Kenya: MITS Staff

An organization is only as good as the people who run it. That being said, MITS is an amazing organization.

The staff at Made in the Streets is an incredible collection of people who are dedicated to the mission of rescuing, nurturing, and equipping children who have been on the streets of Eastleigh and preparing them for productive and meaningful lives in Nairobi.

The MITS staff is comprised of nearly 40 amazing people. What is incredible is that about a dozen off the staff are MITS graduates, which means they were on the streets at one time, went through the MITS program successfully, and then were invited to return to be on the MITS staff.

Here are a few of them:

Moses. Moses walks base camps in Eastleigh engaging street children, praying with them, inviting them to programs at the center that provide hope. Once on the street himself, Moses knows that challenges, questions, and experiences of children living on the street. He also knows that there is a pathway off the street.

Mary. Mary is so full of life and energy. She inspires skills students in fashion and design. Mary has overcome much adversity in her life. When she prays, it is a force of nature. When she leads worship, there is no stopping her. She desires to be fully engaged in what God is going in her life, in the lives of the MITS children, and in the world around her. She recently got some press in a prominent Kenyan fashion magazine that featured her work. When I was there, she was interviewed for an hour on one of the most listened to radio programs in Nairobi.

Mbuvi. Francis Mbuvi is the leader of the team in Kamulu. He leads with a quiet and gentle spirit. He is as rock solid as they come.

Irene. Irene is as intelligent as she is passionate about serving the children of MITS. Trained in psychology, she understands the experiences of the children, their trauma, and how to build resilience. She has big dreams too. She has hopes to create a counseling center at the MITS facility. I also have some big dreams that dovetail with hers. I would love to send students to MITS for an internship to do therapy with the children.

Something On The Horizon (Behind You)

After so much nothing
Wheeling so fast
Feeling so slow

After so much tut-tut-tut tut-tut-tut
Highway speed - for so long,
Infinite distance,
Never going to get there,
Monotony lulls,
Perceived progresslessness;
Weighted eyelids

“There.” It is! There is here! Wake up! You’re missing it!

Tut-tut-tut tut-tut-tut
So much nothing.

Marriage: Opportunity, Suffering, and Mystery

It is difficult to speak about marriage to people these days. Most people who are the age to get married (a first marriage – 20’s and early 30’s) have grown up their entire lives in a context where the marriage narrative is negative. Divorce, abuse, cohabitation is no different, loss of freedom, pointless and on and on, the negative cultural narratives about marriage make it unattractive. The limits and risks in the marriage negative narrative make it difficult for many to want to consider it. This narrative is supported by their own experiences growing up or at least the experiences of people they know as well as endless celebrity divorce and break up news and widely publicized (inaccurately at times) divorce  statistics.

The push back marriage positive narrative doesn't help much either. In short, marriage is oversold as a way to personal happiness: "Here are all the great economic and health benefits of getting married - live longer, get wealthier, be happy..." The marriage positive narrative can sound more the dreaded prosperity gospel of the crooked Christian television pastors. What is worse is the indulgent and greedy wedding industry that seems to link the amount of money spent on a wedding to the amount of love invested into a marriage.  This narrative is supported by selective research findings and religious templates of what marriage is supposed to be.

Sadly, both the negative and the positive narrative are all too often being oversold. Overselling either narrative is a problem in a number of ways.

1.They are not an accurate view of marriage

2. What might be descriptive of some specific marriages is communicated as prescriptive of  marriage in general

3. There seems to be additional and unhelpful motivation in either case for communicating the marital narratives in the way they are communicated. People who are  compelled either to diminish marriage or  militantly advocate for it seem to have some additional stake in their efforts that has nothing to do with the people they are communicating with.

