps the duma (though he runs very fast). In the meantime, you can figure out what each one is, which shouldn't be too hard since I gave you a clue on the duma.

Please enjoy the pictures and keep up the prayers. We'll report back next week.

Love,

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The Marches in Kenya: Calendar Index  |  Photographs of Kibera