Cafeteria Cats

My day was spent at doing ministry in the mens, womens, and pediatric wards at the AIC Hospital in Kijabe.

My day yesterday, I was working in the kitchen, helping them with various tasks, as well as serving tea and porridge in the mens and womens wards. Serving tea? Not exactly something I thought of as ministry…

Anyway, yesterday was not the day I enjoyed most, ministry wise, but today has been awesome. Three of us from my team, Alissa, Janet Marie, and myself, went and prayed over the different rooms in the three wards we visited this morning. We didn't stop and spend a lot of time speaking to anyone, but went through, just asking God, should there be anyone who needs prayer, or needs us to speak with them, to put that on our hearts.

After we did that, we spent some time before lunch playing in the pediatrics ward with a boy named Vincent, who was feeling much better than he had been the day before! Due to the language barrier, he just kind of made noises at us, and pointed at us, and ran away from us a lot. We chased him around, stopping when we were getting in the way of the hospital staff or anyone that might be trying to get by, but we were unrelenting! Vincent seemed to enjoy it a lot; it was great to  see how happy he was that we were playing with him.

In just the last few hours, after the 12:30pm-2pm visiting time, the three of us headed back to the wards, and prayed again. We were sitting outside when Alissa said that she thinks we should go back up to the mens ward…

"Alright", JM and myself said, thinking that we had already prayed there and we didn't really find anyone who spoke English, but, we figured God must have put that on Alissa's heart for a reason.

So, we made our way back up the stairs to the mens ward. We went directly to the end of the ward, where instantly, we found some guys who spoke a bit of English, and who wanted us to pray with them.

First, we met a man named Gerishon, who wanted us to pray for his foot. That was all we prayed for, for him, but we had just made small talk about what we were doing in Kenya.

"Alright, so, this was a good start", I thought, "We're kind of going somewhere with this."

Upon finishing up with speaking to Gerishon, a nurse grabs us and says a man wanted to speak with us. This is how we became acquainted with Tony.

Tony was in Kijabe because he had been in an accident last year, and, this last December, had surgery in Nairobi on his left leg and his left arm. The surgeries in Nairobi did not leave the results Tony had expected, so he came to Kijabe so they could fix the repairs that the hospital in Nairobi had attempted.

Tony told us that in addition to praying for his body, and the doctors who would be performing his surgery, that we could pray for his family, his two sons and his wife, and, that we could pray for him to be able to reacquire the job he previously held before his accident.

We were stoked to be able to pray for all of that, he was one of the only people we had really gotten to know all day, as he was the first patient with whom it was evident that he really wanted to speak to us.

God surprised us with meeting Tony. It was rad. It was a huge blessing.

After speaking and praying with Tony, we headed out to the playground in the pediatrics ward and drew pictures with some kids. Their names were Faith, Alex, Michael, and John. John was nine years old, and did the interpreting for us. That was also just a super fun time. Oh yeah, Alissa also found Vincent and started playing ball with him again.

I think I speak for Alissa and JM when I say that our prayers were answered today.