Here's the Scoop

Since I never really explained the situation here in town – we had no clue until we got here – here’s the deal.

There are Christians here (about twenty-seven little churches in a population of about 60,000), but they are almost all down-countries, people from tribes in Western Kenyan that received the gospel a hundred years ago or more.

Churches in Western Kenya here about the need here, and send a missionary to start a church. They do, and they get converts, but they are all down-country people.

It’s not that down-countries don’t need to hear the gospel, but the effect is kind of like sending a missionary up to the Rez to minister to the Yakama people and then having him plant a church that is full of white people or full of Latin migrant workers. People would be getting saved, but the Yakama Nation would be no more reached.

Out of the twenty-seven churches in town, there are only two that are making any real effort to reach out to the Somali people who are the majority tribe here.

In this immediate area, there are six tribes that are still classified as unreached – all of them Muslim.

Those are the people we are here to reach out to and to encourage the church here to reach out to.

Although we’re not the only Christians here, we are more or less the only white people here.

There are several NGOs in town (Unicef, World Food Program, etc), but, really, the only other white people here outside of our group are with “Civilian Affairs,” meaning that they are affiliated with a foreign military and are here doing relief and development work. They only come for short stints – a month to seven months – and, when they’re not working, they pretty much hole up in the only western style hotel in town.

The NGOs don’t really want anything to do with them, since, even though most of the Civilian Affairs guys actually are civilians, they are still affiliated with the military. But, a few of them are aware – in vague terms – of what we’re here for, and they have offered their help if we’re ever working a project that they could assist with.

(A few months of either being stared at or shunned by everyone in town makes it pretty exciting when someone is willing to talk about working with you – even when those somebodies are a group of nineteen to twenty-something college kids who just got into town…lol.)