Graceland Primary School

Since our earliest days in Kenya, we have been involved with a wonderful school in the Kibera slum of Nairobi. The founder and director is an amazing brother in Christ, Alex Weigel, who is a Swiss National. Alex left everything in Switzerland to live in the Kibera slum to start a school where there were no educational options for 100’s of thousands of children there.

His primary assistant and the Principal of his Kidstar Academy is a beautiful sister from Kibera herself, named Judy Mtulah. After years of serving and building up Kidstar – Judy kept struggling with another crisis. Every day on her way home, she walked by kids from infancy on who were left unattended as their moms were out desperately searching for any kind of income in a community where unemployment is over 80%. Many of these children are lost, starving, abused or killed each year.

Without any other support or resource, Judy left a secure position at Kidstar two years ago and rented a tiny room right in the most difficult area of the slum and created a primary school to shelter these beautiful at-risk children, who had no other place to go. Other volunteers have joined her to teach the Bible, hygiene, English, Math, and to give them a healthy meal once a day. Some of these dear kids come with little or no clothing and the staff does everything they can to meet the needs.

Last spring, the owner of this tiny schoolroom was preparing to evict them because, with no outside help, Judy and her volunteers were unable to pay the rent and had fallen three months behind.

Sue and I had been giving randomly up to this time and hadn’t realized how desperate things had become. Judy never asks anyone but God for the help she needs. She trusts that if it is His work He will provide. So, she asked the landlord for a few more days “just wait”, she said, “you’ll see that our God will provide!” A week earlier, our church, Salt and Light, without knowing the situation, had sent a $300 wire to help with Judy’s Graceland School, and by God’s grace, every need was met!

Last week, the leadership felt it was God’s call on our church to make a $500 per month commitment to Graceland for the next 6 months. If it is God’s will to continue providing lifegiving support to a third school in Kenya, we are confident that God will make this clear in the coming months. In the previous Blog, you read how God has been providing 26,000 meals per month through Salt and Light’s Ministry. We face the same questions whenever God calls us to consider leaning into another opportunity to serve. When has God ever failed to provide for His work? And is our faith still growing so that everything our Lord desires from this fellowship will be accomplished by His power as we put our trust in Him? Matt. 17:20       In His love, jerry