Love each other

Returned to the farm last thursday for our weekly visit, we did a prayer walk and supervised a new playground being put in so the kids now have swings, a see-saw and a very steep looking slide, I haven’t tried them yet. We took blankets up for the mamas which they were extremely pleased with, they were a gift from someone in the UK.

We have been continuing to talk about how to build community at the farm, I learnt last week that in Kibera if you have beef with your neighbour you just move house, you don’t deal with it, you run away and carry all your resentment and bad feeling with you. A lot of things make much more sense now I know this. We said last week that although that’s how it is in Kibera and that may be how they have always functioned that’s not how it works everywhere and they can choose to do things differently.

This week we pressed the pause button, and lakukarachad the sessions for a bit to evaluate, thought I had better check that the mamas were actually up for it and didn’t just see it as a waste of time. They were very up for continuing, I guess it’s a nice change from digging!

I asked if they had noticed any change since we started talking about this stuff, Grace said they have started to forget about the past and look to the future, Rose said they have started choosing to forgive each other, Wahu said they no longer let small issues become big problems but choose to forget them instead, and Zipporah said the other day she needed some sugar and asked another mama for help and the other mama shared with her, they never used to do that apparently.

So that is flippin encouraging! Slowly slowly they are starting to change.

Since they are getting on so well now I had to make them play snap as a way to cause a fight this week so we could talk about conflict resolution in a not too heated way. They loved it, next week they really want to play football so we shall, there will be no ref so they will have to resolve any conflicts amongst themselves, hopefully employing some of the stuff we talked about this week.

In other news… Jo and Jon have abandoned me and gone to the UK for the summer, please pray for them as they tour about telling people about Turning Point.

PLA to make PLS proud

The last couple of weeks I’ve been doing some community building sessions up at the farm using the ‘participatory learning approach’. This is a fancy dev term you can only use when you have a degree but it basically means having discussions to learn from each other rather than a teacher telling you all the answers. The mamas still struggle a lot at the farm, mostly because they don’t get on very well, they are unable to deal with issues that come up amongst themselves and always bring loads of complaints to Pastor or to Jon when they visit. So we are hoping that if they can figure out a way to work together maybe their problems won’t be so many and they might start enjoying themselves a bit more.

We started by talking about our basic needs, what do we need to have a good life that we enjoy, not just food, water, shelter and fuel but also friendships, knowledge, rest, play etc etc. From there the mamas decided that yes life might be a bit better if they built a community than if they just stay separate and conflicting. So last week we looked a bit more at community, what things build community and what things hurt community or friendships and they agreed to try and stop doing the bad things and start doing the good things more. It’s all pretty simple stuff but I think the mums need a chance to think about it, talk together about it and choose together to live out these things.

This week I hope we will talk a bit about decision making and how they can deal with situations that come up amongst themselves in a fair way that they have all agreed on, they might make up some rules for the community or something, I don’t know yet. It’s quite cool that it all comes from them, I don’t teach them anything, I just ask questions and present back to them what they have said and try to lead them towards their own answers and solutions. It’s been so fun so far, the mums have really enjoyed it and have been working together and listening to each other and playing together so I hope they are taking some of these things on. Wahu was hilarious the first week, she was feeding back what her group said about the need to play and celebrate and she was getting super animated about how she really wanted to play football! Kicking the air and shouting!

I would really appreciate your prayer for the mums in general and for these sessions as I don’t actually have a clue what I’m doing! It’s a bit hard to know what things will work and be understood and what things are a bit too off the wall to translate in Swahili, and it takes a lot of quick thinking to respond to what the mums are saying and keep the discussions going the right way when it takes me a while to understand what they are saying.

Prayer walks
Have started doing prayer walks around the farm every time we go up to visit and also around Kibera, walking from one project to the other and praying along the way. I’m so glad God has provided someone to come prayer walking with me in Kibera in the form of Mr Bruce Fraser, other TP staff are all busy during the day but I feel much safer standing around praying with another person than on my own, in fact a few people in Kibera think that Bruce is actually stone cold Steve Austen so that helps! Also a few other people from my church home group want to come along with us or are praying for us at their office desks while we walk! As Shoshu says ‘Mungu tu’ (just God) as in only God will sort it out. Only God can transform Kibera. Matthew 11:12. word.