Better and better!

A group of young girls from the Eastleigh Community Centre's primary school dropping in for a drink of water at the Eastleigh Pottery ministry this morning.

Throughout the morning, we enjoyed seeing several children slip into the pottery ministry for peek at what we were up to and for a drink of water. Along with the traditional pottery and new ceramic beading project, Eastleigh Pottery has been very busy with producing and distributing ceramic water filters to families within Eastleigh and greater Nairobi. Throughout March, the women of Iftin will be learning about the importance of proper hygiene and clean drinking water as a first defence against common water born illnesses that are especially killing young children in places like Eastleigh and Mathare Valley. We are deeply thankful to the many churches and individuals who are contributing toward the purchase of water filter systems through The Sharing Way. Your gifts are providing clean drinking water to hundreds of people in Eastleigh! Every member of the Iftin self help groups will receive a water filtration system and be trained on how to properly use and maintain their filters over the next two months. Coming from Canada, water seems like such a common thing. But for most of the world, clean drinking water is a rare and highly valued commodity. We want to thank everyone who is making these filters a reality in Eastleigh!

Better beads!

Meanwhile the Eastleigh Jewelry enterprise continues to move ahead with Erica and the pottery crew improving their bead making day by day. We will soon be ready to move into the glazing and finishing steps of the bead production phase. Once we have the complete process ironed out, the Somali women will begin their five week training with Erica and the pottery staff.

Erica and James working on finding the best glazes.

So far all of the raw materials for the beading project have come from Kenya. The one component that we are lacking is the glaze. Kenya produces materials that create a wonderful grey and brown glaze (in fact the pottery ministry has produced some beautiful glazes of its own), but this does not satisfy the range and pallet of colour needed for jewelry. We will be experimenting with glazes that we must import from England. While we await the arrival of these glazes, we will be using some of the Eastleigh Pottery's supply.

In Prayer:

* Please keep our family in prayer as we return to the High Court in Nairobi this Friday for Ava's adoption. We are praying that everyone who needs to be there will make it and that we are not bumped from the list.