Thank you all for your congratulations for my engagement. Tom and I are doing well, but keep joking we want to get married tomorrow! I’m meeting his father tomorrow which should be interesting, because he doesn’t even know that Tom is engaged or even that he has an English friend called Sarah! Tom wanted to surprise him and take me to his home in Nakuru (a town about 2hrs from Nairobi) when I’m free one weekend, but his dad just called saying he’s coming to Nairobi for the day on Monday, so we thought we’d surprise him then instead. After watching Guess Who I’m a bit nervous!

I’ve been so busy recently I feel I need a week just to catch up on sleep. The main thing preoccupying my time is the PMP (practical ministry project) for KA. We went on the spy mission a few weeks ago, which went really well. It’s a semi-urban area and most people speak English which is good for me. What was exciting was that we prayed before going and asked God to reveal to us what the deformations in that community were and God said alcoholism, domestic violence, idle men and overworked women, lack of value of education, religiosity (people going to church as a habit but not saved), sexual immorality, single mothers etc. And those were the exact deformations that we observed with our physical eyes and discovered from talking to the local people. Since then we’ve had many long meetings building the unity of the group, hearing God’s vision, mission and objectives for us, deciding on a group name, logo, slogan etc. and starting to analyse what the root cause of all these issues is and brainstorm what we can do to address it. There’s been so much pressure because we have so little time. We have a ‘pre-defence’ on Tuesday where we have to go before the lecturers and present our concept. The purpose is mainly for them to correct us and advice us on how to proceed with our planning, but the stress came when we were only told on Thursday night that the pre-defence report was meant to handed in by Saturday morning, so had just one day to do it (and everyone is at work all day and then rushes to class in the evening). We managed in the end but it was manic.

I am enjoying leading my group, but it is really stretching me. I find it difficult to be strict with people when everyone’s so much older than me, but thankfully they do respect me as the leader. The main challenge is actually knowing what process to follow and how to strategise, because I get zero input or advice from the college. By God’s grace I am managing though and learning to rely 100% on the Holy Spirit to guide me and tell me what to do.

Last Saturday we had another spiritual gifts practical and this time we had to manifest in the power of the Spirit. Like last time it went on for nearly 8hrs without a break, but I didn’t really notice because it was so much fun. People were healed, fell down under the power of God, laughed controllably in the spirit etc. I’ve actually decided I find it easier to impact people with the power of God than to share accurate words of knowledge. E.g. one man I was ministering to I felt the Spirit tell to me put my hands over his eyes so I did and after a couple of minutes he just fell over backwards under the power of God.

On the work-front, I got my feedback from the Cambridge lecturer who’s funding me for the research paper I’ve been writing and she said it’s excellent (which is a huge relief because I had no guidance or help with it) and has sent it to the editors who are compiling the book. Apparently it will go to the editors at the end of the year and be out around mid-2011. If any of you are interested in reading it I can email you a copy.

I’m now working on a different research project on why girls stay in school despite the odds. I’m still transcribing the data but it is really interesting, especially the data from the provinces that I didn’t go to do the fieldwork myself.

Anyway, enough about me. Please keep emailing me with your news because I love to hear what you’re all up to