Plus, these narratives are situated into the relentless cultural support for hyper-individualism and consumerism which elevates above all other things a cost-benefit analyses as the basis for marriage - the costs being "how little do I have to relationally invest or risk" and the benefits being "how much sustained satisfaction can I extract." No one is really going to outright admit that this is true. However, in a sense, although we know that we are not supposed to be selfish in a relationship, we have been so well trained by the power of cultural inertia to focus on personal satisfactions that it is the only thing that comes naturally when the relationship is up and running. Applying economic principles, even accidentally, to an intimate relationship is like spreading a smooth layer of mud onto bread and calling it a sandwich. It just doesn't work.

Marriage is, in large measure, a process filled with opportunity, suffering, and mystery that has great potential for good for a majority of people. Here is a very small sample:

Opportunity: The opportunities that occur within marriage, a committed, intimate, and exclusive relationship between two people that is recognized by layers of community and family, are numerous. The primary opportunities are for growth. Marriage provides context for growth that is constant and the stakes are real. In order to be intimate, there must be risk. Risk-free intimacy is no intimacy at all. Not committing in an intimate relationship is a risk-avoidant process that wears on efforts at intimacy. The answer to the question, “Can I be committed to someone, even when it gets difficult?” cannot be answered very well with serial monogamy. In order to there to be sustained intimacy there must be sustained growth. In marriage, an individual has the opportunity to become the very best version of themselves because there is real time feedback (intentional and unintentional) on their efforts. Satisfaction that is genuine and sustainable comes after growth, not before it. Gratification can happen at any point, but most people eventually tire of mere gratification like they do of eating the frosting off the cake -  it doesn’t kill, but it also does not sustain. Genuine satisfaction that is sustainable is a process that takes committed time to a committed other. Marriage provides opportunity for the experience that some things can only be accomplished by a marital social system or can be accomplished easier in that system. Yes, children can be raised in other family structures, but marriage provides an excellent social context as married parents can serve as an amazing resource for each other that were such a resource to be outsourced, the costs would be significant. Married parents are required to grow as they raise children together as the children force out all kinds of latent rules and roles that must be engaged and modified in order for the marital social system to survive. Grow or suffer.

Suffering: Speaking of suffering, there will be suffering in marriage. That is no different than any other part of life, so this should not be frightening to anyone. The person who believes they will escape this life without suffering knows so little of life. The suffering in marriage is often caught up in the extent to which the individual must give up part of himself or herself that does not make for a better relationship. It is called sacrifice or sometimes it is called self-confrontation. When genuine and meaningful sacrifice is made in the marital context, the outcome is often that the thing given up is not missed for what the space left by that thing given up allowed for in the marriage.
When significant loss happens and grief makes its unwelcomed visits, the couple suffers, but they have the opportunity to suffer together – to share in the grief, the pain, and the uncertainties. Such things can strain a marriage, but also opens door for the building of resilience and depth.

Mystery: Life long sustained efforts at intimacy can lead to unexpected things in marriage. Knowing that two people are committed to each other until death opens up dreams and hopes and the chance for the unexpected. Revelation about self, about the other and about the relationship through years of storying and re-storying events of life together can make for deeply meaningful reflections and marital identity making. It makes for shifting and generative meaning-making through years and decades together. Events change meaning when there are three, four, or five decades to re-story them. Such mysteries of marriage deepen and grow with the length of the marriage. Serial monogamy cannot offer this mystery as previous events of past relationships cannot be borrowed into the next as shared experiences.

This does not even scratch the surface, but it is a small hint into what marriage can be.
Marriage is not the horror narrative that all too often gets told in the media, nor is it the fairy tale narrative told by the marriage imposers. It is not an obligation in order to be a normal person and it is not a death trap  meant to ruin all of your freedom entitlements.

It is a context where in two individuals find meaningful ways to become one without losing themselves. THAT is beautiful.

Kenya: Kids

The children at Made In The Streets are inspiring. The younger children are learning basic literacy, math, communications, science, Bible and some other subjects while the older children are learning a trade: woodworking, fashion and design, catering, beauty and hair, or farming. They are being prepared with useful and marketable skills for their local economy. With these skills, these children who were formerly on the streets fighting to survive will be situated to thrive.

