Day 2: Sunday

We woke up to a fresh morning and another wonderful breakfast. Each day the hotel lays out a great breakfast buffet and custom-order omelets.

We loaded up onto the vans around 9:30 and headed to Pangani - the largest of the slum schools. They host a church service every Sunday there, and this week's service was a special one. They had all of the students who are preparing to take the 8th grade exams come up for encouragement and prayers. I believe there were about 37 of these students. To explain, the average person in Nairobi has what is called a "standard 8" education - meaning that they have completed schooling through 8th grade. At this point, they are required to take a very competitive and intense exam to be considered qualified to advance to high school. Passing the exam is not a guarantee for a high school education - it simply means that if there is room in the high school, and if the parents are willing to pay (most can't afford it), they student can continue on.

What made this service especially special was that the students from the mission who will be testing this week are the mission's first "graduating class" of 8th graders. In 2000, Mary (director of the mission) gathered together a rag-tag bunch of 50 pre-schoolers. These kids were considered by the community to be the worst, most desperate cases in a portion of the slums that even other areas of slum were afraid of. Currently, the mission has over 3000 kids in 10 schools throughout the slums. These 37 were from that original seed group (the rest of the 50 are still in the school, but some are repeating grades). It was emotional to watch the Kenyans celebrate the investment that has been made in these children who would otherwise have not made it to this stage of education.

After the services, we had a lunch and discussion with Mary about the history of the mission, some of it's programs, and their hopes for the future. Mary is an amazing individual - and she has assembled an incredible team of leaders. It was really good for our group to hear from her firsthand about the vision and strategy of the mission.

From there we had a brief tour of the Pangani school. For the rest of the week we will be working on the other side of the Mathare Valley slum, in a "neighborhood" called Kosovo.

After coming back to the hotel, we all went next door to an open air market and tried our hand at haggling with vendors of various souvenirs. This is an intense experience for most of the group - up to this point the advice has been: be polite, ask questions, share your life with the people... In the market, the advice is opposite: Be rude, don't make eye contact, don't show your cards... Intense to say the least. But, some cool treasures found...

Dinner at the hotel - lots of laughing as a group.

We just wrapped up an evening meeting where we are getting our bearings on the plans for the next several days. We anticipate hard, hard work - but we're really excited to be rolling up our sleeves and diving in.

Off to sleep now... Day starts early tomorrow!