Celebrate Today

Friday, July 31, 2026

A Welcome Surprise

arriving in Lodwar this morning on our 6 am flight from Nairobi - so very grateful for so many details that have fallen into place for this all to come together!

so happy to see Bishop Kaaleng at the airport to greet us!

Veronica, some parents in our program, and a few board members went above and beyond to welcome us to Kenya!!

They crowned us with beads and outfits fit for a Turkana king or queen :)

with David Kamar and his daughter (he was one of the first students to graduate from our program many years ago), Bishop Kaaleng, Pastor Emase, Joseph, and Joyce

with Saroja and Veronica in the car on the way to the Children of the Kingdom center

Jecinta and Saroja

greeting the childern who showed up to celebrate with us this morning

back at Veronica's house this afternoon with Abigael and Isaiah (two kids I've known for over a decade)

"What if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things? What if joy, instead of refuge or relief from heartbreak, is what effloresces from us as we help each other carry our heartbreaks?" -Ross Gay

"From the forest to my own fragility, I have been shown that love is like mycelium, the web beneath all we see, and joy is simply the sense that we are woven, never truly isolated but ever interdependent. Joy is not the opposite of sorrow nor the absence of grief, but the surprise, sensed over and over, that the truest fact about who we are is that we are connected. Joy is the feeling of finding that underneath your life, no matter how far you’ve fallen nor how much you hurt, the web of love still holds."- K.J. Ramsey