Backpacks!

Emily and Josephine had a successful trip to purchase backpacks Monday! They kept their patience as the checker insisted on typing in the SKU for each and every backpack during the checkout process... 

While these two women were serving at the shopping center, the rest of the team enjoyed exploring Karura Forest.

Hotel snapshots

A few photos of Amani gardens Inn - our home for three nights!

Safe in Nairobi!

Pictures coming soon, but wanted to at least post briefly before we tuck in to our comfy beds at Amani Gardens.
All team members, all luggage, most of our sanity made it in one piece to our destination. God is good, all the time!

Takeoff!

Here we go!

First flight leaving now for Paris, then a 4 hour layover, then second flight to Nairobi.

One specific prayer request that came up when we gathered this morning before heading to the airport: the Lewis family’s dog, Max was acting very sick this morning. Please lift up John and Carissa as they leave with uncertainty about Max’s health, and lift up the Lewis kids who are taking him to the vet to find out what is wrong.

Adahlia Bosh: Prayer Requests

Hi, my name is Adahlia Bosh, I am 9 years old, and I have a Kenyan name, Kanana.  Kanana means “one who is loved and adored” in Kimeru.

We will need all the prayers we can get while we’re in Kenya. Please pray for the following:

·        Safety on planes and on vans

·        For clear weather, especially on seminar day (forecasts say rain and maybe even thunderstorms)

·        For the seminar to go as planned

Thank you, everyone!

Gideon Bosh: My Top 7

Hi, my name is Gideon. I am 7 years old. These are some things that I am excited about for our Kenya trip:

•           Playing basketball with Gideon, a Kenyan friend that I am named after.
•           The seminar.
•           Seeing Gitonga, Josephine’s dad, and his chickens.
•           Play soccer (they call it football).
•           Being on the equator.
•       Seeing giraffes and baby elephants.

Lewis Wenz

Hi, my name is Lewis and I'm 9 years old. This is my first time going to Kenya. This is going to be the longest I have been on an airplane. I am excited to play soccer with the kids in Kenya. As a family we read Sharon Moffitt’s book, “A Day of Small Things,” and I feel like it helped me get ready for the trip. From the book I learned that many kids don’t have the money to attend school all the way through high school. I also learned that HIV is one of the sicknesses causing sadness in Kenya. Kenyans have a folk tale about an ogre that eats a small part of a little girl each day because her grandma is not able to protect her. The grandma has to go get food so they won’t starve. This folk tale shows that the grandmother had to choose between protecting her granddaughter from an ogre, and collecting food to survive. If I were the grandmother, I would be mad because my granddaughter didn’t follow my directions to stay inside. I wonder if our sponsored child has heard this folk tale before. I’m excited for Kenya!

Final Team Meeting -- A Packing Party!

Adahlia, Lewis, and Pam filling a suitcase July 22

Do you see those stacks of large envelopes going into a suitcase? Those are filled with hand-made stationery each sponsored child will receive at Seminar -- inside their brand new backpack! The UPPC Day Campers made each stationery page with care. One stack is for younger kids, and the other is for older kids. The vision is that this stationery will eventually make its way back to the U.S. in the form of letters to their sponsors. 

At the Packing Party we filled 8 donated suitcases with clothing, toys, shoes, stationery, medical supplies, and other useful items we will be leaving in Kenya. Even the suitcases will be given away!

Here's how we ended our night together:

The next time we are all together, we will be heading to the airport with 24 suitcases and 12 carry-ons!

Ryan Wenz

Hi my name is Ryan and I am 11 almost 12 years old. I turn twelve on the day we leave for Kenya. This is the first time I am going out of the continent. I am excited to go to Kenya to play soccer with the kids and see the love of Jesus there. We are going to a seminar and hopefully all 180 of the sponsored children will be there. I am not looking forward to 17 hours on a plane.

Caleb Wenz

Hi my name is Caleb and I am 14 years old. This will be my first time going to Kenya and out of the continent. I am very excited to go on this trip. I’m excited to do the seminar and meet our family's sponsored kids. We have gotten many amazing letters from sponsored kids and are dying to meet them. Also, I am excited for the seminar because I will be playing soccer with the kids and teaching VBS songs to the kids. When we are in Nairobi I am excited to go to the giraffe sanctuary and Karura forest. In the giraffe sanctuary you are at the giraffes’ level and can feed them. In Karura forest we will ride bikes and look for wildlife. I know this trip is going to be an amazing experience and very inspirational.

Lincoln Bosh: Mwenda

Hi, my name is Lincoln. I am 11 years old. This will be my first time going to Kenya. I have a Kenyan name, Mwenda. It means ‘one who loves’. I am excited to go on the trip because I will get to meet so many new people. I am also excited to see the elephant orphanage with the baby elephants. We are also going to have a seminar with all the sponsored kids. We will give some of them soccer balls, and I hope that we play a game! We will be staying at Amani Gardens Inn. This is different because on all the other mission trips, the team stayed in the Methodist Guest House. I am going with 13 other people, including my best friend Ryan.

Darren Wenz: It's about relationships

Our Kenya team has been meeting every two weeks for the last four months and I have enjoyed the opportunity this has given our family to get to know our fellow mission team members better, pray about the trip, and to consider the purpose the Lord has for us on this trip.  This trip perplexes some who want to know what the tangible results will be of the trip.  We aren’t building homes, digging a well or providing any physical improvements to the area.  If this trip were all about building I think the Lord would be sending someone besides me.

