Mission Work in Kenya
By Hans Schenk
This summer, our family traveled to Kenya, East Africa for seven weeks of intense ministry alongside 33 other staff and students from both the United States and Kenya. We were assigned to teams and sent to minister alongside Kenyan churches, pastors, hospitals, and ministries to do everything from door-to-door evangelism, to assisting amputation surgeries, to feeding kids with cerebral palsy in the slums of Nairobi.
Our family’s assignment was to work with two other students at the Missionaries of Charity’s Home for Orphaned Children in the middle of Huruma slum. We helped feed babies, change diapers, hold kids who don’t get a lot of one on one attention, and do physical therapy with those afflicted by cerebral palsy and meningitis. We even got to help the physical therapist drain a boil for a young boy!
At the Mother Theresa orphanage, we quickly learned that every child had an amazing story of survival by God’s grace. One child, Rita, had been tied in a plastic bag to suffocate, but a pack of feral dogs had ripped open the bag and she survived. Some generous people heard her crying and brought her to Mother Theresa’s! In the midst of stories like this, it was humbling to realize that we were participating in a living parable of the Gospel: children are rescued from horrible situations and given a new identity (the children receive a first name and their last name becomes Mother Theresa) in much the same way that we have been rescued by God and given a new identity as children of God.
After our host family in Nairobi stopped receiving water due to severe drought and water rationing, God’s grace once again became evident. For many days, we would travel to friends’ houses to fill two 100-liter tanks that would last all ten of us about a day and a half. One Friday our host had an idea from God to put in a tap in the lowest water pipe on the house. On Saturday, the water flowed from that tap! We collected 5,000 liters of water that day, and it carried us through the next week and a half! Although the experience was unexpected, it was amazing to see how we all worked together and how God provided in the midst of that difficult time. In fact, the kids were hardly fazed by it at all, and we think they secretly enjoyed not having to take a bath for several days at a time!
When we rejoined the rest of the team, we realized that their experiences had been just as exciting and fulfilling as ours. Some students were instructed by their pastors to ‘evangelize!’ on the spot, and some were surprised at the response to the Gospel they saw. Another group narrowly missed being attacked by elephants while on the back of a motorcycle. During our debriefing, our group realized that we had collectively preached over a hundred sermons, had attended to more than 1,500 hospital patients, had held so many babies that we lost count of the number, and that a couple hundred people had committed their lives to Jesus. That did not even include all of the encouragement we had given to African Christians -- or the encouragement we had received from African Christians -- to be bold in speaking and living out our faith.
As a family, we now look back and reflect on several lessons we learned from our trip. First of all, the nuns and pastors all live and work in difficult situations with very few breaks, yet their lives and faces are full of joy. We want to be as joyful in the midst of our own circumstances. Secondly, while taking our children seemed like a big risk, God’s grace and provision were strongly evident – even when Mackenzie contracted malaria. This happened at the only point in the trip where we were within walking distance of a good hospital, and the drugs were cheap and effective. God is in control even in seemingly difficult places. And finally, we were blessed by sweet friendships in Africa; and they are so much more than friends – they are our brothers and sisters in Christ, and our lives are bound together. When they are suffering through drought, working faithfully to pastor their flocks in the slum, and sharing the Gospel boldly we are spurred on by their amazing tenacity in running the race.
Hans, Jill, Mackenzie and Liam Schenk are active members of Heights Cumberland Presbyterian Church in Albuquerque, N.M. The Schenks traveled and worked in association with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), an interdenominational evangelical campus ministry that seeks to build witnessing communities of students on university campuses around the United States. IVCF is also associated with the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, which is an affiliation of indigenous Christian student movements in 145 nations worldwide. Their trip to Kenya was the result of a partnership between the U.S.A. (IVCF) and Kenyan (FOCUS) movements.
