The Loaves and the Fishes

I have been at this Children’s home for 1 month now, and I have seen a HUGE transformation. It is very exciting. When I first came here they were struggling to feed the children each day, and were living off of the donations that were coming in one day to the next. The orphanage (for 140 kids) and the school (for 1000 students) literally runs on $5,000 USD a month. If you break that down to pay about 40 teachers and 10 staff members salaries and water/electricity bills for the 2 buildings there is nearly no money left over for anything. Yet, the children need to eat in order to pay attention at school. The school has been having huge problems on Monday’s because the children from the slum are not eating over the weekend and they are fainting by the time they get to school on Monday.

With this problem, they decided the most important thing that needs to be done is to secure additional money to feed every child every day. With many hours of work and dedication from a volunteer here in Kenya they did in fact secure enough money to begin a feeding program at the school that will feed every child every day of the year—including Saturday and Sunday and all holiday’s. It is a beautiful thing. Last week we started the program and it has been an incredible success. The first day we were worried because the school did run out of food before all the high schoolers were fed, but it was just a small glitch and we learned how many KG’s of beans and corn we needed to add for the following day. The students were a bit cautious the first 2 days about this program because they could no longer leave the school compound and roam the streets of the slum. But this week the students are racing to line up for lunch, excited to have a meal. They were pleasantly surprised to also find a variety in the diet: meat once a week and fruit once a week, rather than rice and beans everyday. This is seriously heaven on earth for them, truly a blessing! It is such a joy to watch these kids get lunch, which will sustain them and help them to learn more rather than fainting in class. In addition, research has shown that children participate in risk taking and unhealthy behaviors when they are deprived of food, so now that the children are eating and are not roaming the slums they will be given a brighter future. The attendance in just 2 weeks has increased a substantial amount as well- it's not just poor college students that love free food! Soo exciting!

2 days before the feeding program started we had a huge donation of food to the children’s home. When I say huge, I mean over 5000kg of beans donated from a local organization. I have no idea how they found out about us, but they were happy to help, and we were happy to accept. When they found out how needy we were and how grateful we were for their donations they said they wanted to do more. The most immediate thing they wanted to do was to cook a delicious meal for the entire school and church community on Sunday. I still don’t understand the whole situation, but we wouldn’t turn that down of course, so on Sunday they hired a caterer and made some of the best Kenyan dishes, including my favorite- Chapati, for not only the kids, but also the families in the community. We had a huge party all day with dancing, singing and food. Lot’s of food! I helped to serve the food and the line just kept coming. After 2 hours of serving food we estimated 1,500 people came to eat! When everyone had gone through the line once there was still some rice left and I foolishly thought, “oh leftovers for tomorrow, great” but before I could finish that thought the children were knocking me over to get to the rice, and the bowl was scraped clean in minutes.

The Lord is good and provides for his people! It is so easy to become overwhelmed by the problems encountering here but then beautiful people are sent to assist and give us hope to continue. The fact that these children can now eat and study is a huge burden lifted from everyone working on these projects and we can now go to the next issue. So, one step at a time we are making progress and improving the future of these kids.
As they say in the churches here…
God is good, all the time.
And all the time, God is good!