upcoming Kenya trip

I have not blogged for several months. Our hope2kenya team was in Kenya last year from mid September to mid October doing 5 medical clinics. It was an eye opening experience for all 5 members of the team. To update yourself on the trip you can go to www.hope2kenya.org.

We are now preparing for another trip. This is the largest team I have taken and is consists of 10 people including 5 youth. This is the first time I have taken youth on a team and I am very excited about it. These kids are all amazing and come from different backgrounds and schools. the youngest is 16 and the oldest is 24. Our adult team has one returning member, Cathy McCallum, and this is her third trip with me. The other members are all newbies but are excited about the challenges that will face us.

Debbie Jones is from a small place called Verona, outside Kingston, Ont. She is a "master"teacher (my words) and will be doing teacher training at the schools that we help support. While she is doing this, with the help of Cathy, the rest of the team will be handling the classrooms. This will be exciting for everyone.

As of Friday of this week we should have purchased a piece of land with a building on it which will be the new orphanage for young children with HIV/AIDS. We are working along with Transformed International on this projects and our hope is to house 10 children. Once we can raise more funds we will do an expansion. Since the property is large, the hope is to build a home for our Neema Home, which houses our street girls program. We will be working on the building when we are there, and purchasing the furnishings and equipment for the orphanage.

The school we built at Kolongolo Village last year is finished and our job this year is to paint the interior of the school to make it a brigh and cheery place to be.

We are also hoping to send a container to Kenya with school furnishings and resources, wheelchairs, crutches, canes, board games, shoes, games and anything else that we think the people in our projects can use. If you have anything just give Sandy a call at 705-752-2156 to arrange pickup.

On February 20th we are having a Pasta dinner at Trinity United Church in North Bay beginning at 5:00 pm, to help raise funds to offset the students trip and on February 26th Trinity Arts is sponsoring the Tenor Jeff Wiseman in concert at the church at 7:30 pm. Hope2kenya will receive $6.00 from every ticket sold for the performance.

Since we are going in July (to accomodate the youth that are going) we have to work hard to raise funds for our projects in only 5 months. With the disaster in Haiti it will be an uphill battle but we always seem to manage.

Keep reading for upcoming blogs as we again approach another exciting adventure to bring help and hope to the orphans and widows in Kenya..