Here is the second part in a series guest blog by my 14 year old nephew, Nate.  The first part was basically a description of modern day Kenya and his first impressions upon arriving there.  This section begins his mission work as part of the education team that went over. 

Nate painting in Kangundo, Kenya

Starting that Thursday, I had to leave Huruma temporarily, because the team had also made plans to work in a slum about two hours northeast of Nairobi (closer to the big rebellion) called Kangundo.  The drive there, when sitting in the front seat of the tourist van, was a spectacle that makes the “Indiana Jones” ride at Disneyland seem very tame, due to the bumpy roads, narrow, winding mountain paths, and the constant swerving and weaving of the drivers.  But the reward was at least a better view of nature than in Huruma.  Sitting on the top of a large hill and overlooking the valley below, Kangundo was made of houses that, while made of mud and straw and not as run-down as the houses in Huruma (no  offense), were still simple beyond the imagination of most Americans.  This is where the medical team set up their biggest medical clinic of the entire stay, next to a church, and I did probably the funnest thing on that trip: helping to paint a classroom.  While the medical team (which included my mom) was doing their thing only a little ways down from the guest house where they would be staying, I had to walk down the hill another quarter-mile to get to a school.  Our job was to paint a classroom and the two engineers of the team were working on a bed-building project for the school dormitories.

But because of a great fiasco involving turpentine on the first day (namely, we didn’t have any, and the school people wanted us to put it in the paint), we could not paint until the second of our three days there.  But we managed, in the two days we had left in Kangundo, to completely paint the bottom section of the classroom wall blue.  Our stay was capped off by a church service at the place where the medical team operated, which involved a sermon by one of our team members, singing hymns in the local language (which I couldn’t quite get into, for obvious reasons), and even a small-scale auction!

Then, after our third and final day in Kangundo, we went back to New Dawn in Huruma for one final day.  As I helped to teach one final art class, I wondered what the next town and school would be like.  At the end of the day, we left the school compound after a good-bye assembly held by the students.