Guardians of Hope Leadership Gathering

GOH 2010 Leadership Gathering

Nairobi, Kenya

This week, Erica and I had the joy of facilitating our first GOH leadership gathering at Heart Lodge, near our home on the outskirts of Nairobi. This has been an incredibly helpful time as we build trust and understanding, and gain a much broader picture of how Guardians of Hope is functioning within each of the partnerships and regions where we are serving communities affected by HIV and AIDS.

The meetings began on Monday morning with an opening challenge on empowerment by Colin Godwin, Canadian Baptist Ministries Africa team leader: At the centre of all Christian service, we are to give power away and to rely on God's spirit to remain our true source of power. In essence, this is what we should be doing as we seek to serve others as the Church. The danger lies in the fact that many of our well meaning efforts can have the very opposite affect -- unintentionally the church can create dependency and, at our worst, exploit the very people we are trying to help.

Times like this of stepping back and examining the work we are a part of, can help us gain perspective on the ministry in which we labour.

Scott Lewis and Colin Godwin

We have been blessed to have several of our Canadian Baptist Ministries colleagues speak into the Guardians of Hope and bring their own perspective and strengths. It was an answer to prayer that we were able to coincide these GOH leadership meetings with Scott Lewis' first trip to Kenya as a Sharing Way program officer for Africa. Scott's good humour, humility, expertise, and first hand experience in community development in Southeast Asia, has made his time with us both encouraging and insightful.

Ruth Munyao sharing during the Monday sessions

We were also glad to have Ruth Munyao, The Sharing Way's Africa coordinator, join us for part of the meetings as we looked at our expectations around leadership roles and our various systems of management within each of the partner organizations.

Our Africa leadership team members

Elizabeth, Isaie, James, Henry, Patrick, Laura and Triza

(Sadly, we were not able to include Eduardo from Angola in this round of meetings)

GOH leaders meeting with Iftin community facilitators and members of the Ililili Self Help Group, Eastleigh

On Tuesday morning, we took a short break from our meetings to travel into the Eastleigh Community Centre to visit with participants in the Iftin Women's Self Help project. We had the pleasure of spending time with Somali and Oromo women who have formed a group of 18 members and have been working together to improve their lives over the past year. They call themselves "ililili" which in their mother tongue means "flower" . It was a great opportunity for the GOH leaders to see another perspective on the challenges of empowering people within marginalized communities.

Elizabeth sharing her thanks to the women of Iftin

On Tuesday afternoon, we were also blessed to have Tim and Diane Bannister join us for discussions on how we can better integrate short term volunteers into the Guardians of Hope program. Given the wide geography (and often remote locations) and nature of the varies GOH projects, the leaders have faced many challenges in connecting volunteers to groups beyond brief exposure visits. It was very exciting to work together with the Bannisters as we begin to explore new possibilities with having visitors strategically coming alongside of groups and communities. We are not there yet, but already we are beginning to look at new possibilities.