Hello everyone! I am so excited to announce that we have completed training camp and are on the way to the airport to go to our first country of Kenya. While in Kenya we will be split up into five teams of five. My team will be going to Butere which is on the west side of Kenya close to Uganda. I will be with Kira, Judah, Emily, and Ashley, whom you all will be seeing pictures of and who I will be talking about for the next 4-5 weeks or so. This is bitter sweet to be splitting so soon after meeting all of the wonderful people on my squad but we will be back together in Ethiopia. But I do know the Lord is going to grow each one of us while we are in Kenya to be better prepared for the rest of the world that we are going tom see!

Now to talk about training camp. I could honestly go on and on about hope fun and good training camp was but as that would take up a lot of time and would give me less to talk to you all about in person I will give a brief overview of what campo was like. To start with the parents that wanted to could come for the first two days of camp to learn more about the race, what their kids will be doing, and the behind the scenes things AIM does here in the US. After the parents left at 1:30 Saturday we began our first session of the week. Throughout the week we would have worship and a session two times a day as well as have squads meetings and prayer time. Come Thursday we had Sabbath and a lot happened on this day. Firstly I got to spend some good quality time with the Lord and we workless a few things out that He has been showing me this week. At around 11am a couple buddies and I went to Waffle House, Walmart, and then target. So much happened on this little excursion but the most impactful were with an older lady at Waffle House who said Ayo was one of the most beautiful people she had ever seen. We then prayed over her and we found out that some in her family was dealing with depression. At Target we met a homeless man and his family and they were some of the nicest people I’d ever met. He is a believer and his son was baptized within the last couple months. We talked for a good while to him and learned that he had recently helped out a fellow homeless person by getting him a hotel room for the night. We then prayed over him and his family and gave him $20 for gas, he then put us in his prayer calendar. On the way back we had an uber driver form Turkey. She didn’t speak much English so we tried using different translation apps for the convo but they kept messing up, however, we know that the Lord will handle what happens next with her and what needed to be said was said to her. I also got desire to try and learn a new language as I had so much fun trying to converse between languages. Friday we celebrated our squads first birthday by giving Ayo a birthday cake and singing to him throughout the day. We also did our hike up Mt. Yonah which was a lot of fun, and the views at the top was amazing. You all will get to see some of the pictures from that trip, and the rest of training camp soon. Saturday was our last day of actual training and during this day we got out into our teams and did role training, of which I am treasurer for my team of six people. We also found out who our team mentor would be and my teams is Ana, you will also be hearing more about her in the next few weeks. My job as treasurer requires me to be in charge of all ministry type expenses, whether it be food, transportation, or supplies for the ministry itself. I will explain the role more in future posts as I learn about all of the details throughout these coming weeks. Finally comes Sunday and this day is a good but sad day. This is the case because all of the other squads left to go to their ministry locations throughout the day and all the squads had gotten pretty close with each other throughout these last 10 days. And now we come to today, which is the day that my squad, P-Squad, ships off to head to Kenya. We will be going from Atlanta to Istanbul, Turkey, have a three hour layover, then we will head to Nairobi, Kenya from there. We should arrive around 1:25am local time on Wednesday morning so we are bound to be quite tired. The last of us head for the airport at 3:30 pm today so at the time of writing this I still have a bit of time before I am actually at the airport but once at the airport it will be go go go until we are in Kenya.

As I am wrapping up this blog I would like to ask everyone for prayers as we head into our first country. Our squad will be split up so I know there will be some sadness there, but I also know this will be where it really begins to feel real and we fully realize we won’t be back in the States for 11 months, so I ask that you all pray for anyone that get homesickness or begins to stress over that fact. Please pray for the ministries that each of us are going to. My team will be in Butere, two teams will be in Mombasa, the other two teams will be in Wamunyu and the Nakuru area. I do not know very many specifics for what each team will be doing but my team will be going around to different villages to evangelize and to schools. Please pray for safe travels and that the Lord will move is mighty ways. Thank you all and I love you all so much! Next time I post I will be in Kenya! Let’s go!

Also my squad has a squad instagram so follow that if you would like to see what my whole squad is up to! Squad Insta: wr_psquad_11in11