| Oops! In our excitement to send out the Jambo letter yesterday, we forgot to include this video of Mama Carla giving a tour of the new house. Here it is—check it out! A huge thank you to all of the private donors who generously gave to provide Baba Jeff & Mama Carla with this special place of rest. |
Jambo Everybody!
Wow! It has been a while! Life just gets crazy sometimes!
Here in Kenya, we are heading toward the end of dry season. It is so dry, there is literally dust in the air! You can’t avoid it! Just walking across campus makes me feel like I need to take a shower, lol! People are saying that the rains will come next week! So, most likely, in my next letter I will be complaining about the mud! Haha! We only have two seasons; Dry Season and Rainy Season. But they could just as easily be called Dusty Season and Muddy Season!
We have gotten all of our high school kids settled in for the year. Sometimes it takes a while and some students seem to take longer to settle than others. They were all just home for a five-day, half-term break and they were all happy to be home. They’ve gone back to school this week, which is always a stressful time for everyone! The logistics of it all can make you want to pull your hair out!
As I’ve told you before, every school has their own rules and regulations that the students must adhere to. Presently, we have kids in 26 schools… that’s a lot of rules and regulations to keep straight! Luckily, not every school starts back up on the same day, which is weird to me, but I must admit that it works to our advantage! Being able to spread it out over three or four days is the only way that we are able to get them all where they need to be.
Our amazing social worker team puts together a schedule; this vehicle with this driver is leaving at this time with these students… and so on! Each student needs to check the schedule to figure out when they are going, they must make sure they have everything they need and that they are in full (clean and pressed) uniforms and wearing freshly polished shoes. Most schools require that students come with various items, usually printing paper, buckets, plates of a certain color, etc. It’s so strange to my Western mind that everything must be “uniform,” even the color of your dinner plate. But that’s how it is and there’s absolutely no getting around it. A student can be sent home for not having the right color plate! As I said, the logistics of getting 62 kids to 26 schools requires all hands on deck for about a week’s time!
In Step Academy is off to a great start this year! The classrooms are full of kids from both the children’s home and the surrounding community! At the moment, we have 132 kids from home and 191 from the community at large. A few people have asked why we have decided to become a community school, instead of just focusing on the kids in our care, so I thought it would be good for me to talk about that a bit.
For several years, we operated In Step Academy simply because logistically, it would have been pretty much impossible for neighboring schools to accommodate our large number of students! (It’s the same reason we have church on campus. If we went to a neighboring church, there wouldn’t be enough seats for anyone else!) Anyway, when we moved to our present location in 2008, we only had eight kids who were school-aged, so it was easy enough to send them to local schools. But as the babies grew and got to be preschool age, we had enough of them to fill a classroom ourselves and administratively, it would have been a nightmare getting that many four-year-olds to and from a school off campus! So, we built a classroom.
From then on, we added one classroom every year until our school went all the way up to eighth grade: the final year of primary school! (Now the education system has changed so we go up to ninth grade, with separate wings for primary school and junior school. I hope we’re done building classrooms for a while!)
As time went on, we decided to allow our staff to register their kids at In Step Academy if they chose to do so. With our staff being mostly women, this made it possible for them to be at work without worrying about what their kids would eat for lunch, etc. Eventually, neighbors began to ask why we didn’t open to the public, which some saw as us being selfish, using the resources God has blessed us with to benefit only In Step kids and not to help the community as a whole. They had a point!
All this to say, things just sort of evolved one thing at a time, as things of God often do! The Lord has taken us one step at a time… one classroom at a time… one teacher at a time… never only one student at a time, though… to create a thriving community school that truly is making a difference in the lives of Kenyan children!
I’ve noticed something about the group of kids currently in high school. The ones who went through primary school with just each other, before the community kids started joining. Many of them never really developed the social skill of picking good friends. They never had to! The only people they were around were other kids from the In Step family, all of whom lived by the same rules and belief system they did.
As with almost everything in life, we didn’t see it coming and have had to spend a good portion of time and effort trying to teach them the importance of being careful who you hang out with, etc. My prayer is that this next batch of kids, the ones who are schooling alongside community kids, will not have such a difficult time socially, when they go away to high school.
All in all, bringing community kids together with In Step kids has been beneficial to everybody! Our community now has a modern school with the ability to provide a higher quality of education at an affordable price, than is normally found in the rural areas of Kenya! In Step kids have the opportunity to make friends and those friends have the opportunity to learn that kids who don’t come from a traditional family, are really not so different from themselves. It truly is a win-win situation!
As I write this letter, I am sitting in the most comfortable reclining chair! This chair is in the living room of a rambler-style house that was recently completed on the In Step campus! Jeff and I plan on growing old in this house!
For those of you who don’t know, since the children’s home started in 2006, Jeff and I have lived in a single bedroom, located in the baby wing of the home. The room next to our bedroom was converted into a kitchen, which I have shared with the kids all these years. (Before the room was converted into a kitchen, we just had a microwave, coffee pot and small fridge in our bedroom.)
It’s hard for some people to believe that we were actually fine with this arrangement. We were always so busy and had real problems to deal with, that worrying about creature comforts just wasn’t a thing we spent time and energy on. We accepted the life and living conditions that God had provided for us and, for many years, didn’t really give it a lot of thought.
Back in 2018, God started simultaneously laying on the hearts of people the idea of creating a space where Jeff and I could “get away” a bit. Our job (although I hate to call it that, but I don’t know what else to call it) really is 24/7. I’m not complaining! I’m simply trying to get across the magnitude of what this house means in our day-to-day lives. We are still available 24/7, but in between putting out fires, dealing with teenagers, keeping the staff in line, making sure there’s food on the table, checking on sick kids, etc., etc., we can stretch out in a recliner and watch a little TV! What a difference it has made in our stress-level!
It’s important to note that the funds to build this magnificent abode did not come from children’s home funds! It’s more like a gift that a group of people who care about us and the ministry, got together and made happen! How loved we feel!
Several years ago, a family member felt led to start a little nest egg for us. It was always made clear that we could do whatever we wanted with the money in that account, which obviously, has grown over the years. We have never touched that money. Honestly, we didn’t really think about it much, except to ask God to bless the one who gave it.
So, when talk first started about building a house, we knew exactly why God had provided that money that we never really needed! We have used that money to buy furniture, appliances, drapes, even a treadmill! The beauty of it is that because of the situation, I didn’t have to feel guilty about buying whichever furniture and appliances I really wanted! If I had been spending someone else’s money, I wouldn’t be sitting in this beautiful recliner right now, that’s for sure!
Let me just make a bullet list of things I’ve noticed since moving in:
- Watching a movie on a television, rather than a tablet, is much more enjoyable.
- My morning cup of tea stays hot to the last drop, when I drink it on the back porch all alone.
- Cooking is a lot easier with ample countertop space.
- Having a washer/dryer is life-changing.
- It’s finally possible to have a private conversation without leaving campus.
- Having dinner guests is something I’ve really missed.
- When you don’t sleep in the same hallway with crying babies, you need to set a morning alarm.
- It’s hard to know what you want to hang on so many empty walls.
- We are blessed beyond what we could ever imagine!
Thanks for sticking it out to the end of this very long letter! I never know what I’m going to say when I sit down to write, then I have to force myself to stop! LOL!
May God pour his blessings out on each and every one of you! As I always say, words cannot express what we feel for all of you and how much we appreciate you coming alongside us to give these kids a hope and a future!
God Is Good All The Time (GIGATT),
Mama Carla