I like Antony’s smile and sly sense of humor.



Jane gave me my first ever pedicure. This girl is going to make it. She is good at what she does and is savvy in her marketing.



Lydia and Lucy are both such sweet and beautiful young women. Their hearts are deep and they have a lot of love to give.


Ambush is his name and he graduated last year and is working in the Nairobi fashion industry. He came back to MITS for a day to speak with current skills students on what it is like to graduate, get a job and live on your own. He is an inspiration to the current students, but also to the MITS staff and the visiting team.


Sylvester has such a welcoming smile and servant’s heart. He was found helping out frequently.


One of the great joys of this trip was to have my mother join us. It was a dream come true as I recall when I was a children she would speak about how wonderful it would be to do mission work in Africa. Well, it took a few decades, but here is evidence of a dream fulfilled.

Mom got tagged as “Sho Sho Linda,” which means Grandma Linda. The children took to her. Being from the streets, these children had little or no contact with their grandmothers. There is a grandmother void for these kids and my mother was glad to put a little something of herself into that void.

I had the privilege to teach a class to many of the older students to help them prepare to launch out into the world.


Children of all ages of all nations like to  play

and to be silly

and to be held. it should be stated that this little guy has the look on his face that we saw more than once. It is his fake "I am not having fun face." He was loving the attention he got from Sierra and LOVED HIM SOME IPHONE.

One of the most amazing things to ponder is how the street children of Eastleigh, with their painfully filthy living conditions, glued addicted stupor, and withering poverty can turn into healthy and smiling children poised for success in life. Having seen face to face both street children and MITS children, there is no better measure of the transformational work of this mission and how God uses people to lift people.

Kenya: Eastleigh

In two previous posts I talked about Methare Valley (here and here). Another place in Nairbo where Made In The Streets has a presence is in the Nairobi suburb of Eastleigh.

Methare Valley and Eastleigh have poverty in common, but there are many differences. Eastleigh is both more and less developed than Methare Valley. Eastleigh is not a slum, but s run down suburb where poverty has come in and run amuck. There are multi-story buildings in varying stages of either development or dilapidation in Eastleigh as opposed to the random, make-shift housing units cobbled together in Mathare Valley.

Another difference is that Eastleigh has a much more overt Muslim presence than Methare Valley. There are Muslim places of worship, more Muslim dress, and much more signage in Arabic.

Eastleigh is “home” to many street children whereas there are no street children in Methare Valley. In fact, street children in Methare Valley end up in Easleigh.

Our visit to Eastleigh involved base-walking, which means meeting the street children at their bases. A base is simply a location where street

children gather. It is usually identifiable by a small lean-to or unique land formation. To them it is home. When we came up upon our first base, I did not even know it was a base. It just looked like children sitting together, high on glue. Larry Conway guided our base-walking group through some basics of base-walking. As we approached the children, Larry and Moses took lead and helped our group engage with the group of children. Moses translated between English and Swahili.

We all introduced ourselves and they themselves. I was surprised they were so eager to listen. What I found out later was that street children are either feared as dangerous by locals or are invisible to locals. In short, no one bothers to talk with them. So, when Mzungus (white people) bother to stop, they are at least curious and sometimes eager as it might mean help.

This was a base that had been visited by Larry and Moses and others before, so there was some pre-existing familiarity. Larry, in both English and Swahili, ,asked who would like to say a prayer to start our conversation. It was an unexpected move so far as I was concerned. Then what come next was even more unexpected. One of the boys at the base base pointed directly at me and said, “you.” Then everyone looked at me. I looked around at everyone looking at me with the expectant looks on their faces. What else could I do? I began to pray. Moses interpreted.

We spent about 20 minutes at the base sharing scripture and stories and the boys at the base listened much more than I could have ever imagined. Perhaps they were really engaged. Perhaps they were so high on glue that they didn’t have the will to do anything else. Perhaps they thought they were going to get food. It is really hard to tell.

