Information Meeting

Eddie, Debbie D., Ron, and Jan arrived in Chimala on a Sunday evening. On the next day, Monday, we took a walking tour of the Mission grounds. Most of my posts so far have been kind of a general introduction to the Mission as a whole and the place where we stayed. Many of the photos were taken on that first day as we walked around the Mission.

We were finally ready for the work to begin! The afternoon of that first Monday we had an Information Meeting. A Let's Start Talking project is usually kicked off with an Information Meeting, to which potential readers are invited. At the meeting the program is explained----the main point being that we will be helping people with conversational English by one-on-one conversations using the Bible as a text. After the explanation, people are invited to sign up for whatever times are convenient for them.
For the information meeting at Chimala, Bernard, the hospital administrator, was the interpreter in Swahili as Ron explained LST in English.



Some of the church leaders were invited to the meeting so that they would have a good understanding of what we would be doing and so that they would feel like they were involved in the project. The following photo shows some of the church leaders from the Mission Church and the Chimala Bible College.




After Ron's explanation of Let's Start Talking, the potential readers were then divided into groups, with each group going to a place in the room with one of the LST workers. Questions were answered, and then the readers signed up on our individual reading schedules.

The following photo is very fuzzy, but it shows Eddie talking with some of the people who came to the meeting. The two young men on the right are from the Masai village.



The next two photos are of Debbie with Bernard and her reader group.

We read with people of all ages and faiths. We very seldom have anyone refuse to read with us because of our use of the Bible as the text, even if they are atheists or of a non-Christian belief.
The LST lessons are friendship based and are non-threatening to the readers. Our reading with them is not dependent on their agreement with our beliefs. We just talk about the ideas in the text. We are "seed planters"; we never know how much influence the seed will have in someone's life.

We were disappointed with the number of readers who attended our Information Meeting. We knew that we had work to do to recruit more readers in order to fill our time slots each day. We all prayed that night for more readers! Little did we know how God would answer that prayer the next day! More about that in the next post.......