Our Intentional God

 Hello all my awesome friends and family! 

I am currently on a train on my way to my last debrief on the field! My team has spent the last month in a slum outside of Nairobi, called Kawangware. We are currently on our way to Mombasa, which is on the coast of Kenya. We have only about 2 and a half months left on the field, which is CRAZY! I cannot believe how fast time has gone. 

Kenya has been packed! The ministry that we served with was called Eden’s Hope, and it was started by an American, named Haley Reed, about a year and a half ago. Since opening Eden’s Hope, it is clear that the Lords hand has been upon her and her ministry. It has at least doubled in size since they first opened. Eden’s Hope is a 3 pronged ministry, the 3 pieces are called Living Hope, Growing Hope, and Thriving Hope. Each is aimed to bring hope and support to people in Kawangware. When the organization was started, Haley had moved to Kenya with the vision of bringing support to teenage moms, in the slum areas. Teenage pregnancy is very prevalent in Kenya, due to lack of available offered resources, and little education. Living Hope offers support, education, ultrasounds, financial provision, and community to teenage mothers in Kawangware. The program currently hosts about 50 moms every Saturday, and those who are currently pregnant are invited to additionally come on Thursdays, they have about 10 mommas who are currently expecting. 

This is a photo of myself and Ava teaching a devotional with Living Hope, we both shared our testimonies with the moms.

Growing hope is their children’s program, this is their biggest and most quickly growing program. In Kenya, the school year operates on a quarter system, and the kids are off for 3-4 weeks each quarter, rather than just one long summer break. During these long breaks, it is very common that the kids, especially in the slum areas, will go hungry, or have little to eat. Eden’s Hope has started a children’s program for during these breaks. It operates very similarly to a vacation bible school, or a kids camp. The kids can come as early as 7 in the morning. They are served breakfast, and lunch right before they go home around 1:30pm. During the growing hope program, each day started out with a lot of fun music and dancing, as well as full group games. The kids got to play, and had access to a lot of awesome toys, that Haley brought from the US. The second half of the day the kids were separated in to classrooms based on their ages and they learned a story from the Bible. The 2 stories we focused on during the 2 week camp were Shadrech, Mesach, and Abednago, and the story of Jonah. I got to teach grades 5 and 6, and really loved teaching them about Jonah! Throughout the 2 weeks, we saw an increase in the number of kids there each day, as word spread throughout the neighborhood, more and more kids joined. By the end of week 2, there were about 300 kids! 

The last program Eden’s Hope offers is called Thriving Hope. They had found that once the moms were aging out of the Living Hope program, they were still eager to remain in the community they had built and continue to learn more. Thus, Thriving Hope was born. This program is for older moms who still want to stay connected to Eden’s Hope. They come to the facility every Saturday for different bible study teachings. This program currently hosts about 50 women as well. 

This is a photo of me praying over one of the moms from Thriving Hope during a home visit.

The Lord used our team is BIG ways in Kenya! Eden’s Hope has ample staff and volunteers, and the first day we arrived, my team sat down together to discuss our time there. We talked about the fact that the ministry seemed to have plenty of hands, and so we wanted to do our best to be as much of an asset to the ministry as we could during our time there. And oh boy did the Lord have big plans to use us at Edens! 

Outside of the main ministry’s which I listed above, Eden’s had a lot of extra projects we were able to help with. One of my teammates, Ava, painted 6 different murals in the school building while we were there, with the help our team. I also was able to get Eden’s Hope set up on Quickbooks! Yay! Haley was very excited to learn that there was an accountant on our team, and I was very excited for the opportunity to bless their ministry with a service that can be quite expensive. I was able to get all of their finances sorted for the year of 2025, and set up some new systems and train one of their staff members, so they can better keep up with finances going forward! Our team also dedicated some time to preparing an event for all of our Living and Thriving Hope moms that we hosted for them in our last week of ministry. We set up 3 different stations, Sarah, who is a baker had 1/3rd of the moms at her cookie decorating station. Ava, who is an artist, had 1/3rd of the moms helping her work on some canvas paintings at her art station. And I got to host the other third of the moms for a zumba class! During this event, I hosted 3 zumba classes, back to back to back. Safe to say that I was pretty pooped by the end lol. A few of us also had the opportunity to do some one on one discipleship with some of the volunteers at Edens. A lot of the volunteers have some pretty difficult things going on in their lives. It was heartbreaking to hear some of their stories. But it was also a really cool opportunity to share more about God with a few young believers. There was one volunteer who had some similarities between her testimony and my own. I met with her a few times a week for the last couple of weeks we were there. It was really awesome to have the ability to pour in to her and help her grow with God. 

Here are a few of Ava’s awesome murals!