Then it was time to close it out and visit another base. Larry asked the boys which one of them would close us off in prayer. Again, it was unexpected. Then one of the boys stepped up and volunteered to pray. Dirty, covered in flies, glue bottles shoved in his left from pocket, he stood to pray.

His prayer maneuvered past all of my defenses and put me to tears. He prayer for us, for our safety, for protection for others, for all kinds of selfless things. His prayer was coherent, compassionate, and unselfish. How could a glue addicted street kid put together such a prayer.

It occurred to me that he is living in two worlds. He depends on glue and he depends on God. He is in squalor and abject poverty and has a wealth spiritual access. He is broken and he is whole.

But my tears. What was it about his prayer that squeezed my heart? Later I figured it out. I felt deep within me that as different as our life circumstances are, there is no difference between us. He has a glue bottle shoved in his pocket that I  can clearly see, but what “glue bottle” do I have shoved into my pocket? What do I rely on when I should have faith?

I entered the base walk to engage with people so different from me and left with the disconcerting and generous understanding that our differences are overwhelmed by our similarities.

These glue addicted children on the streets of Eastleigh are in process, just like I am. They are loved by God no less and no more than I am loved by God. We have our own types of poverty and our own types of wealth. We engage and share in each other’s poverty and share in each other’s wealth. And we hope and we pray and we never give up.

League of Extraordinary MFTs

It happened. For real. Last night a dream that began three years ago came into its complete fullness. The first cohort of MFT students has left the nest and now go into the world to practice the profession they have been rigorously studying for two years. It’s humbling. It’s exciting. It’s beautiful.

Three years ago, when the program was nothing more than an idea, I was reluctant even to consider engaging in it. I had completed my first year of being a new university professor and felt like I needed a couple more years to get my footing. Not only that, the idea was not even mine. I was simply asked to help out.

Well, little did I know that helping would become lots of helping, and lots of helping would become leading, and lots of leading would become being the director of the program. Before I knew it, I was in charge of everything.

Two years ago I met the first cohort at the initial orientation in a downstairs conference room in the student center. I was impressed at the first meeting and eager to get started. I decided to be bold and to challenge them that this program would be rigorous and that they would need their cohort to “cooperate to graduate.” I made promises about quality and rigor and how well prepared they would be by the time they graduated – promises I knew I had to find a way to keep.

My words were not based on any evidence whatsoever. I had no idea what was really going to happen. I wondered whether it would even work. We were working on the curriculum as we went, I was the only full time faculty, we did not have an onsite clinic nor did we have any identified clinical sites. In an ideal world, we would have had another entire year to prepare for the roll out of the program. We had no such luxury. We sailed the ship as we built it.

Looking back after two years, I see that the ship sailed all the way to from one shore to the next – no one fell out and no one drown. More than that, 15 students thrived and excelled and succeeded beyond my most optimistic dream.

There are now 15 graduates, a league of extraordinary MFTs, who will:

• Take the next step in their MFT profession.
• Provide excellent therapy for hundreds and hundreds of individuals, couples and families who need help.
• Advance in the profession and make it a better profession.
• Continue to grow and develop in their own relationships.

So, Aron, Jen, Jenny, Jeanetta, AnnChristine, Adella, Siobhan, Amanda, Nathan, Marcus, Nikki, Bekah, Drea, Juli, and Alyssa, you are amazing. You are forever etched into my life – unforgettable. You are the newest and most promising face of this profession and the field of MFT. You now take you place in this sacred work and will shape this profession in middle Tennessee, in California, in Pennsylvania and wherever else your life journey takes you.

I am proud of every single one of you. I am proud to say you were trained at Lipscomb. I am proud to say that I got to be  involved in your training as an MFT. I am honored and humbled that I got to  be involved in your lives so deeply. I cannot wait for the opportunity to say, “that MFT was trained at Lipscomb,” because the reputation of this program is tied to your excellence – and you are excellent!

