Last week we went to the baby home. I loved the baby home. The babies there don't have a mum and dad. I played with the babies. There was one called Lucy and I loved playing with her. We played with them outside. There are 22 babies that live there. They drank lots of milk.
By Pippa Schopf

Last Tuesday I went to the baby home with my family. There was a lot of babies there. I played with them. When we got there we played with the babies inside the house. And after that we played outside with the babies. I saw one of the babies getting their hair cut. Some of the babies cried a lot. They liked to drink milk too. I had lots of fun. 
By Zoe Schopf

While the last 4 weeks have been mainly about settling in to life here in a new city and organising homeschooling, both Fiona and I have had a few opportunities to get out and about in Nairobi.

Fiona and I both got to tag along with Karen, a missionary with ABC Children's Aid Kenya who lives just up the road, to visit some of their students in slums around Nairobi. ABC are an organisation who educate children who normally couldn't afford to go to school. They also have boarding facilities and sponsor children to attend partner schools.

On my trip, I visited a couple of families of ABC students. The main aim of our outing was to encourage a teenage girl to go back to school after she had been absent for a number of months. We brought her a new school uniform and she gladly went back. Hopefully it is a new start for her.

Fiona met a few families whose children attended ABC schools and was able to bless one family who's 2 year old child was very sick. They were quite a distance from the nearest hospital and they couldn't afford to even travel there to get the child checked out.

The poverty, sanitation and injustices in these slum areas are very confronting. It can be difficult to see any hope, but when you open your eyes you begin to realise that there is also a lot of joy in these areas. The people are generally happy and laughing and there is always a lot of activity.

I made a very short video of my trip with Karen and the ABC counselors into the slums. It will give you a bit of an idea of the conditions that some people here are forced to live in:

I have also started trying to figure out what Southern Cross will do with the church building that I came here to help with in July, 2013. It is a slow process but we are progressing which is encouraging.

We hope you are all doing well, we miss all our friends and family back home but we are settling in well here. Please keep us in your prayers.

Love Anthony, Fiona,Zoe, Pippa and Lucy