Ray of Hope 2010--The Journey Begins!

Today, the Glide Ray of Hope team 2010 leaves for Kenya. The team includes Craig Wood (team leader), Naima Bryant, Katie Burke, Kelli Jew, Benita LaScola, Robin Ridenour, and Pastor Karen Oliveto.

This year, the team will be providing supplemental educational programming for the Ray of Hope Learning Center in Kawangware, one of Nairobi's largest slums. Those of us who were on the last trip will never forget the teachers telling us how they couldn't understand why the lively children they sent home from school of Friday came back on Monday so lethargic, until they realized that many of the children don't eat from Friday lunch until Monday morning when they return to school.

We will be setting up a computer learning center as well as providing a range of educational activities. We are sure that even though we are there to help teach, we will be learning so much as well.

Life in Nairobi's Slums

Katie:

This Daily Nation article provides an illuminating and sobering glimpse at life in Nairobi's slums. Particularly haunting was the quote that it is "not uncommon for a lively child in her class to go home with a drunk father, only to return home the next morning 'like a torn and tormented ghost, who never smiles in the same way again.'"

Yet, as residents or even one-time visitors can attest, depravity is not the only face of the slums. I frequently speak of the palpable joy that effuses from the people who suffer as this article describes. The Nairobi slum dwellers I know are heroic, forever shining their bright spirits. Notwithstanding the atrocities of their daily lives, their cultural gratitude is immense.

Before I traveled to the Kawangware slum of Nairobi, I had never seen such spiritual wealth - even in my own country, the United States of America, where we have many collective blessings to celebrate.

Spiritual riches aside, those in the slums need help. I continually ask myself, "What more can I do to keep their felicity bulbs burning?"