It is difficult to find adequate words to express our thanks and gratitude to so many, for what has been an amazing journey, but the most thanks go to our Father in Heaven who, we believe, made this dream a reality.

  

We have to go back to October 2007 when we went to Kenya and spent a memorable afternoon in Toi Primary School, Kibera where the African Children’s Choir have started an after school club. While there and talking to the Deputy Head, we mentioned about our puppet team, (launched in April, that year, after a training day through One Way UK) to which she replied “Oh you must bring them” and the rest is history.

 

 

 

Just over a week ago we still needed £4000 to fulfil our mission. At the time of writing this £3500 has suddenly been pledged, so that we now only have £500 to go! That means that we have raised £13,500 in just over 8 months. £9,500 has been achieved by our teams fundraising efforts, as diverse as car washing, sweet selling, wall climbing, table top sales, puppet shows in schools, Valentines events, individual gifts, London Monopoly challenge and puppet shows like ’Love is The Greatest’ etc - the list goes on. The original target was £15,000, but due to special deals in flights and other costs we have managed to reduce the amount needed to £14,000; this does not include our own personal spending! However, we still hope to achieve the £15,000, as this will be money that we can use to buy bibles and give to special needs, along the way.

A point worth mentioning is the commitment from the team to raising this amount and it really is amazing how faithful our God is when we believe and trust in him. Last year, we had the assurance at the start of all the talk of ’Downturn’ that ‘there’s no recession in Heaven’, I think this project proves what can be achieved when we step out and take a risk in believing that this is so.

We can now concentrate on the very important preparation in shaping the project for what we will be doing in Kenya 

 What are we going to do? The first weekend will be spent acclimatising and visiting a local church on Sunday. We will spend 5 days training a group of young people in the art of puppetry (these are former African Children’s Choir Children) eleven in total. Then all twenty-one of us will be performing a show to the pupils and their families of Toi Primary school in Kibera on the Saturday afternoon, there could be as many as two thousand people there on the school playing field (which really is a brown dust bowl). After the show we will be donating the puppet staging, ten puppets with costumes, CDs and stage curtains to the team as a gift from England so that they have everything they need to further the work that we ’Rafiki’s Crew’ began.

After this we will be heading south for a few days break in Mombassa, a time for the team to de-stress and to debrief from the different culture, the very different lifestyle and the conditions many people.