In a country where poverty expands my capacity to grasp the reality of what a desperate person may do when desperation means death or life…. like when a mama looks at her children as a burden rather than a blessing.  When a man threatens a life of another when he loses his job…

There is a reason I am not writing the story and God is.  He knows how it all works out, where it all leads, what it all means.

Is God still a good God?  Is God still in the slums where naked toddlers roam about, unsupervised- where a mama beats her child so badly that she goes unconscious?  Is God in the prisons where innocent men and women reside, falsely accused?  In a world pocketed with pain? What about the crumbling marriage or a terminally ill child?

How do we choose to allow the holes to become seeing-through-to-God places? To more-God places?  How do I give up resentment for gratitude, gnawing anger for spilling joy?  How do I give up crippling fear for courageous faith?

In places where it seems impossible to believe God’s goodness – that God surely cannot know or care about this place -  I turn to His word, which I believe is true and relevant to every culture and person.  I flip open to Romans 8.  I read “And we know that God works for the good of those who love him…” and “if God is for us, then who is against us?”.

Sometimes we are so trapped that it forces us to only look up.  There are hard questions to ask here but there are awesome answers and they only come in the Name of a God who knows so much more than my broken, little brain can wrap around.  There are moms who love their children and work so hard to provide for them.   There are children’s homes here who take the rejected, abused children and nurture them to be God-fearing men and women.

God is faithful.  Even in the tough.  Taking the tough to become seeing-through-to-God  places is possible, but not alone.  He is the only one that can help us SEE.

*Italics emphasis placed on Ann Voskamp’s “10,000 Gifts” quotes.

She walks with 2 friends today. She sometimes has to walk alone. Six kilometers to this forest. This is area one. Areas two, three and four give and take 2 kilometers more. She has to get food for her children to eat today. So she presses forward.

She takes the 60 cents she saved from yesterday’s labor and gives it to the Forester. He controls the coming and going of firewood from his forest. She takes the bundle of firewood, wraps it in strips of cloth and hoists it up on her head, preparing for the journey home. It’s 12 noon.

Steady, strong, slowly, Mama balances the bundle atop her sturdy frame as she steps 1, 2, 3. . . This is daily life -to sell this bundle for $1.20/day and save half to feed her family.

She is a firewood carrier.

If it is the dry season, she can afford to make a second trip. But it is now raining, and she will only be able to do one.

“How do you survive,” I ask her.

Giggle. BIG sigh.

“Only God knows”

Jua Project’s story was accepted to their website and we are currently on their front page.  We are trying to raise awareness and funding for 3 sewing machines and 32 chickens for our moms as we support them in becoming self-sustainable.

Currently we are #9.  We are trying to get one of the top 4 spots and we are SO close.

Please help us and PLEASE spread the word.  If we raise $432, we are able to supply our moms in a next step in sustainability.

It’s free to help us.  Here is what I need you guys to do!

1.  Go to www.hopemob.org and set up and account (super easy, free)

2.  Activate your account and you will have 1,000 free points.  “Boost” our story to help us reach the top 4 spots so we may be featured as their cover story.  THAT’S IT!!

Will you please help us by doing this and tell your friends, too?

We are also on Twitter!  Follow @JuaProject to get all the latest details on what is happening with our moms.

Meet Florence.  Florence is a former firewood carrier, grandmother to dozens of kids and lives in one of the slums in Kitale.  She offers a strong dynamic of leadership and spiritual encouragement to the other moms in our group. She arrives every day with a smile on her face and leads the time of prayer and worship every morning before our day begins.

Meet Gladys.  Gladys and Florence know eachother as they are neighbors in the slum.  Gladys, a mother to 6 children, also worked as a firewood carrier for several years until just a few weeks ago, she was attacked by robbers and was severely injured on her chest and legs and could  not walk.  Bridget knew Gladys from her previous trip to Kenya in 2011 and found her ‘by chance’ just after her attack.  Bridget started caring for Gladys’ injuries and praying over her each day.  I’m not telling the story well…but you can read it here and be certain that we serve a GREAT GOD who knows all of our needs.  We rejoice in the miracle of healing that comes when we have faith and pray in the name of Jesus.

Meet Rosemary.  Rosemary has quite the story to tell.  Both she and her husband have taken in children who have been abandoned for various reason, around the Kitale region and Northern Kenya for several years.  Together, they ‘adopted’ over 14 children.  In 2008, Rosemary’s husband was caught in a bank robbery during the post election violence and was murdered.  Still, this has not stopped her from trusting the Lord to provide for her and her children.  Rosemary has a nice space where her kids can study for school and sleep on matresses.  She also has a cow and a few turkeys.  Rose feeds her children beans and maize 2 of the 3 meals each day. 

 One month ago, Rosemary took in her 18th child, Zeporah.  We are unsure of Zeporah’s age, however we feel a good guess is around 3 or 4 years old.  She was found just outside of Kitale, completely abandoned.  Her father was found but denied her and Rosemary went through the process to foster Zeporah and call her “daughter”. 

