Volunteers in Mission

As the Aspen Community Church continues to define our outreach goals, one focus has been to participate in mission work in the country of Kenya. In the summer of 2008, two of our members, Charlie Horn and Debbie Welden, traveled to Meru, Kenya with a team from Volunteers in Mission from the Rocky Mountain Conference of the United Methodist Church.

While in Meru, the team coordinated with local Methodist church leaders on the use of approximately $7,000 of donated funds from the United Methodist Rocky Mountain Conference. The main project work occurred at the Kithoca Primary School, a poor rural school outside of Meru. Working with the local parent volunteers, headmaster Nathan Ngiti, and locally hired laborers, it was rewarding to see what could be accomplished in two short weeks:

• Conversion of a rustic classroom into a library and media center
• Helping the Kithoka School with other necessary maintenance, including reconstruction of the 4-strand barbed wire fence around the school compound, and repairing and re-hanging the entrance gate
• Provided a reconstructed cooking stove for the school cook and installed a chimney to funnel the cooking smoke out of the cooking shed
• Presented a lesson on environmental stewardship to the standard 7th and 8th students and conducted a school grounds clean-up. A follow-up plan was established, through which the older students will train the younger ones to continue to keep the school grounds clean
• Contributed school supplies and clothing to the Kithoka School
• Contributed medical supplies to local primary care providers and held a one-day medical clinic for the surrounding area

The team also had the opportunity to tour the Methodist Guest House (under construction), the Methodist Children's Home, the Methodist Polytechnic School, Kenyan Methodist University, and the Methodist Bio-Intensive Agricultural Training Center. A highlight was a Sunday service where they were honored guests with the Bishop William Muwonga at the Chugu Methodist Church in Meru.

The Kenyans are a very elegant and gracious people, and they welcomed the team with friendliness and heartfelt gratitude for the work that they were doing. Relationships were formed, and the desire for ongoing connections is strong.

As a result of this initial trip, the Aspen Community Church has established an ongoing mission fund, through which we are currently sponsoring a young girl at the Methodist Children's Home in Meru, and we are co-sponsoring another rural school that will be the beneficiary of a joint project between the Methodist Church and the Arvada Rotary Club. 40,000 books are being shipped in the spring of 2009, with the plan to establish libraries in a number of rural schools in Kenya over the next three years. Future mission trips to Kenya are also being planned, through which Aspen Community Church members and friends are encouraged to participate.