The good, the bad and the ugali

Unfortunatly last week was not all fun and games for a couple of reasons. A while ago I asked you to pray for Agnes who was sick. She seemed to get better but on sunday she was taken back to hospital and on monday night she died from a heart condition she has had since she was born. She was maybe three.

They live just outside the project so I pass by everyday, I saw her mum veronica on tuesday looking very sad so she told me what was wrong. She has a lot on her plate at the moment as her oldest daughter Petronila has just had a baby of her own, she is 14. Veronica's mum has come to stay with her for a few days to help out.

I had no idea what to do, talking to others in Kibera about it they said 'It's the way it is', not making light of the situation but used to the reality of 'high infant mortality rates'. Veronica cried a bit and we prayed together, her other daughter Angry Peanut was as cheerful as ever not really understanding whats going on, she was able to cheer up her mum trying to style my hair with a stick she found. God is in the slums with a grieving mother and her daughter who became a mum way too early.

Another hard day was Thursday when we went to the farm, the good was planning when to plant things ready for the next group of mums to move up to the farm hopefully later this year and deciding who gets to keep which cows. One of the baby cows is called the mzungu cow because it has a pink nose while all the others have black noses.

The bad was we have decided to send two of the mums back to Kibera, we have given them so many chances to start working but I guess farming just isn’t for them. It is a very hard decision to send people back to Kibera, especially their kids who love it at the farm and it’s not their fault their mums don’t want to work. However, we will continue to help them, their kids will rejoin the project in Kibera, we will help them find somewhere to live and settle back in Kibera and they will be able to join the microfinance scheme which didn’t exist before they moved up to the farm. I hope they will see this as grace continuing towards them just in a different way but they probably won’t! I've been told that one of them was fairly happy with the decision so thats good.

Once we had sorted out all these things one of the mums came to us very upset about how the other mamas were treating her. It seems there are all sorts of allegations, accusations and lies flying around. People are very messy. They really haven’t figured how to live together as a community. I don’t know how much Turning Point can do to help them with that, a lot of it is up to them. Thankfully God doesn’t mind mess, Jesus put up with all sorts of messy relationships, He hung out with Judas for three years even though He knew he would stuff up royally. His disciples seemed to argue quite a bit but in the end they became this awesome (but still pretty messy) community that rocked the world. So please pray for the mums, God can do something.