Z is extremely malnourished.  When she was found, her face, hands and feet were extremely bloated and her hair was grey and falling out.  Today, just a mere 30 days later, we see Zeporah running, speaking, trusting her caregiver, Mama Rose.  Her hair is starting to grow back.

Rose just completed her first week with us.  She texted me yesterday saying how thankful for Jua she is and the income it provides her family.  She was able to take 2 of her daughters into the clinic yesterday to have much-needed medical procedures done that she did not have the means to pay for.  The cost of the proceedure = $10.

Zeporah is a unique baby in that she needs a special diet for her body to process nutrients.  Severe malnutrition causes our organs to fail and not have the ability to process foods the way a ‘normal’ body would.  So, we are looking for a sponsor for Zeporah for the next 6 months to help her pay for the special food Zeporah needs.  Please email me at jua_project@yahoo.com if you are interested to learn more.

Thank you for praying for us and for Jua.  We are continuing to grow and blossom and we will continue to take every mom the Lord puts in our path.

More to come….

God continues to work in our family’s life and it has been a great joy to see Him work in the lives of our children, our marriage, in the people of Kenya and see miracles happen that only He could do.

Our volunteer base has expanded tremendously, and I am so humbled to think of all the help that we have received.  Bridget, Hannah and the Tinsman family are people that have all moved to Kitale to help with Jua in one form or another.  I will post photos when I seem to have a speedier internet connection.  In the USA, we have wonderful people who are helping behind the scenes get our financials, our website and retailers organized to showcase the jewelry our moms are making.

Jua Project has expanded in several ways the past month.  We currently have 8 moms in our group.  About half of them are HIV positive and of those, many of their children have HIV as well.  All of our moms are single or widowed.  All of our moms have or have had children who have been severely malnourished at one time.  All of our moms struggle to provide for their children and are barely scraping by.

We meet daily for 5 hours, working on jewelry that you can pre order today, to be delivered in early July to the US.  (More info on that later).  We used to start at 9am, but now I have barely taken a sip of my coffee at 7:30am and they are standing at our gate, waiting to start their day.  The first hour of our time together has included a time of prayer/meditation and singing.  African style.  I find myself jumping in my jammies most days.  10,000 reasons again to Praise God for all He is doing here.

Jua Project has been a spontaneous work only the Lord could do to help single moms in Kenya.  It is our prayer that Jua will continue to expand and grow and we can help mamas here-and other places feed their children and keep them out of children’s homes.

We have the new ability to receive donations online.  If you are a current sponsor for one of our families, would like to purchase jewelry that has been displayed on our Facebook page, or would like to give to our general fund for feeding needy families in our area, please click the donate button below Jua’s logo.

My internet connection has been so slow for several weeks, making photos very difficult for me to post on here (it’s a miracle that I am to ble to write this!) so, bear with me as I try  to post more frequently the ways you can help!!

I’ve learned that raising children in slums does not have to be an option.

There is hope here, Jua.  Mamas love their babies, just like I do.  They want to provide a future for their children, just like me.

I’ve learned that we can take an impossible situation

douse it in prayer

sprinkle in a bunch of love, compassion

and hard work.

And we can see lives transformed,

joy,

miracles in the lives that want to live and capture their purpose.

Jua Project is so brand new, yet we have seen leaps and bounds in the mamas we serve

and it’s a great honor to see their lives transformed

one bead at a time.

Me either……ahem.

But sometimes, I just need to pack up my kids…….. and march straight home. 

And call their father……of course.

because he always knows how to keep his cool….

………he’s such a humble man.

I had a brief conversation with my friend here that her mom had sent her some money for me to use for Jua Project ministry here and I was welcome to pick it up anytime.  I ran over to her home to pick it up and headed to the grocery store.  I was able to purchase food for the week for Josephine and the money I received covered the food bill-to the last cent (er….schilling).

As I left the grocery store, I wondered to myself how I was going to bring the food to her, as she lived far away and she didn’t have a cell phone, so I was unsure if she was home.  I called a piki (a motorcycle taxi) and was standing outside waiting to be picked up.

Up walks Josephine with her two beautiful babies, greeting me, as she happened to be in town.  I smiled and handed her the groceries and she safely arrived home with food for tonight and the rest of the week.

She told me that her food had run out completely and she was asking God where she was going to get more food.

Money for groceries.  Making contact at the exact moment of needing to find her. 

That is God working here, in a place where most people have nothing. Nothing.  This is the dependency on God that a lot of Kenyans have no choice but to depend on-because they struggle to make ends meet.

I am so thankful that I was able to experience gaining everything from nothing-miracles.  It puts me in a place that trusts God for big things.  It reassures me that He is GOOD and knows our needs-down to the last Schilling.

Have an awesome day!

