Partners

By special request (and with apologies to those of my readers who already know all of this, and may well be fed up hearing me talk about it) I thought I'd say a bit about some of the projects in Kenya that our church is involved in.
The first of these is a congregational partnership between ourselves and PCEA Kiambaa.
The partnership began a number of years ago when Rev. Dr. David Githii (then minister at the new, but growing, Kiambaa Church) visited Scotland and, after meeting one of our elders, came to Kirkton.
Some time afterwards, as part of a Study Leave Project I was undertaking, I visited Kiambaa with one of our elders, and we agreed to develop the relationship between our two congregations.
On that first visit we saw the very impressive building pictured here (now known as the Lankia building) which had been erected at Kiambaa thanks to the generosity of First Presbyterian Church, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. At that time (2002) it was virtually an empty shell.
It now houses, among other things, a clinic, lab, library, kindergarten and a computer training centre (more of which at a later date.)
However, the real focus of our partnership has always been the relationship between the members of the two congregations.
The various projects that we have undertaken (though not of the same scale as the Lankia building itself) have always been intended to develop the friendship between our two congregations.
The first of these projects was to pay for electric lights to be installed in the church.
Another project was to contribute towards the drilling of a borehole (although several years later there still seems to be a dispute between the church and the local authority as to who has the rights to the water in the well.)
More recently (in 2005) we installed about a dozen second-hand computers. (Of course, this also included installing all the electrical sockets etc. to run them.)
It may seem strange to take computers to a community which as yet does not have running water, and where few houses have electricity, but there were good reasons for it. If the economy of a country like Kenya is to catch up in any way with the rest of the world and compete in the global market it is not likely to do so through industrialisation, but it might do so through information and communication technology. More immediately, the individual people from Kiambaa who learn even basic computer skills are much more likely to find employment.

(installation of computers at Kiambaa almost complete)

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Partners.