Urban Gardens

Vertical Gardening in Nairobi

The Iftin Women's Empowerment Program in Eastleigh, Nairobi, is striving to help vulnerable refugee families living in the informal settlements of Nairobi to improve their lives. As Canadian Baptists, we are committed to several aspects of transformation, including issues of food security. In urban areas of Africa, millions of people become trapped in sprawling ghettos, slums and shanty towns where people live on less than a dollar a day. In such communities, most of a family's income goes to either food or shelter.

Training in Eastleigh

Tim and Diane Bannister not only lead the short term volunteer program of Canadian Baptist Ministries in Kenya, but Tim is our resident agricultural and agro-forestry expert. We are looking forward to having him back in Eastleigh on May 16 and 17 to lead a training program on vertical sack gardening with the Iftin members. This will be our fourth training on sack gardening at the Eastleigh Community Centre. It has been encouraging to see God at work in the lives of families who had never gardened before.

Please keep Tim and the Iftin group in your prayers as we work together to provide a reliable and inexpensive supplement to the diet of refugee families.

The first vertical bag garden workshop at the Eastleigh Community Centre led by our Canadian Baptist Ministries colleague Timothy Bannister with Bruno Soucey and Aaron, back in 2009.

Learn more about the use of bag gardens in improving food security for impoverished communities through the work of other organizations serving in Kenya:

LINK Kibera:

http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Sack-Gardens-of-the-Kibera-Slum

LINK Cowfiles:

http://www.cowfiles.com/african-gardens/bag-gardens

LINK Solidarites:

http://www.solidarites.org/ourprog/Kenya/humanitarian-action.shtml

Solidarity Sunday 2011

Children living in the Gambala Community

of the Ifo Refugee Camp, Kenya

Every Mother’s Day, Canadian Baptists across the country come together for a very special reason:Solidarity Sunday.

This symbolic event enables us to stand in unity with our brothers and sisters in need around the world. Last year's Solidarity Sunday raised over $40,000 to help the women of Rwanda.

This year's Solidarity Sunday focuses on ministry with women in Kenya. To learn more of how you can participate, please follow this link to the Canadian Baptist Ministries website, where you can learn more about this program, download videos and order promotional materials for your church or group to be a part of Solidarity Sunday.

http://www.cbmin.org/cbm/solidaritysunday

We also have a new update letter available for download. You can read it online or share it with your church by visiting our CBM webpage: simply use the link on our sidebar or below:

Our Update Letter:

March 2011 Update Link

April Podcast

April 2011 Podcast

This past week was busy, with Erica working in the city and Aaron attending a course in Mitaboni with Carey Theological College. We are back to our regular routines this week and, as promised, we have a new podcast this month taken from some of the audio content we recorded earlier in the year.

Conversation at Safari Park Hotel

This month's podcast takes us back to January during our time with Patricia Card, Henry Mwangi and Patrick Miana. Early one Tuesday morning, we met together to visit Guardians of Hope beneficiaries living in slums and informal settlements around Nairobi. Before we set out, we stopped for coffee and shared a brief conversation about how the Guardians of Hope started in Kenya and the impact it has had upon the African Christian Church and Schools.

In Prayer

It was very interesting to hear their perspective on what led to the formation of the Guardians and of the successes and ongoing challenges that the ministry encounters. Please be keeping the ACC&S in your prayers as it works to proclaim and embody the good news of faith in Christ throughout Kenya. We will be meeting with the ACC&S Guardians of Hope leadership early next month as we work through forming a strategic plan for the next chapter of the GOH program. Please remember us during this time of assessment and planning.

Erica and Patty this past January in Nairobi

To listen to this or any of our podcasts, please visit our audio site at www.fivekennys.podbean.com or subscribe for free and automatic audio downloads at iTunes, just search for "fivekennys"

Video Download

Principles of Faith-based Community Development

What is Integral Mission? What are the goals of the work that we are apart of as Canadian Baptists in places like Eastleigh or in rural communities throughout Eastern and Central Africa?

We wanted to share with you a short video that we made for Saint Stephen's University on principles of development that undergird much of the ministry that we lead with Guardians of Hope and the Iftin Women's Empowerment Program. In the video, we talk about these questions and discuss the framework that shapes much of the ministry that we are a part of in Africa.

Link

or

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7126669/Fivekennys%20Video%20Podcast%20Women%27s%20Empowerment.m4v.zip