Meet Samson

From trouble with algebra and the typical pressures of high school, to financial and family issues, there aren’t many struggles that face the students of the Kibera Penda Project that Samson Mugendi, the 28-year-old Director of the Penda Project, can’t relate to. The oldest of five children, Samson, was born, raised, educated and still lives in Kibera so he knows all too well what challenges these students face on a day-to-day basis. I recently had a chance to sit down with Samson in Kibera and talk more about his life and his role with the Penda Project. TJ: What is your role as the Penda Project Director?

Samson: One of my main roles is to check on the 77 students that are currently sponsored. What I mean by that is I make sure they attend all of their classes and beyond always attending I make sure they are doing well within those classes both academically and in terms of discipline. Secondly, when they are done with exams at the end of each term, I collect all of their grades and send updates back to Kyle & Kelsey Baird and the sponsors in the United States. My other main job is to serve as the Student Pastor and teach them the word of God.This mainly takes place on Sundays when they attend the youth service at Kibera Bible Baptist Church.

TJ: One of the core aspects to the Penda Project is accountability, how do you try to provide this for the students?

Samson: As I said before this is one of the main responsibilities I have and the students need someone to consistently check on them. This is one of the reasons I am employed full time so that I can be there at any point the students may need me. In addition to attending class, all Penda students must attend study hall after school and this one of the times that I can check in and make sure all is going well with them.

TJ: What are some of the biggest challenges the Penda students are facing?

Samson: One of the biggest challenges is the environment they come from and are currently still living in. In Kibera, a lot of students drop out because they can’t pay school fees after primary school or they don’t qualify to attend. The Penda students are blessed to have their school fees covered but not all of them have qualified to attend boarding school which means they travel to and from Kibera each day to attend classes. When they go home, many people their age have already dropped out and the opportunity to get involved in bad activities like drugs are prevalent. Our boarding students are away for most of the year but still come home between breaks in terms and face these same situations. Also pregnancy is another huge challenge they face - especially the girls who are in day school and in some cases the pregnancy is against their will.

But no matter what challenges they have we always tell them that we want to have students who are committed to working hard and overcoming any hardships.

TJ: What has being the Penda Project Director meant to you?

Samson: It has changed my life. I never imagined I would be where I am now and I believe that God is using me to do great things in Kibera. The Samson I used to know four years ago is so different now because God is working in my life. My prayer is that God will continue to use me to reach many people in Kibera — from the Penda students to my neighbors and my fellow youths.

TJ: What are your goals for the future?

Samson: Right now I am working on my theological degree at Tena Bible Baptist School. I have finished my first year and I have two years left. Once I am finished I want to continue to serve the Lord in Kibera working with New Hope Initiative and using all that God has given me through my time as the Penda Project Director to continue to serve the youth of Kibera. I want to do all I can to make sure they achieve something with their education and most importantly serve God in whatever job they have.

By T.J. Walter - New Hope Initiative Board Member

How Did He Inspire You?

For my wife and I the adventure began nearly 18 months ago. Leading a missions trip was something we prayed about and was high on our list of dream to-do’s but like many people, jobs & scheduling remained a constant hurdle. It wasn’t until a radical shift in my career and the encouragement from close friends that we applied and were offered the opportunity to lead a team from McLean Bible Church with New Hope Initiative to Tanzania & Kenya.

As both of us have been part of short term mission teams in the past we spent much of our preparation time with the team focusing on how this two-week experience could usher in lasting change within their lives instead of just a flash-in-the-pan spiritual moment. This was reinforced once we arrived in country and Sandy Baird, the director of New Hope Initiative, spoke to the same ideal and challenged each team member to dig deep and see where God was inspiring them through this trip. Little did we know that the preparations and those conversations with Sandy would end up challenging us in ways that we are still unraveling and seeing where God is leading us.

For many of you reading this you have been on a trip with NHI or you know someone that has. So I have a challenge for you - when you come back or when you have the opportunity to sit down with someone that went take the time to dig a little deeper – beyond the safari tour, the souvenirs, the foods consumed and the always prerequisite bathroom question – ask them How did He inspire you? There is a chance that you or the friend you are asking may not know at that exact moment but maybe there is a glimpse of an idea or their heart has clearly been burdened to make a change. In any of these cases, accountability is a strong tool and I encourage you to take the time to follow up and pray with them or find someone that can become a partner in prayer and a sounding board for ideas.

While some ideas may involve NHI - and we truly hope that many of you will sponsor a student through Penda, share the mission of Project Biashara, or help serve in some capacity within an active project - but in addition, hopefully the inspiration will also hit close to home as you are likely going to spend 50 weeks over the next year there as opposed to Arusha or Kibera. For some it may become evident that the mission field God has placed in your path at this moment may not be as far as Africa, India or South America but maybe the next cubicle, the next door neighbor or the orphan in the city that needs a shoulder to lean on.

So how did He inspire us? We feel blessed and incredibly challenged to say that God inspired a lot in us through our time in East Africa – many ideas we are still processing through and others that we are currently in the midst of. For starters, it wasn’t less than a week after we returned from our first trip that we knew we wanted to go back. It was clear to us that God was not finished working on our hearts to serve the ‘least of these’ and as of this writing we have just wrapped up leading our second trip back to Kenya & Tanzania within a year.  As anyone that has lead a mission’s team knows, sometimes the greatest moments can come when seeing a change in others and we have had the amazing opportunity to watch six young adults from our first team embrace the ideas that God inspired in them - some within NHI and in other local ministries. But we are also filled with even more excitement as we have the chance to ask five other young adults that we just returned with the same thing we want you to ask yourselves and those returning from trips this summer – How did He inspire you?

