Settling In

Picture this:

Dirt paths (really roads) with two hardened tracks from vans and mule carts, not straight but with an obvious destination, intersecting at what appears to be random places at first. Along the roads are some large houses with tile roofs, some tin shacks where families live, a few shops (with self made speed bumps to slow down traffic ... for increased business?) and a variety of goats, a few donkies and cows. Roosters crow and the sound of six pair of boys shoes, tattered mostly, creates a percussive beat in the cool, misty morning. An older boy, Joseph, leads the pace with an obvious sense that if alone, he would be running twice as fast. Following the pack, keeping 'pace', is me - a tall white guy with longer strides that do not match the boys rhythm and are echoed with the sounds of burning lungs. They know it means a slower run, but they love waking me up to come along.

Aside from establishing a morning running routine, we are settling in now that we have our bags and have really started to get to know both the children at the farm and the team members that we are working with. Staying at the boys facility, we see them more often and they eagerly wait for us to return from our tasks at several points in the day. Names are becoming easier to match to the many faces and it is easy to see that these boys who were forced to act like 'men' at such a young age, crave interaction with adults, crave the feeling of being able to be a child amongst elders.

After my run (and without a shower), we ate a quick breakfast and attended chapel with the whole crew of students and team members. Charles gave the team members a very 'on target' talk before class about rules and procedures and encouraged each teacher to be cautious of letting rules 'rule' our environments. Like the pharasies, this becomes dangerous. 'Relationships come first,' he spoke. The Coulston's have done an amazing job at making this facility a well run place. They give appropriate guidance when needed, but leave the program to be run by Mbuvi, a former street kid turned program administrator. Made in the Streets is run not only by Kenyans, but by people who grew up in the street environment and have taken the opportunity to change their lives. They know what they are up against in so many ways. In addition to having the right people in place, the program has an amazing sense of sustainability from the food grown on the farm, to the students cooking their own meals every night, many ways of empowering the kids to take responsibility and support the whole group and the list goes on. Whether this was pre-planned and well thought out or whether it just had to be this way in order to make it work, Made in the Streets empowers kids who have nothing. In addition, the Coulston's both work in the relevance of Christianity in ways that reflect the nature of Christ.

After this afternoon, we have some what of a gameplan which is helping me feel a bit more settled in as well. Tomorrow morning, Darren will observer some classes to assess what areas we can best help the team members, Emily has plans with Darlene (as well as plans to put her experience with teaching tough kids to work in working with the teachers here) and I will be helping Charles weld a pole to extend an antennea in the hopes of establishing communication between a few of the facilities. None of know exactly what we'll be doing, but we know when to show up.

One other intersting note was talking with two older boys, both nineteen, who are not technically in the MITS program but are staying on one of the piecs of property (the 20 acres) for different purposes. Evance ran across MITS serindipitously and Mbuvi saw a sharp kid that could help with the farm and help with the boys. Kennedy was forced out of his home about 1 1/2 hours north of Nairobi during the violence this past December/January after the elections and was able to clarify what has been happening in Kenya between tribes and how many people are being displaced as they are threatened with their lives to leave. Simply because he is of a different tribe, he was chased from his home, spent 3 nights in the forest and was able to get a hold of Mbuvi. If not for Mbuvi's open doors, he very well could be in a displacement camp, truly a humanitarian disaster with people living in tents with very little to eat and nothing to resolve their violent removal from their homes. We get snippets in the U.S. - in fact, we saw CNN at the airport today when getting our bags, reporting on none other than the UFO 'mystery' in Texas?!?! Reporters live at the scene, money spent on 'experts'?! When you see that after driving past a displacement camp filled with thousands of hungry and beat down people, after watching a man high on who-knows-what spinning through a sea of cars in the slums, after seeing men pulling carts stacked with more than a thousand pounds of weight, after hearing the story of a girl who is at MOST 13 years old (probably younger as her feet swing from the chair when sitting) who just had her second baby one week ago while living on the streets... you start to wonder why we think so much of ourselves back home.