Work

This pic is for you, Jim Nichols! *smile* I was interviewing a CRF sponsored child and her mother in this picture, updating her file. Which reminds me, I have been meaning to post about our work on here and keep spacing it!
We have been consumed with work at the Kenya Church of Christ Children's Home in Kitale. The situation at the home was much more bleak than we realized coming in, so we've been spending a lot of time fixing things up a bit. The main thing I've been involved with is re-structuring their financial system. I created a new way of keeping their books, since our team is currently acting as the administrator for the home. I wanted to create something simple that we will eventually be able to train a local person to take over and run the home with. If you know me very well, you know that math & finances have never been my strong suit, but it seems that God has suddenly given me the ability to understand what I need to be able to understand in order to do a job that involves finances, so I feel very blessed! Everything here works on cash basis, no credit or debit, which I've found to be a lot easier to work with. We've also been seeking out ways to farm the land at the Children's Home to cut some of the food costs. Carrie & Kelly have been the primary workers on that project, while Greg & I are focusing more on the business administration side of things. We have quickly learned that the more skills a missionary team has, the better. Missionaries have to know how to do all sorts of things! We have already encountered situations in which we needed to use skills like business, mechanic, medical, computer tech...the list goes on!
Our work in AIDS education is getting off to a slower start than we anticipated. The problem is more vast than we can even imagine; and there is no simple solution. We have discovered that our training needs to be more than just the basics. It needs to involve marriage and family training, general health education and basic life skills as well as address spiritual maturity issues. We don't want to re-invent the wheel OR put the cart before the horse, so please pray for us as we prayerfully decide each step we take toward fighting the AIDS pandemic.