By TJ Walter - New Hope Initiative Board Member

Forging A Path Out Of Poverty

Poverty is a villain who terrorizes, oppresses and represses.  It takes the path of unworthiness, defeat and sorrow.  I feel this sorrow as I consider poverty and a deeper sorrow as some of its victims have now entered my life and become my closest friends. As a result, my path in life is to fight against poverty, to challenge its violent and relentless pursuit to take its subjects.  It is an evil regime that has preceded and will continue to proceed the majority world.

Along my path I have found many organizations accomplishing credible feats in this battle and I heartedly commend and thank them.  But there is an organization I can personally and intimately endorse in its efforts and that is New Hope Initiative, where we are initiating change by carrying the Good News of God's love thru nutrition, education, micro-loans for small businesses and providing medical care for those who are as poor as you can imagine.  Sub-Saharan Africa is home to 400 million of them.  Their simple dwellings have no electricity, no running water or sewage system, women cook with charcoal, they wash their clothes in a tub, they get up early in the morning to walk to market and sell their produce or wares.  They return home at night to prepare meager dinner for their families or no dinner at all.  As men lose their self worth women and children bear the brunt of their trauma.

Yet I have found some things along this path.  I have witnessed to what extremes a mother will go for her child.  I have found that amidst the strife and hopelessness God is right in the middle of it.  He knows it all, He sees it all, and He has great compassion for us all.  Also I have found that even the most difficult life is still a treasure.  As far as poverty seems from the throne of heaven, I can still hear His voice.  I see light in the darkness and hope burning bright for the future.

Join us in forging this path out of poverty...

By Karen Baird - Director of New Hope Initiative

The Sum Total of All Things

Have you ever done an inventory of your personal possessions? Maybe for insurance or estate purposes you sat down and determined the approximate value of all the things you own. For most Americans it is a staggering list: vehicles, furniture, electronics, kitchenware, clothing, linens, and the other assorted pieces of junk that populate our lives. We fill up our homes, our closets, our attics and garages and then we have to go and rent storage spaces to hold all the overflow things. Do you have an idea of the dollar value or replacement value of all these things? With that dollar figure in mind let me tell you a story about a tragic event that happened in the Kibera slum of Nairobi Kenya last month. Late on a Sunday evening a tragic fire swept through that neighborhood. The very nature of this community makes it a fireman’s worst nightmare. The stick and mud homes are literally attached to one another; there are no streets, little running water, mounds of trash and combustible materials. On that particular night the fire raged and they could not get it under control until hundreds of homes were destroyed and thousands of people displaced. New Hope Initiative is directly connected to at least 100 people that were affected. These are members of our church, students at our school, and leaders in Project Biashara. We asked Pastor Simon what we could do to help those that were affected by the fire and he told us that 20,000 shillings or about $200 could replace most of the things these families lost. Let that number sink in for a moment, $200 would replace every single thing these families owned! All the furniture, housewares, clothes, linens, every worldly possession for the entire family could be replaced by an amount of money that most of us would think of as pretty insignificant.

My point is not to try and motivate you to give to help these victims, we have had churches and individuals who have already stepped up and we are in the process of helping these families recover. My purpose in this story is to motivate us to look at our closets, attics, garages, and storage sheds and to determine how many things we really need in order to enjoy our lives. Please don't misunderstand me, I am not trying to make you feel guilty, we should enjoy the blessings of God and be thankful for the incredible privilege of living as a 21^st Century American. However what I am trying to get us to consider is this, can we live with less so that others can have more. Could we reduce the amount of clutter in our lives so that others could enjoy some of the basic necessities? Could simpler lives actually lead to a greater personal fulfillment? If you lost everything in a tragic fire how much of it would really have meaning to you?

By Sandy Baird - Director of New Hope Initiative

Charitable Giving in an Imperfect World

Many of you know that Karen and I were interviewed last month by the local Fox and ABC news affiliates concerning our opinions about the Kony 2012 video seen by almost 100 million people and the broader subject of charitable giving in the age of social media. We enjoyed our “15 minutes of fame” and were delighted with the exposure for New Hope Initiative and our mission.  We are in no way critical of the goals of the Stop Kony campaign or the broader work of the parent organization Invisible Children which has and will continue to do much good. However we do want to continue to encourage people in their charitable giving to know what you are giving to and to know where your money is going. These are the basic requirements of good stewardship when it comes to our use of resources to meet the needs of people at home and around the world. Every organization is not worthy of your support, every cause is not one that you should take up personally, and every organization does not do an adequate job of handling the resources they are entrusted with. Sadly, some people will use controversy or point to unworthy organizations to justify their lack of personal giving but can I state unequivocally that there is no excuse that can ever justify a greedy heart. The answer to the question of charitable giving in an imperfect world is to do your homework, to apply due diligence in the choice of worthy charities and then to give without reservation or restraint.

There are 2 lessons that I hope we, as an organization will take from this episode. One, we need to continually remember the power of social media today. We need to continue to promote our website as well as our Facebook and Twitter presence. 100 million people may never see our message but if we continue to promote our work with timely, quality pieces, we can do much to further the message of New Hope Initiative in our world. Secondly, now is a great time to highlight the giving record of New Hope Initiative. As you hear disparaging remarks about the use of money by many non-profits please remember to put in a positive word about NHI where 100% of donated funds go directly to the need. Karen and I along with our entire leadership team want to thank you for your concern and generosity that makes the incredible mission of New Hope Initiative possible.

By Sandy Baird - Director of New Hope Initiative