A single pair of shoes…

Many times we don’t think about them, but we use them every day or even multiple pairs a day. They are part of our routine when we get ready to leave the house we put on a pair of shoes. Now I know I am guilty of this but we spend tons of money on the latest styles or new trends when our old pair of shoes that are still in good condition would work perfectly. However what would it be like if we didn’t have a pair of shoes? I mean if we all had to depend on only two pairs of shoes and our everyday pair disappeared. Well this happens and sometimes on a regular basis in many areas.

                Now giving a little background when we came to the centre we were overwhelmed by the rush of little kids. Each and every one of these little kids wanted to be our friends, but soon it became clear to each of us that there were a few kids that needed something more than a friend. They needed someone to be there when they came home for school that would pick them up and ask them about their day or go and eat supper with them. Well Robert is the one kid that stood out to me from the first day. He grabbed my hand and showed me around the centre and asked me to help him with his math homework from school. I knew from that moment that this kid was special, and I could not wait to spend the whole summer getting to know him.

                Now I have gotten to know Robert really well and it was amazing to see he is at the top of his class in school and is amazing at acrobats. In the middle of last week I had to the privilege to sit in on the centre’s acrobatics class, which Roberts a member of. At the end of class he came and jumped on my back to give him a piggy back ride. As custom with the class you take off your shoes before you enter the classroom. Heading out of the room I am putting on my sandals and ask Robert where his shoes are… Well he said that while he was at school someone took his shoes so he didn’t have any to wear and his school shoes were falling apart and he needed to keep them nice. So now he has to walk around the centre barefoot until he is able to get a new pair which is hard to tell when that will happen.

                This shocked me. I mean I have never had to worry about if I had a pair of shoes let alone a simple pair of sandals. The thing that is hardest is that I can’t just buy him a pair of sandals because we must let the kids earn them and not give them hand-outs. This theory is that when the children have to earn items so when they enter the world they know there is not a free lunch. Luckily the Centre is a community and several other kids let him borrow their shoes until he is able to get a new pair.

                Now I know this is just one sad story and there are many out there, but we need to learn from this story and the stories that are similar. We have to be conscious about what is happening in our world and how we are at times so wasteful in our daily lives. We hear this but sometimes it doesn’t sink in until we experience this first hand. Now there are ways we can help out the centre and children in this community, but the best way is to be conscious of the needs. We need to grow as people and try our best as citizens to help out in our daily lives by not being wasteful and supporting causes that are trying to give education to children or improving agriculture throughout the world. Doing this we may work to create a world where a child would not have worry about having a pair of shoes stolen or ruined.

This Long Journey

Well everyone its 2:00 am and I am still on the train… So after watching the towns pass by thinking about this and that I realized that I am going to miss this. I mean there is something about Southwest Kansas that grows on you such as the blinking pivot light of irrigation systems, the almost endless fields of wheat, the thousands of head of cattle and so much more. This is where I grew up and where I now call home, but I have to remember that I need to grow from this experience and gain as much as possible. This then had me think about how we have spent this whole semester preparing getting to know each other and still we do not concretely know what we are going to do for the whole summer.  I thought about this as I passed the endless fields between Garden City and Dodge City.

When I thought harder about it I was able to realize something that wasn’t going through earlier. That whatever we are doing now is not just preparing us to serve abroad but it is helping us grow in the understanding of what could happen this summer. It really reminds me of particular field that we farm. This is actually two sections cut in half that we produce the two continuous halves at the same time. So instead of being just one mile long this is a two mile long field. I dread this field because for the first half of the tractor work will be done by normally one driver as they split the field with one vertical pass. Now to do this you aim the tractor towards the far corner and set the auto steer and let the tractor steer itself.

Now many of you may not have driven a tractor before but I am pulling a 54’ hard topped plow. So with each pass that is 54 feet that is tilled, but the tractor is only moving around 5.6 mph. This means for that first vertical pass from corner to corner it seems like it takes forever and you have accomplished nothing. Pass after pass it seems like you are making no progress as it takes you over 30 minutes to get to one side of the field then turn around. However, when we look at the GPS it shows that we have covered a lot of ground during that time.

Now after that long winded story, I feel that even though this semester has seemed that as a team we have not accomplished very much and we have remained here in the US. I need to step back and look and take in that what this service team has done this semester and has gone through has prepared us for this experience. This semester has cleared any doubt from my mind that we will be anything but amazing. I just have to remember that sometimes we need to take a step back and looked at the facts, look at what we have accomplished during that time. 

Getting Started

Hi everyone I am glad that you somehow made it onto my blog page!

                First of all I would like to apologize for not getting this first post up faster, but here it is as I am typing this post on a train heading to Kansas City to join my other amazing teammates. We are about to start what can only be described as an amazing journey by previous International Service Team members, but this journey is going to have some bumps in the road. I know that at some point each of us are going to get onto each other’s LAST nerve, or we are going to face hardships that we have not even began to prepare to overcome. I know however that the other four individuals and I are simply amazing and that we will be able to overcome each obstacle that we face.

                This last semester our team (Team Tumaini) has been preparing in a class for this trip. We have put together a huge portfolio with research on almost everything such as what are women’s role in the household, geography, economic situation, and even Swahili. Then we also have created the first part to our team video (which everyone should look at right here J http://youtu.be/DOA-rypTCII ). So overall I cannot wait to meet my teammates in Kansas City at 11:00 am at the airport so we can get this summer started!