July 6

July 6^th

7:00am devotion in the dining hall. Joshua Mwaura spoke about not forgetting where you have come from in order to be thankful and a blessing to others. Joshua was one of the first kids Pastor Benson rescued and he is 17 now. He is a tremendous leader and shepards this flock very well and with a sweet, sweet spirit.

Pastor Benson took 4 of us to exchange money in the town of Gilgil. We stood in line for quite some time exchanging US dollars to Kenyan Shillings. It is a very nerve racking experience. There is a lot of money being exchanged with a lot of Kenyan eyes watching. Several team members also had a lot of Ugandan Shillings that needed to be exchanged for Kenyan Shillings. We had to go to a different bank for this exchange. It was hard to do all the conversions and keep everyones money in order. The Kenyan exchange is 85 shillings per 1 US dollar. For example, something that costs 17,000 Kenyan shillings would be equivalent to $200 US dollars.

Our other team members had been outside playing sports games while we were gone. We ran out of bottled water a day before. Some people looked like they were going to faint. We had not had water for a day.

We did rotations of 6 stations with all the kids for a few hours until they ate their lunch/supper. They only have 2 meals a day. They feed us 3 meals and give us delicacies that the kids do not get like fruit, sugar, bread and oatmeal.

After lunch the kids took us on a walk to Lake Elementaita. The Fiwagoh mission sits on this lake and there are flamingos on the shore. They enjoyed showing us “their lake”. The older boys are assigned to leadership roles. Joshua had a large stick in his hand like he was sheparding his flock. He told all the kds to not run ahead so we could get our pictures and not scare them off. The kids loved chasing after them and making them fly off.

They then took us on a walk through the forest by their house to see the monkeys. We did see them way up in the Acacia trees. It was pretty neat and such a beautiful walk.

Showers and then devotion and dinner after our 6 mile trek!

During dinner Pastor Benson and wife Florence shared their story of how the orphanage came to be and what he went through living on the streets with his 4 brothers at the age of 9.

After a full and amazing day we were ready for bed and off to Grace of God in the morning. Out of all the places we have visited so far, Fiwagoh has been the most like home.