I arrived in Kenya a week and a half ago along with seven other volunteers. We will be serving in different organizations all over Kenya. For the next month, we will be living near one another and our site-coordinator for a bit of in-country orientation. At the end of the month, I will begin my work with the All-Africa Conference of Churches. Those are all the details I know. Now, this lack of a concrete plan has been interesting. Each day we all band together to try to figure out what exactly we are supposed to be doing and where exactly we are supposed be at any given time. Take today for example. Our first task of the day was to go to a church where we had a lecture on the spirituality of Kenya. From there we had very specific instructions to go to one particular fish restaurant we had visited before. However, we had no directions, just a driver and a small bus with no real time schedule. Any time we receive such instructions, I tend to think of it as a mini-test to see if we can be patient enough to figure out what is going on and if we can muster the grace to be calm in the process. We did not know where the lecture was to take place, so we notified the office we were there and proceeded to the sanctuary to hold our morning devotion together. Eventually, our speaker found us. We listened eagerly and then shared a cup of tea. Slowly, we narrowed in on the location of the restaurant after asking many people for help. We all enjoyed lunch and made it back home safely. Becoming dependant on others is also part of our training, and we are getting pretty good at it. It will be another time of transition when we all split up and go to our own sites, as we will have to find new people to support us and for us to support.
