Welcome to my blog!

This is a new experience for me, having my own blog.  It has been a harrowing experience for me, trying various complicated steps with Ipage, WordPress, Mojo, etc. over four days to establish it.  And then after talking with daughter Rebekah, she led me through it with none other than GMail, and low and behold, in THREE MINUTES I had my blog up and running! God bless you, Rebekah!

When we went to Kenya in 2013, I got started posting a daily update on the Bethlehem United Methodist Church blog. It was a rewarding experience for me, and it really got me thinking each evening when I typed up the post how blessed each day was. I realized how awesome an experience this trip was, and it gave me an opportunity to hopefully give others a glimpse into what we experienced. Not everyone has the desire or opportunity to go on a trip like this, but many friends have given resources and prayer support that allow us to go.  But we go as your representatives, and it is my desire to bring you feedback on what your support has allowed the team to accomplish.

It's not my MO to be a preacher, and in a lot of cases, I don't know where you are coming from spiritually as individuals.  I hope I don't offend anyone who is coming from a different faith perspective.  But I would be disingenuous if I didn't give the Lord credit for what He did for us and through us.  His hand of blessing was so evident on our trip last year, it was unmistakable.  The experiences we had working and serving in Kenya were remarkable enough by themselves, but just the logistics of our actual trip were no less remarkable.  We had 29 of us on the trip last year, flew from JFK to Amsterdam with a second flight from Amsterdam to Nairobi and returned the same route, no lost luggage coming or going, and the Jomo Kenyata International Airport international terminal burned to the ground two days before we were to fly home and we nearly left on time (only two hours late, as the first international flight after the fire!).  Some may try to explain that as coincidence, but to me, there is no question where the praise belongs!

This year, there are 27 of us going, including 12 newbys and 15 veterans.  We will be flying from Philadelphia to London Heathrow, and on to Nairobi after a 4 hour layover.  We will be in Nairobi for just one night and then moving on to Nakuru for the remainder of the 10 days on the ground in Kenya. As always on missions, the activities are subject to change on a daily basis. At this point, we anticipate that we will again be doing hygiene training associated with our distribution of personal water purification systems, work at the Springs of Hope orphanage, and our major focus is to be construction of a church at the Gituamba IDP camp. For those of you who don't know the history, the IDP (Internally Displaced Persons) camps were formed in about 2008 as squalid tent camps for people who had been uprooted from their homes by ethnic fighting after a contentious presidential election. Those uprooted people have now been permanently settled on

small parcels of land in these camps with their own timber, mud and corrugated metal roofed huts. Last trip, we worked on two of these camp locations, and it looks like this year we will be focusing primarily on work at Gituamba.

Stay tuned, and I'll keep you posted as we get underway.  My first post from Kenya will probably be Monday night when we get to Nairobi, just to let you know we arrived safely.

May God bless you for your interest in what He is doing in Kenya!

Jim