cason & colleen: Salgaa Clean-up

We’ve written before about the ministry that our church, Ngata AGC, has to the women of Salgaa and the local Internally Displaced Persons Camp. Today we had the opportunity to go to Salgaa with our youth group and students from Kabarak University to help clean up the streets.

Salgaa is located right along the main road from Nakuru to western Kenya, and is a popular truck stop. Because of this, it is a poorer community with a large commercial sex worker industry. It is difficult to get real numbers, but on any given night there are up to 300 women out working the streets. Many of these women turn to prostitution because they see it as the only viable occupation available – many hope it is temporary necessity just to get by, but they end up getting sucked into a lifestyle that won’t let them out. The church hosts a weekly Bible study for the women, and partners in other ministries that teach health education and alternative occupation skills.

Because the town sprung up quickly around the truck stop, there is no working sanitation or refuse disposal… so trash is tossed haphazardly or piled by the streets. It is everywhere, and is a big health risk since many kids run around in bare feet.

For our clean up day, we met in Salgaa armed with gloves and garbage bags, and walked around the dirt streets picking up trash. Kids came from everywhere wanting to know what we were doing, and many wanted to help. We gave them gloves, which they loved, and they helped pick up trash for hours… I made quite a few little friends, mostly because they were interested in being around the crazy mzungu (white guy) who was picking up trash. After a few hours, I had a little army of trash picker-uppers helping me as we tried to communicate in broken Swahili and English. When most of the garbage bags had been filled, we loaded them into a lorry (truck) to be hauled back to Nakuru… again, because there is no refuse dump in Salgaa.

We realized that our overall message of cleanliness wasn’t totally sticking with the kids when we gave them each of them a piece of candy for their hard work…. almost immediately after they had the candy in their hands, the wrappers were tossed all over the ground… right next to the bags of garbage that we had just collected! I guess old habits die hard, even when you’re 7 years old. Someone explained to them about picking up the trash and keeping things clean, so hopefully they remember the lesson the next time the get a sweet.

The goal of the day wasn’t to rid Salgaa of trash – that would take many days, shovels, and backhoes – but it was merely to show Christ’s love in the community and try to let people know that the are valuable. While working, I talked with some women selling vegetables who were so appreciative of what we were doing and were asking about the church and Bible Study. Just showing up with gloves and trash bags afforded us conversations that we wouldn’t have been able to have otherwise.

It was also great for our youth to serve, and to think about how they were working for the Lord, not for men. Sometimes showing Christ’s love means picking wrappers and condoms up out of the mud and sewage… there are many ways to worship the Lord, and they are not always pleasant. He calls us to be servants, because He humbled himself and became the ultimate servant… willing to give all of Himself for each one of us.

So whatever you do… do it all for the glory of God. 1 Corinthians 10:31

Thanks so much for reading and for your prayers.

Cason

Click here to see the whole Ngata AGC Facebook album of pictures from the clean up day.

Here’s me and my army of helpers taking a break from work to show off our dirty gloves: