This week, a group of young adults went into the Kenyan slums during their Real Life mission trip.
To say the very least, it was a life-changing experience for them. On the Kenya blog, you can read their in-depth reports, but we’ll highlight just a few here.
Amy Johnson remarked on the unimaginable sights she saw in Kibera:
Imagine: smelling burning trash, food cooking from little shacks,
and trash dumps.Imagine: feeling the rough, dirty hands of children all over your
skin because they have never seen a white person before.Imagine: seeing shack after shack piled up next to one another with
tin walls and locking eyes with children with no expression on their
face.Imagine: being in the largest slum in the World… with one million
people crammed into once place and only seeing a fourth of it and still
being overwhelmed.
Drew Hulsey learned an amazing lesson about community and solidarity that he wants to bring home:
The team and I have been to a couple of different slums and all of them
have been different in attitude and style. Kibera is by far the
happiest. The feel is different and people seemed generally happy. I
think the people are happy because of community. If they move away they
would lost it. One thing I have learned in that America has lost
community and the Kibera people will sacrifice comfort to obtain it. The
Kenyan government has even provided apartments right beside the slum,
but a lot of people refused to leave there community. I’m taking
community back to The States.
Sarah Jeffcoat struggled with questions of privilege and opportunity when she walked through the Fuata Nyayo slum:
It took us 10 minutes to walk through the slum to get to the secondary
school that we were speaking and singing to. Those 10 minutes felt like a
lifetime. The smells, the sounds, and the sights are difficult to
describe, but I will attempt. Trash littered the mushy, brown dirt
underneath me… Women and men yelled, “Sister, sister, come buy.” A chorus
of barefoot children sang, “How are you?” in unison. Flies swarmed around goats eating the
leftover corn cobs and candy wrappers piled about two feet high.The
despair in the eyes of the women was as dark as the blackest night. I
gazed down to my dirty brown (once white and pink) tennis shoes so
thankful that my toes were covered, but then I saw three little boys with
huge holes in their shirts, pants barely hanging on, and feet so dusty
you couldn’t see their skin. Tears softly filled my eyes along with
many questions.Why was I born in America and not in a Kenyan slum?
Why did God give me loving parents and not molestation ever since I can
remember? Why do I open my pantry and have a choice of what to eat
instead of a completely empty stomach? Why?
You can read the rest of Sarah’s story here. For more about our college-age missions program, click here.
How would you answer Sarah’s questions?
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