May God continue to unleash blessing in and through you so you can continue to bless the world.

Kenya: Methare Valley (Where is God?)

In my last post I shared a bit about the slum of Merthare Valley in Nairobi where half a million people live. It is a place of contrasts with poverty as a main feature, and yet seasoned with beauty, redemptive smiles of children, and a thin but active economy.
When we first approached Methare Valley in our bus, all I saw was squalor. Lines of abandoned cars covered in dust, trash piled up with old men and children picking through it looking for something valuable, people standing around with seemingly nothing to do – the place looked like what depression feels like. I tried to imagine what it was like living there and my heart sank. I wondered, “Where is God?”
This question that emerges in the midst sprawling poverty, “where is God?” is exposing…of my own spiritual poverty. My immediate assumptions about Methare Valley and poverty and God had immediate implications. Although I did not overtly think this, the assumption supporting my question was that God cannot be where economic poverty is. In short, I was unwittingly admitting that I am much more beholden to the Joel Osteen style prosperity gospel than I would like to admit.

This is embarrassing since I am such a critic of this false teaching. To make the automatic assumption that economic conditions are some indicator light for the presence of God IS THE PROSPERITY GOSPEL!. Of course God is in Methare Valley. God is as much in Methare Valley as He is in my middle class neighborhood in Tennessee, the monasteries of Kentucky, Wall Street, or anywhere else. God does not play favorites and prove who is “blessed” by money.
When I looked to that which contrasted the poverty, I saw God. In the smiles of children, the the families that were still in tact, in the neighborly way people looked out for each other, in hospitable and welcoming spirit people had, in the lack of complaint for their situation – there is life in the slums. Slum churches were vibrant a live in their dark ramshackle structures. In the midst of economic poverty, life emerges, it presses through, and it is even thrives. Like flowers grow through the cracks of pavement, life presses through the pavement of poverty.
God does save people in the poverty of Methare Valley, but God also saves people in the poverty of Wall Street.  The way God saves people usually has nothing to do with how much money they have. People saved out of effects of economic poverty of Methare Valley might never get rich while people saved out of the moral poverty of Wall Street might always be rich. There is no necessary correlation.
There is a life and depth of spirituality alive and well in Methare Valley that I do not have access to in middle Tennessee. There is constant faith for provision that I simply do not consider on a day to day basis. I must purge the prosperity gospel that has a greater hold on me than I want to admit and notice that my confidence in things has so comforted me that I have replaced faith in God with the reliability of the good infrastructure.

Where is God in Methare Valley? When I was there, God was busy - very busy. And one of the things he was doing was undoing layers of internalized bad theology in me.

Kenya: Methare Valley

Methare Valley is a sprawling slum in Nairobi. Half a million people live in this slum. Narrow zig-zag pathways snake between endless ramshackle, make-shift metal housing units where ducks, chickens, and goats lap sewage water that runs in sometimes random places. Low hanging power lines link across the zig-zag pathways and water trickles in the cracks on the ground as you walk creating a constant hazard.
There are far fewer actual roads than the population density requires and the roads are poorly kept. It feels disorganized, unplanned, and uncontrolled. Forget about zoning and HOA rules. This place feels like a free for all. Poverty closes in on all sides as the slum stretches for as far as the eye can see.
The main road passing through the slum bustles with activity. Venders selling their wares and food fill the streets, some of the very engaging and some aggressive as they seek to make a day’s wage. If they can make a couple dollars, they have had a good day. One person cooked french fries over an open fire in the street. They looked pretty good, but I passed by not giving in the temptation.

The smells of the slum were a strange mix of delicious food, raw sewage, and diesel exhaust. The smells were pungent and savory all at once and there was the slight feel of carnival excitement. It appeared as though the smells were invisible to the locals, but what was not invisible to the locals was our group of white Americans walking through the slum.