Our kids seem to be growing up way too fast.  Alayna is now RUNNING everywhere, Collin is now “a really cool man”, and Ben can take on his Dad in a fair wrestling match and almost win every time   Here are some photos to share with you what our family has been up to.

 We recently took a visit to Nairobi’s Elephant Orphanage where we were able to see beautiful baby elephants who had been rescued from the bush in Kenya because their mother’s had been killed by poachers and other horrible ways.  Does it get any cuter than baby elephants? 

 It gave the kids a great lesson on caring for our environment and how precious the animals in our world are.  Each elephant has a caretaker 24 hours a day.  They are released into a National Park in Kenya after up to 10 yrs of care here.

We took some time at a nice guest house in Nairobi and let the kids swim and swim and swim.  Alayna almost was too brave, making us nervous, as she happily plunged into the pool several times, going underwater and bouncing back to the surface with a big grin on her face.

   Food is always a hit in our family-especially when I am not cooking   Going to Java House in Nairobi is such a treat and having a nice burger, burrito, coffee or shake is always welcome!

Giraffes are pretty awesome out here.  There is a neat place to go and feed them here in Kenya.  The kids thought this was a big hit and enjoyed feeding them handfuls of food.

Almost too much….. 

All our photos with Grandparents seem to be on my other camera that is currently in the Massai Mara.    Thankfully, I have a few shots of the Great Rift Valley.  We can never get sick of this view!!

We are so thankful for your support of our family out here.   Whether that is notes in the mail, prayer, financial gifts, boxes of goodies, Skype calls…we are SO THANKFUL for your thoughtfulness and support. 

 It makes Kenya feel like….home.

“The purpose of this trip was to scout out a very remote area of Kenya, just East of where our family lives.  Granted, there are not direct roads to take me there, so I had to travel an hour South(ish) and back North again to get to this place.  A direct road too and from Kitale would have made too much sense.  And nothing seems to make sense here.

First, for my transportation, I could have walked or taken public transportation.  To avoid becoming flattened, I boarded a ‘truck’ that looked like this.  I was told that the journey was “not long”.  This phrase can mean 5 minutes or 5 hours in Kenya.  My bag was on top, I was sitting in the middle of the crowd of 18 people with my nose shoved in an armpit of a man who was harassing me that I was ‘branded’.  People were on every side of me and above me as we bumped along the road.  2 1/2  hours later, I arrived in Marakwet, Kenya.

The scenery was breathtaking.  The scenery here never gets old.  The trek into the mountains was a steady up or down hike.  It was a couple of miles in and a couple of miles up.  We were so hungry when we arrived and lunch was served about an hour later.  The hospitality was amazing.  The food was …. traditional.    I ate substances that I had never eaten before and I was served milk straight from the cow in front of the house.  The people here had very little compared to American standards, but yet they were serving us-joyfully. 

I was the first white man that many of these folks had ever seen.  I heard kids from far away seeing me coming their direction and screaming at the top of their lungs, running away.  One time, some children were walking towards us.  When they saw me, the white man, their eyes bugged out and they ran away screaming, trampling over a smaller child, who struggled to get up, screaming and running away.  I even heard once someone yell “THERE IS AN ALBINO IN OUR VILLAGE”.  Albinos and white people are often associated with witchcraft here, so I understood what their anxiety was coming from.

To use the bathroom, we were provided with a ‘squatty potty’.  However the roof on this thing was about 4 feet high.  Thankfully there was a space in the boards in the roof, so while using the facilities, I could peep my head outside and enjoy the view.  There is nothing like looking over myh shoulder and seeing a man in a box with his head sticking out, smiling and notifying me that he is ‘dropping water’.

Sleeping.  Peter and I shared a small, mud hut.  The walls were made of mud and sticks and it had a grass roof.  I had a bed to sleep on, thankfully.  As the night wore on, chickens started coming to our door and we kept shooing them out.  There was a stubborn chicken in a box in the corner that would not move.  The hen would there and whine and peck at me when I was turned away.  As Peter and I were chasing chickens out of our hut, a woman came in the door, clearly uncomfortable and politely informed us that the chickens come inside at night.

So there I was, me, 25 chicks and 2 hens and Peter….in this mud hut.  Chickens squeak and mimic each other…all night long.  At 6:30am, they all got up together and headed for the door, pooping and waiting for us let them out.  The box hen stayed there, as she laid the eggs for breakfast.

I’ve never been more annoyed and amazed at the life of a chicken than now.

Back into the packed truck I went from Marakwet to Kitale.  Only this time, I had the pleasure of riding out of the forest on TOP of the matatu.

In Kenya we often see such gorgeous scenery juxtaposed with horrific poverty.  These couple days seemed to balance Kenya’s beauty of the scenery with the beauty of the Kenyan people’s hospitality and satisfaction in being content with what they have.

I am looking forward to helping a team from the USA come and experience the beauty of the people here and serve the people of Kenya.”

And as my husband and I continue to find our ‘compromise”, I still hold firm to: