Pastor's Training in New Training Center

It is very difficult to express the utter joy I feel when I look at these pictures and remember these moments.  The Starfish Charities, Biblical Studies has begun!  We are starting with the pastors we know and working our way around to as many others as possible.  The books are on the shelves, the building is furnished, and the pastors are eager to learn.

A small percentage of the Maasai pastors are literate, some are even graduates of denominational seminaries, and other Bible colleges.  However, a larger percentage are semi-literate or totally illiterate.  Pictured below is a group of literate pastors. 

One thing I have noticed about the Maasai, many have vision issues.  I don't know if its because they have spent their lives outdoors in the wind and dust, or perhaps its due to the smoky fires in their homes.  The result is they sit in class and squint.  Many of you have purchased reading glasses from the dollar stores and put them in my hands.  I can't tell you what a difference it has made to these pastors.

Sleeping under the trees is a common site during breaks from our training sessions.  As nice as our facility is indoors, they love being outdoors when the weather allows.

We were given a flat screen television and 5 laptops by Mentorfish.com.  Using that equipment, we used a training curriculum from Jesus Alive ministries, which was provided by Life Outreach International.  The combined gifts from these three ministries, allowed us to launch our training program.  The beauty of the DVD curriculum is it comes in 7 different languages.  Here we are training our literate pastors in English, but the next week, we trained illiterate pastors using the Swahili version.

Meet our two cooks, Anastaciah and Teresia.  They do a fabulous job of taking care of our pastors with yummy food, but also doing general housekeeping.

The pastors were a bit overwhelmed, but fascinated by all the books available for their use.  Here they are just pulling books off the shelves and learning how to do research.

One day, I left my camera behind when I had to go run an errand.  This was the result!  They really enjoyed their antics in front of the camera.

One of our faithful board members, Penina, dropped in for the day and is seen here serving tea.

The benefit of this training facility to these pastors is beyond measure.  My hope is that eventually we will be able to keep it open every day even when we don't have scheduled training sessions.