(Last fall, I managed to lose all the photos I’d taken for the previous 10 months. Yes, I cried. That event has been the single reason for the sporadic nature of my blogging the last few months. For one thing, I had pictures I’d been saving to use in future blog posts. Now I have to find those particular scenarios again and photo them. I got out of the habit of blogging and have struggled to get back into it. I’m trying to build back the habit. Hopefully, I’ll get more faithful with it over the next few weeks.)

A Church for Isanja, Update

A few months ago, I posted about Isanja’s need for a new church building. The building has only gotten worse since then. When we showed the Jesus video during VBS last August, we had to drape a sheet over the hole above the door to block out most of the light. Not long afterward, the entire front door fell out of the church. There’s been a gaping hole in the church since September last year.

Our desire had been to tear down the entire church and rebuild it with baked bricks – mud bricks that had been heated for several days until they are very hard. The baking process kills any termite eggs hiding out in the mud used for the bricks and makes them last years longer. They are, however, quite a lot more expensive than the mud bricks the people use for building their houses. 

Little by little the building has been falling down. It’s been in worse and worse condition every time we go out there. Finally, one Sunday, the people told us they were going to make the bricks and rebuild the church. After a lengthy (and sometimes heated!) discussion, we realized that our Isanja church folks truly wanted to do most of the work themselves. They didn’t feel the need for the more expensive bricks. In fact, they felt like a church made from them wouldn’t fit in their community. We were so thankful they talked to us about it.

Since then, they’ve been diligently making bricks and letting them dry. We’ve been getting a lot of rain so the drying process has been slow. They had 2,000 bricks stacked in the back of the church today (out of the rain) that they made in the last couple weeks.

They are so excited about it, too. It’s exciting for them to have a part in making their own church. We will need to help them with cement, metal windows and doors, and iron sheets for the roof. Sometime in the future, they’ll need more benches (they don’t have enough seating most of the time) and we’d like to put bookshelves and a small library there, too.

The mason who built the church at Ngarama will be going out there to check on their work in the next few days. I know he prefers the baked bricks. The mud bricks might be a hard sell for those church folks to make to Crispus. I’m sure there will be other discussions in the future. I’ll keep you posted on the progress.

Meanwhile, they have a man-sized hole in the church grounds. The guys who made it were pretty excited about it. I actually caught a couple of them smiling for the picture. (Is this the African version of a man hole? I’ve been wondering ever since I took the picture. 😉 )