Harbour Heads Home

This past week has been an eventful one! The team from Harbour just left on Friday, and they truly did God’s work while they were with us at PACE. First of all, for those of us who don’t know, the entire team was ALL above age 60! Isn’t that cool?! For two of the members, Grace & Jim, it was even their first time in Africa! The team spent their two-week mission working in the musty basement (a room just off of our apartment) and miraculously turned what was once a room full of hundreds of boxes of books into a functional children’s library! The PACE carpentry team made shelves for the books that are retrofitted to some of the odd corners and varying levels of the room – they are quite a talented bunch. We went into the library again today to show it off to two of the teachers, and we were once again surprised at how much order Jim, Grace, Gary and Cathy brought to that room – they even put the books into sections complete with labels! You should have seen this room before hand … there was barely room to blink with all of the boxes in there. So from us and PACE, we send out a big THANK-YOU!

Another aspect of the team’s ministry was to visit various orphanages in the area to distribute nutrient supplements. The team was lead by one of the former elders at Harbour, Gary Anderson, who has a PhD in bio-stats and is also doing a study at Telitha Kum, an orphanage with HIV/AIDS children. The study attempts to quantify the effects of a particular set of nutrient supplements on the quality of life for these children. He brought a team this past May to initiate the study and this trip was the conclusion, though the distribution of nutrients will be ongoing (and much needed). We haven’t yet heard the results, but Gary mentioned that he was pleased with the way the study had progressed. There is much more to this story, so when you see Gary at Harbour in the coming weeks, ask about what he’s been doing here in Kenya – it’s been really encouraging for us to see it in action!

I (Ryan) spent most of this week and last week bottled up in Wachira’s office helping to piece together a 100-page beast dubbed “the board document”. My primary job was to take all of the stuff that had to be in there and fit it into the least amount of pages possible. I was also the third level of spell check – which is a bit scary since I rely heavily on spellchecker to autocorrect my horrendous spelling. Shhhh … don’t tell Wachira, k?
Speaking of Wachira, he rolled out yesterday for his annual trip to the US – we are praying that it will be a good trip for him, and that everything God wants out of it will come to fruition.

Taryn got some good news this week that the headmaster of the academy has been really impressed with her teaching, and most notably with the amount of preparation she puts into her lessons. He also told her that he could tell the students liked her classes because when he “tested” them by saying they wouldn’t have her class one day, they all became distraught. And this makes sense to me, since there isn’t a day that goes by without (at least) half a dozen children asking Taryn if they have one of her classes that day. They are cute!

Well, this will be it for now – we’re hoping to get more pictures up this week of the Harbour team’s visit and of Taryn’s classes.

Couple of prayer requests:
1) I am thinking of doing something musical with the kids – the music teacher from Tanzania hasn’t come back to work and there’s been no word on where he is or if he will be coming back. I’m not really keen on teaching per say, but the choir has suffered since he is not here to direct them and I was thinking of stepping in somehow so that they can get geared up for a mini-tour of the local churches.

2) Taryn has been sick for the past week – some sort of re-occurring head cold that refuses to relent. She’s already gone through two boxes of Kleenex! We’re not sure what is causing this, but we have our suspicions that it might have something to do with the fact that our apartment is made of concrete and is constantly dusty. We’re going to head into town this week to try to find something that will clear her head.