Hello there everyone,
Today was my first day of teaching at New Dawn High School, and it went well. This morning started out badly because my driver Richard did not show up, but fortunately I had his business card and so I had the office of the Guest House hear call him on his cellphone to ask him when we could expect him to arrive. Well fortunately he was relatively nearby so he said I could be there in 15 minutes. Well when he arrived he told me that he hadn't received a call so he just did not know.
Anyway I arrived at 9:30am at New Dawn, which was half an hour late, but certainly more than half of the students were not there yet, which I had expected. After all they are on "Kenya time" and that is the prevailing time everywhere here. Before I could really start class I had a few minutes to talk to Sammy and he started gushing about yesterday. He said that both my sermon and the songs Sanna and Lance had played and sung had been big hits and that his congregation was truly excited about what they had seen and heard. They had just loved it.
Then we got the laboratory ready for teaching. It is the same place I taught last year, which is not ideal, but the problem is that tomorrow the educational team will be back (they are now in Kangundo) and so they need the assembly hall. So I will just have to take the next best place that is left and that is the laboratory.
There are apparently 12 teachers slated to attend my class, but 4 will be taking courses to upgrade their certification. They will be back on Thursday. Also I have two others, Pastor Sammy, and Leah, who was in my class last year, and mid week Irene will be joining us. Leah is the school counselor and she is clearly well educated. We talked over lunch and she said she had received four years of theological training, but that she was just turned off by the teaching in the churches here. Yet last year she had also been in my class and had loved it and so she was once again looking very much forward to this year. She was very interested to hear how things had gone in Eldoret, when she heard I had just spent a week there and had taught the same material as I had planned for New Dawn--material that deals with good and bad experiences of women in the Bible. Being the school counselor, she is very interested in this indeed. In today's class she and Margaret were just great, also Pastor Sammy. It is great to be able to depend on three people in the class that like to participate so eagerly in the discussion and do that with good comments driven by common sense.
There are several new people in the class that are becoming acclimatized quickly so it looks like we are going to have a good class, especially when Irene Tongoi, the director of New Dawn, will join us later this week. She is very keen on application and that continues to be my weaker side, since I thrive on understanding the content of a passage, and the deeper the better, so that is what I mostly emphasize.
Today I taught on Judah and Tamar, which went over very well and I was happy to find out that since I had taught that passage 5 years ago they remembered much of it (that is the few that were there at that time), which was very encouraging. Then I taught the passage on Rahab the prostitute/innkeeper who, by saving the lives of Joshua's spies, is saved from the destruction of Jericho. Then when later she marries into the line of Judah, she becomes one of the four women in the genealogy of Messiah. Then I started on the book of Ruth which I had to skip in Eldoret because things were going much slower there given that the the students there generally had less education than the teachers of New Dawn. The book of Ruth is a little gem that also, just like the story of Rahab, deals with the Leverite marriage, which I have tried to explain in an earlier e-mail. Anyway they are pretty impressed by the different characters like Naomi, Ruth and Boaz, who are truly a delight to get to know.
Well I will be joined this evening by the education team that is returning from Kangundo. They will arrive late after a very tough trip. To travel the road to Kangundo in the morning and back at night leaves you with a very sore bottom and rattled nerves from the crazy traffic here. Pray for safe travel for all of us every day. So tomorrow we drive together to New Dawn where they will be working with some of the students while I will continue to deal with their teachers.
Well this must be it for the day,
God bless you,
Hans
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