Today was our fourth day serving in Pangani and the MOHI grade school. After a long but wonderful evening in fellowship at Wallace and Mary Kamau’s, most of the team looked a little spent at breakfast and as we boarded the bus. But once on board our bus, our Glocal Pastor Tom inspired us with a devotion that charged us with making today a day to inspire those on our mission path, spreading the love, grace and humility of Christ such that years from now our actions would be remembered even if not our names. Once on site, we started again preparing our seven classrooms for VBS, decorating each with colorful and fun props that transformed each classroom into a stage to share customs, facts and traditions from each country represented in our Passport to Awareness Program. And as in the days leading up to today, we were rewarded with hosts of children filing into our classrooms that are polite, eager to learn and so hungry for a relationship with all of us who have traveled here to serve in the schools.
In particular, our last two classes of 5th grade students today were super well mannered, attentive and very bright. Their teachers were also very engaged in our lesson and seemed thankful for a chance to sit back and be a student as well. Every class could recite their memory verse with ease, learned a snippet of the same verse in Filippino and taught us a song that they knew. There is nothing like listening to these students sing – it is like a chorus of angels here on Earth.
When asked tonight to share one word that summarized our day, I said “Light”. Not only is our memory verse John 8:12 in which Jesus says, “I am the light of the world”, but each day here I see more light in the classroom – one, because we’ve been moving up one floor in the building each day and higher above the ground level, but two, because in the eyes of the kids I can see the proverbial “light at the end of the tunnel” for many approaching 6th and 7th grade. That’s because the students that are made ready for and can pass a scholastic exam for entrance into middle school would be afforded the opportunity to go to the Joska boarding school and, for now, move up and out of the slums. The sign on the Pangani school building sums it up best, “Missions of Hope International, Transforming the valley of darkness into the mountain of God”. I pray these students keep their faith, love of the Lord and work hard in school to find their way out.
-Dawn Schepleng for the Kenya team
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