Here I am teaching Zumba to the Eden’s Hope volunteers and staff:

Me and a couple of the Eden’s Hope volunteers:

During our last week of ministry we also had the opportunity to go do a couple of house visits. We visited 2 homes in a slum called Kibera. Kibera is the largest slum in Africa, and the second largest in the world. What we saw there was like nothing I have ever seen before. It was one of the most difficult places I have seen in my time on the race. As we were walking through the slum on the way to our first house, I realized how disconnected I felt from where we were. I was walking around a place where people dig through the dump on a daily basis to try to find something to sell to provide for their family, or something to eat because they are starving. I felt like such a foreigner there. I prayed and asked the Lord that He would allow me to have a better understanding of what its really like to live there. About 2 minutes later we were walking through some back alleys and I stepped in to some mud that swallowed my leg. My foot went straight down, and mud covered my leg up to my knee. I was so shaken for a moment, because it had really caught me off guard, and my leg and foot where now covered in thick black mud. But after I recovered and we kept on walking the Lord showed me this image. It was of a parent, who had been out all day doing everything they could to earn some money for their family. This parent had come home from a long day, empty handed, and in the dark of the evening, and in a frustrated rush to get home, they forget about this sink hole and stepped straight in to it. I don’t know if this was a real image that had actually happened to someone or just an idea the Lord planted in my head. Either way, it changed my perspective to what life in Kibera truly is. Luckily, after I stepped in to the hole I was able to wash off my shoes and my pants when we got to the house we were visiting. But I imagine having access to an abundance of water is not always the case.

The first person that we visited in Kibera was Mama Precious, she is the mom of one of the sponsored students at Eden’s Hope. Mama Precious has stage 4 cancer, and she has a sponsor through Eden’s Hope who has been paying for all of her medical treatments. We had the opportunity to talk with her, share some scripture and prayed with her. Please keep Mama Precious in your prayers that God would heal her. Our second visit was to the house of one of our volunteers. I was very surprised when we arrived and it was his house, I hadn’t thought that our volunteers could also live in Kibera. When he invited us in to his home, we walked in to one small room, with no light, it was pitch black in there in the middle of the day. We also noticed that his couch and the wall were burnt. Apparently a few weeks prior, his small house had burned down, and needed to be rebuilt. He also has a 2 year old daughter who is currently in the hospital, and they are in the process of running some tests to see if she has cancer. I can’t even imagine being in the midst of such a serious illness with my young child, and then coming home to find that everything I had was burned down. I was devastated for him. This volunteered also has one of the best attitudes, and he was always so kind to me and my whole team, I would have never guessed or known all of the difficulty in his life. 

       

I truly have loved my time in Kenya so far. I think that our ministry was incredible, and I felt like our team was really used to our fullest potential. I think we were able to really bless Eden’s Hope with how much we were able to do while we were there. It is such an incredible ministry, and the Lord is definitely moving there, I am grateful I had the opportunity to be a part of what He is doing there. My team is going to now be staying in Mombasa for the next 4 days with a World Race alumni, before we head down the coast to Diani for our debrief. On September 23rd we will be heading to Uganda, our last country!!

We also had the opportunity to go to the safari in Kenya! I’ll share some photos below 🙂 We saw lions, hippos, rhinos, giraffes, zebras, impalas, and baboons!

UPDATE:

I’m posting this after our debrief in Diani, so I want to share some photos from pour time there as well!

Me and Ava enjoying our first sunset by the beach.

This was the morning sunrise view from one of the patios of the cottages we got to stay in!

Our whole squad had a squad fun day and we got to snorkel in the Indian Ocean!

One night we got all dressed up and took some fun photos together on the beach, and then went out for a nice dinner! I got to wear my new dress 🙂

This was our team pose from a dance that I choreographed while we were at Edens Hope that we performed for our whole squad, it got a lot of laughs!

And finally! I had the privilege of being asked to baptize my sweet friend Ava. We held baptisms for anyone on our squad who wanted to be baptized, at sunrise on our last day of debrief. It was such a sweet and sacred time, and it was my first chance to baptize someone. And what a blessing that it was my sweet Ava, watching her grow in the Lord has been one of my greatest joys throughout the race. God’s work in her life is so evident, and I was so excited to baptize her 🙂

Thank you all so much for the continued prayers, and continuing to follow along with my journey. I would be so grateful if you would continue to pray alongside me for the following things: 

• Pray over our squad as we are getting ready to come back to the US, that God would guide our next steps and give us peace as we head home. 
• Pray for Eden’s Hope that the ministry would continue to grow and find the right people to join the organization. 
• Pray for my squad mates who are still fundraising, that they would see the Lords provision for this trip financially. 
• Pray for the moms at Eden’s Hope, that they would continue to grow with each other and be encountered by Jesus. 

UPDATE:

As you may have guessed from context clues, I wrote this blog a few weeks ago! My new team is currently serving in Mukono, Uganda. I will put out an updated blog on Uganda soon, in the mean time I have some other current prayer requests that I would be so grateful if you would join me in praying over.

• I recently became affected by a severe bacterial infection from food poisoning which has been wreaking havoc on my body. I am being treated, and I am already feeling a lot better. But prayers for quick and full healing would be so amazing.
• There are also a few other people across our squad who have been impacted by food poisoning or other various illnesses. Please join me in praying for continued health over all of S-Squad.
• Lastly, our host from Kenya is currently going through a lot as an organization. Please pray for the Lord’s favor and grace upon Eden’s Hope, and particularly that His provision would be poured out on them, as they are in a season of fundraising.

Thank you again so much for reading and following along 🙂 

Hugs and prayers, 

Amanda