Day 146 - On the Move & Video #8

December 4, 2012 (Sam)

      For the last five months, Christina and I have been working to develop a child sponsorship program for an NGO called Beacon of Hope outside of Nairobi, Kenya. Our desire coming over here was to be able to implement a program that would facilitate an easy relationship between international donors and needy children in Kenya. We have come to realize that Beacon of Hope has a different vision for how they see this happening. While our focus was primarily on engaging international support, Beacon hopes to be able to empower these children through more local means, engaging members in their immediate community by encouraging investment in the lives of children here through support not only with their school fees but through mentorship and one-on-one interaction as well. This takes a lot of the options for international support off the table, including how we’ve encouraged people to be willing to support the children in the past, through the online sponsorship program that we were hoping to set up. This has been a hard reality for us to stomach, but we are confident that God is using this situation with the best interests of the kids in mind.

      All this to say that we are finishing our work at Beacon of Hope earlier than previously anticipated. We have helped them put systems in place that will hopefully be very beneficial to both Kenyans interested in helping the local youth, and the children who are still in such desperate need of support for their schooling. With our work at Beacon finished, we are turning our attention to other project opportunities through some different local organizations that we’ve become affiliated with other the last months.

      With this shift in focus, has also come a shift in location. We have moved out of the Beacon of Hope guesthouse and further into the heart of Ongata Rongai, the town we have come to love.

      Life outside of the Beacon compound, for the three days that we’ve known it, is intriguingly different. People used to have to go through two gates and seven guards to get to where we were living. Now we live in an apartment where there is only one gate and one night guard between us and the outside world. And it’s kind of a relief actually. Since we first settled into the guesthouse at Beacon, we’ve felt like we were missing out on a big part of the experience of living in Kenya, being that we were existing almost entirely within the confines of the buttoned-up Beacon compound. Now we are just living in the local community, like any other Kenyan. The accommodations are a tad primitive, but we like the simplicity of life here. We compare it to an extended backpacking trip: cooking with a propane stove, taking bucket showers, no refrigerator. Basically, we love it.

Check out a video tour of our new place!