We’ve been following the adventures of Kim Hart, a young woman from England doing her five-month Discipleship Training School (DTS) at the Youth With A Mission training center in Harpenden, England. Kim recently completed the lecture phase of her missionary-in-training school, and is now beginning a two-month outreach to Kenya and northern Uganda. This is the first of Kim’s outreach reports.  Editor, International Communications Network.

Greetings from Nairobi, Kenya!

During our last-minute preparations for our journey to Uganda, many of our team decided to get “the chop”…. that’s right, we helped cut each other’s hair.  It was a dramatic move for some of us, but should help prevent any little friends from making a home on top of our scalps for the next two months.

Tuesday morning came, with last minute goodbyes to family and friends. Friends from YWAM Harpenden came to pray for us as we left at 6:30 a.m. for the airport to catch our 8-hour flight to Kenya (the first leg of our trip to Uganda).  Having cleared check in and security in plenty of time we settled onto the plane and made our way to Africa.

The first thing I noticed upon arrival at the Nairobi airport was the heat. It was late evening and it was still hot. After surviving a cool British summer, I was thrilled. We were granted Kenyan visas with no problems and made our way to the International Bible Society Guest House in Nairobi. When we arrived, we couldn’t believe our eyes. Our rooms are beautiful with bathrooms inside our rooms, which we weren’t expecting at all. After a restful night’s sleep we had breakfast together and made our way into Nairobi for orientation into this wonderful new culture.

The city was exhilarating. Among the high-rise buildings and beautiful tropical trees are dusty streets with markets crammed full of traders all selling the same selection of souvenirs in their stalls. We spent time looking in the shops and talking with traders and soon realized that we are so obviously ‘foreign’, making it very easy to strike up conversations. After some dinner in the city we took a minibus ride back to the guest house, an adventure in itself, and prepared to return to do some evangelism in the morning.

Today as we returned we met many people on our travels and got to talk to and pray with them as we sat in parks and walked through shopping malls. In one of the markets we met a lady called Dorcas. She told her story and it turned out that just the day before her shop burned down in an accident. She was still very shaken by it, telling us how painful this loss was to her. She took us to the site of the store and we saw the utter destruction. We took time to pray for her and her husband that he would be able to provide for them while they figured out how to move on. Many people had stories of difficulty finding and keeping jobs in the city, and we were able to pray for these people, knowing that if God can change whole nations, he can certainly intervene in individual lives.

In the next few days we will be starting our work with Holly and the team staffing the Call2All conference to help them prepare for the arrival of the delegates next week. The weather is hot and the team is doing great… and very excited to see what is in store as we begin another week with YWAM! Rumor has it that Loren Cunningham, the founder of YWAM, may be attending the conference, so we may even get to meet him!

Thanks for reading and see you next week,

Kim