 
In the midst of the immense poverty, there was beauty. The beautiful children with smiles on their faces played in the streets perhaps oblivious to the extent of their poverty.

Young women with habits looking like nuns enjoyed delicious popsicles as they walked down the street after Sunday worship.

The main focus of our visit was to go with a Made In The Streets staff member named Jackton to visit his father, who still lives in the valley. He lived in a very small place situated deep into the valley. Snaking between the puzzled together houses made it impossible for a newcomer to have any idea how anyone could know how to get there get there or how to get out. All 15 of us found a way to squeeze into the home of Jackton’s father, a space no larger than my bedroom. He told us stories of living in the valley, how he worked as a mechanic, and how his wife lived in the up country on their land in order to protect it from thieves.

Many of the children who are at Made In The Streets once lived in the valley. It is a place they call home and it is filled with a strange mix of memories for them, some good and some bad, just like the mix of smells.
It is overwhelming and humbling to walk through Methare Valley. In one sense it feels hopeless. How could there ever be enough economic input the lift this slum from the withering poverty? On the other hand, it appears that for many of the people there, the poverty is more of a problem for me than it is for them. Regardless, the experience in the valley felt like both a gift and an indictment. It forced me to understand myself outside of my most common context, to be in a place where I know that the social forces of poverty are so far beyond the power I have to change it that my own sense of power diminished to some more appropriate level. My privilege became as obvious to me as the color of my skin walking the streets.

Kenya: Teaching

Of the many roles I took on in my time in Kenya, teaching was one of the primary roles. I had two teaching situations: staff and students.
Staff Seminar. For the staff I conducted a 4 hour seminar on trauma and resilience. The purpose of this training was to help the Made in The Streets staff become more familiar with indicators of trauma as well as reinforce community processes that promote resilience in individuals. The focus on community processes was intentional because African culture is much more communal in its assumptions as opposed to individualistic.
The staff received the seminar well. I was not surprised that they were such quick studies on the material as it related to the MITS students, but what did take me off guard some was how readily they applied the material to their own lives. A decent percentage of the staff were once street children themselves. For some of the staff, along with the incredible work they do for the children comes reminders of their own difficult past. It was a great joy of mine to get to affirm what they are already doing right for the students and themselves as well as introduce them to some new and useful concepts.
Student class. I got spend several one hour class periods with the older students discussing their lives in the past, the present and the future. The goal was to get them to imagine a good and successful future, anticipating their success and potential challenges.
The students received the information well and engaged in the role play.

Teaching in a cross-cultural setting has its challenges. Even though the staff and children speak English, that does not guarantee shared meaning. One thing I learned is that English has a much more robust emotional vocabulary than does Swahili and also the tribal languages. So, when asking for emotional expression in words, what I am also asking is for the students and staff to go to their third language to find those words as I am monolingual (blush - shame). The problem is that when multi-lingual people express emotions verbally, their native tongue is most accessible to them, but the language most accessible is significantly void of emotional vocabulary. It is a challenge.

All in all, my teaching role went well and I was pleased with the outcomes. At the same time, if I get to go back and do it again, I believe I will make some changes and engage with more experiential opportunities.

Kenya: In General

The trip to Made In The Streets in Kenya was nothing short of amazing. There were so many things that happened that capturing it all at once is going to be impossible.
I am incredibly grateful to the over 3 dozen people who supported us financially and the many more who supported us in prayer. Thanks to all the people in Kenya who welcomed us, hosted us, made space for us, and shared their lives with us.
Although there are so many different ways to understand the time in Kenya, I try to clump the experiences into something I an put a name to. Here are the categories of things that happened:
1. Teaching
2. Methare Valley
3. Methare Valley (Where is God?)
4. Eastleigh
5. MITS kids
6. MITS Staff
7. Kenya Life
8. Safari
It is my hope to get the opportunity over the next few days to write on each of these topics.