Imoni School in Nakuru

On Wednesday, my team, Lois, Mesh (our translator) and Abby (she was with WHM a year ago in Nairobi and came back for a visit this summer…she is staying with us until she has to return mid July…she is a God send and we all wish she could stay until August) all left Nairobi to head to a smaller city called Nakuru. Once we arrived in Nakuru we went straight to Imoni School where we planned to get the heights and weights of all 300 plus students. While Lois, Heather, Stephanie, and Abby worked on the “medical” side of our day, Jenny, Emily, Mesh, and I all prepared to tell the story of Moses asking Pharaoh to let the Israelites go. I told the story from the Big Picture Storybook Bible while Jenny and Emily asked questions with the puppets. The kids seemed to really enjoy it. I think most of them could understand me…some of the younger kids didn’t get all of it, but that is okay. We also taught them some new songs…they were very cute trying to do the motions.

This school was very different from any other place we had visited. These kids were captivated by us. We arrived at the gate only to have our car surrounded by around 150 kids chanting, “How are you…How are you..” That is how they great us in English with their little British accents. I for one could not stop smiling as we got out of the car only to have several hundreds of kids want to greet you with a hand shake and “How are you?”…precious…My favorite part of the day had to be when we were playing with the kids out in the courtyard. We brought out the bubbles and I literally have never seen anything like it! I don’t care how long it takes, I am going to download the video I took of Emily blowing the 1^st set of bubbles for these kids…it really was one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

As I sit here and reflect over the day I am tempted to think, “Katie, what did you really do at that school…blew bubbles, played games, sang, told a Bible story…doesn’t seem like much does it? But then I am reminded of the circumstance most of these kids live in (the school is located in the middle of a slum)…this was a day I was able to serve some of my younger brothers and sisters in Christ. How do you serve these children? By loving them, hugging them, playing and singing together, but most of all laughter is something that is the same in both cultures. For many, they were able to spend the day in a safe place doing something they rarely have the opportunity to do…they were able to freely be children where the worries of the world could subside for a brief moment in time. It truly was a joyful day!