I have learned one of the best ways to describe this trip is relational.  Some people might read this and think that visiting Meru is just a chance to see Africa and for our family to learn about a different culture.  That opportunity is undeniable, but if you were to attend one of our mission team meetings I feel confident you would get the sense the Lord is providing more than that for this trip. 

I spent a year in Australia after college and I can still remember an older couple in the city of Kilmore where I worked who introduced themselves to me when I visited their church. They became my church community and truly gave me the best glimpse into the magnitude of the Lord’s capital C church.  The relationships we have with our two sponsored children, Ronny and Risper have helped our family consider the larger world and the work God is doing. Our relationships with Ronny and Risper have grown over the years.   I imagine many who have been sponsoring children at UPPC can relate to this experience.  The opportunity to be able to visit them, I pray, will give our family along with our sponsored children a chance to get a better understanding of the size of the Lord’s sovereignty.  We can read about the heights and depth of God’s love but to see it and experience it in such a unique way is something I feel incredibly blessed to be a part of.

There will surely be difficulties along the way. You don’t travel thousands of miles with 5 children and 1 teenager, let alone 8 adults, without some challenges.   Even with all the preparations and meetings we have been a part of, I still wonder if we are prepared.   With the trip less than three weeks away I pray you will join me in praying for the Lord to have our hearts, minds, and bodies where we need to be as we leave on July 28^th.  I look forward to returning and sharing with our church community greetings from our brothers and sister in Meru!

Jason Bosh: Why We Go

This weekend I went backpacking with my son in the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula. One of our self-determined "assignments" was to spend an hour in silence just noticing the nature around us with our journals in hand. As I basked in the evergreen forest and the therapy of the river sounds, I was thinking about our holy-smokes-its-almost-here Kenya trip and reminding myself why we are going. It's not because of the natural wonders-- clearly we have plenty of that right around here. It's not because of the comfortable accommodations or great food or high entertainment value.

No, there are other reasons that hold longer-term value. We are going because God gave my wife a heart for Africa when she studied there 20 years ago and to not go would be to deny her an important piece of herself. We are going because of the people. We met particular people (the Mburugus) who have a particular calling that is tied to a particular place (Meru). Emily and I saw the powerful nature of their calling in 2005 when we went with them to Meru, and we have wanted to support them ever since. Across many years and many miles we've built relationships with the Meru guardians. Em has been to Kenya several times, and we even hosted them in our home when they visited us in Tacoma several years ago. Facebook keeps us up to date even continents apart, but it's no substitute for sharing a song from the heart or a cup of tea. In short, we are going to further our relationships with people we care about and to show them that we stand with them in the important work they are doing for the kids of Meru.

It's also true that we are going as a family to experience how another culture works and to open our eyes and hearts to a different way of life-- a way that has both pros and cons when compared to our Tacoma world. We'll get a chance to show that way of life to our kids and give them a new and powerful reference point for growing up here in Washington.

There are other reasons, of course, but these are the top ones for me, and I'm excited/nervous that it's only a few weeks away. We appreciate your prayers as we make our final preparations!

John Lewis: We All Need Each Other

As part of our team’s June preparation for Meru, we did a fun group exercise. An obstacle course was laid out at the Bosh’s house: from the upstairs family room, down the stairs and out the back door, under the picnic table, across the lawn, up the steps and touch the basketball hoop. Everyone had to complete it. Each person however was given some form of limitation: not being able to walk, only able to walk on one foot, not able to speak, not able to use your arms. Each limitation was known only to the affected person until the exercise started.

When I said “go,” some of those who were able and focused on the end goal quickly bounded down the stairs, out of sight from those unable to move well or at all. The minutes that followed unfolded the drama of how each person finally did get to the finish line. Gideon Bosh, unable to walk, was last to get there; it took 3 others with limitations of their own, to get him down the stairs, under the table and up the final steps (see photo).

When we debriefed together in the family room, it became apparent that this had not been a traditional race where the gun went off and we all got to the finish line by ourselves. We needed each other. God did not intend us to have all the gifts needed to operate independently. In real life, as in the body of Christ, our limits come from our identity and the specific roles we play. And we have more fun as a result, more memories, more trust and appreciation of each other.

And so as we go to Kenya, we first of all go as a UPPC team. The functions of treasurer, devotions, prayer, bug spray point person and others have all been distributed based on people’s interests and gifts. We will need each other as we are stretched in this coming experience. Christ will work through us and come to us through the bodies of our teammates.

And I believe it will become clearer and clearer, each day of the trip, how in a larger sense, each country and culture has its own special place, its own limits. We have already tasted how much Peter and Josephine bring so much knowledge, history and wisdom of Kenya culture. Being immersed with their friends and other new relationships, seeing their faith and courage in a life of hardship, will open our eyes to our own limits and help us appreciate the treasured gift of their culture. Americans and Kenyans, Germans and Koreans, we all need each other to be a church “team” that reaches all the world’s people well.

And so our team will go soon. Together we are a reflection of Christ’s body. As the trip progresses, I look forward to using God’s gifts in me and seeing God’s gifts in others. We are now better prepared to not be surprised that we need each other and Christ himself, who is the head of our team, the head of His body, the church, local and worldwide.