After several days of chaos, I had my passport, a Kenya Visa, a flight, and packed bags. I headed to the airport and settled into the first leg of the flight, a 15-hour trip to Doha, Qatar. I was able to sleep a good deal but still felt hungover upon arrival. The place seemed nearly deserted. The people were quiet as they shuffled along dazed by travel and stress. I had over 4 hours before the next flight. I roamed aimlessly through the terminal (what a bad name for this place). I found a shower which helped. I shaved and cleaned up and then waited.
The airport filled up and the line grew long to get on my flight. I finally settled down and tried to sleep. It was not very effective. The time shift is strange as it is 8 hours ahead of Dallas. I kept my eyes tightly shut and told my body to go to sleep. It did not cooperate.
We landed and eventually, I found myself outside on the sidewalk. So many people were offering rides that it took a while to find my arranged driver.
He whisked me down the new toll road and within about an hour I was in the area of beautiful tea plantations at a large, new Christian retreat center.
I arrived at the end of breakfast and the day started immediately. Over 850 leaders from all over Africa were gathered by the Call2All movement to strategize about the church's role in transforming lives and society. I took lots of notes and was very inspired by the depth of thought put into the conference.
One of the focuses of the conference is a challenge to the Church to adopt every single school in the world as the most strategic method for lifting people up and having the opportunity to build gospel relationships. A website allschools.org has been developed that attempts to identify and track every school. It's amazing technology.
We then heard a presentation by the second lady of Kenya. She is an inspiring pastor and leader. Her focus is lifting up the role of boys in Kenyan culture which has a discouraging trajectory of criticism, and joblessness which leads to many cultural problems. She did a great job.
By the time lunch came jet lag was becoming a serious problem. I kept realizing that I was asleep and needed to wake up. I made it through a presentation of the new Jesus film that is being animated and then haze took over. I finally gave up and went to take a nap.
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