VBS with the Street Boys

I could hear the shouts and songs from down the street. The boys were yelling so loud that all the shopkeepers around must have heard that something was going on at the center for street boys this week. After my errands in the morning, I came as soon as I could to help wherever I was needed. It was a good sign that I wasn’t really needed. Besides my spiritual gift of chopping tomatoes, the morning I had to step in for Martin’s small group in his absence, and helping come up with silly theater games for the drama workshop, I really had no other responsibilities. That’s a huge contrast from last year’s crazy two weeks of VBS where I was overworked, overstretched, and had yet learn to delegate. This year, the team had VBS planned, delegated, organized, and running like a machine. It was just another sign that they are ready to take over now.

I haven’t spent much time with the street boys the past few months. Organizing the sponsorship office and running ministry errands has taken up most of the time I would have spent with the boys there. I truly learned to love them this week though. Those dear, crazy, messy children.

We had about thirty boys at the streetboys’ center during the week. The week before we had fifteen. It was like God decided we needed to minister to more street boys this week and He doubled the number just before we started VBS. We gladly accepted them. Our boys ranged from these tiny little boys who looked barely over six years old all the way up to near men, aged 16, 18, even 20.

We recognized a few of them. They had been to the center before. One boy, who we called “the fluffy kid” (because he was a little meatier than the rest) had run back to the streets and then got returned to the center. Another boy had returned to his village way up in the north of Kenya. Then he decided he would be better off at the street boys’ center and willingly returned. That’s unusual. Most of the boys run from that place first chance they get. I don’t blame them.

A few times we’ve run into the runaways in town. They were back on the streets begging again. They knew us though. They ran up to us very excited, “teacher, teacher, do you remember me?” they asked. It’s sad to see them back on the streets.

These kids aren’t “normal” kids. Almost all of them are seasoned veterans of the streets. They are not innocent children who need to be taken care of. They are survivors who know how to look out for themselves. A guard one day almost lost his wallet to one of the really tiny ones. He looked innocent, but he knew how to pickpocket and he was small enough to be really sly at it.

Then there were the boys who didn’t look a day over eight years old telling us the benefits of being high.

“The bhang (marijuana) you buy for 50 bob (about 50 cents) is enough to make you so high you can walk across the street without even fearing cars hitting you. You can fight and not fear getting punched,” one boy said in Swahili. Emma finally got him to admit he was high that day as well. He was barely four feet tall in a huge purple shirt.

I see a lot of the streetboys around Nairobi sniffing glue. They can be seen passed out on top of trash piles, clutching a bottle of yellow glue, or seen tottering with uneasy steps and sniffing it.

I asked one of the older boys why he came to Nairobi. He was a handsome boy with good English and he intently listened during messages. “I left my village because I liked sniffing glue and in my village they didn’t like that, so I came to Nairobi,” he told me. I guess in Nairobi it’s ok. His eyes were clear and bright now and he seemed sober enough. “I want to be an engineer when I grow up,” he said.

The boys were grubby as usual. A few changed their clothes once or twice throughout the week. That was nice to see. Once they were very clean and had shoes. Someone had come and donated them. The next day, the littlest ones still had shoes, but all the others didn’t. It was anyone’s guess what had happened to them. Either the boys had sold them or the “guardians” of the facility had stolen them from the boys to sell them. Maybe next month more will be donated. It will be the same story again. It’s been nice to see that some of the clothes we donated at Christmas time are still around. The kids come and go a lot but some have been around that long.

When the city council brought the new batch of 15 boys to the center, they first circumcised all of them. The government has been pushing hard for circumcision since it tends to lower men’s rates of catching STDs. It was pretty entertaining to see the boys walking funny and disappearing behind the kitchen from time to time to disinfect themselves. The day we played football we were told not to have all the boys play cause they were “still healing” and they didn’t want them to “bleed again”. The boys didn’t care. Try getting boys to refrain from a football match. Near impossible, even when newly circumcised.

Each day we taught our theme “The Promises of God”. The MSTs came up with our own theme song on how “God is my helper”, “God is my Guide,” “God is my Warrior”, “God is my Forgiver”. Each day different team members gave testimonies on their particular promise of God, followed by small group discussions in each corner of the room. A team member shares their testimony every day focusing on a particular theme and them the kids are split into groups or classes to discuss the theme in questions. It’s been working pretty well. The kids are able to really relate with the testimonies in various ways and it’s different than our past few months’ methods of teaching using skits and puppet shows.




During small group discussions we were able to find out a lot about the boys. One day the discussion question was “tell about a time you were forsaken”. One boy told about how his father took him to town and said he was going to buy him chips (French fries). His father never came back and the little guy was left to fend for himself. Another told how his parents left him, his aunt rejected him, and so he ended up on the streets.

Then there was the tall Maasai boy. Everyone just calls him “Maasai.” That’s the funny thing with the Maasai. They are the only tribe I know where people call them by their tribe. No one walks around calling someone “Kikuyu” or “Luo”, but I have met at least three boys/men who everyone calls “Maasai” to the extent that I don’t even know their real names. Anyhow, this boy seemed a little different from the others. He was helpful, kind, and very sober. When I asked him why he came, he told about the “war at home”. He is more of a refugee than a street boy. The various tribes in his home in Samburu went to war with each other over cattle and he fled to Nairobi three months ago.

Then there are the other boys…nothing really happened to them. They came from good families which were well off. They weren’t rejected or chased away. They weren’t struggling for money at home. They just woke up one day and decided to run away. Emma thinks it’s some kind of spirit that makes them wake up and just run like that. Other boys ran away from home because their families didn’t like the lives they were getting themselves into. Their desire for autonomy, drug use, money, etc. brought them to the streets where they can live as they please and do as they please. Those ones are quite the characters.

It’s a different dynamic working with the various kinds of boys. There are the boys who are stubborn and don’t want to listen to anything (or are too high to pick up much) and then there are the boys who intently listen and soak up every word we say. With those, you can see an impact being made.




The boys loved the week. They made beaded lizards, paper airplanes, and played theater games. The last day, we crowned the week with an epic football game against our team, in which they dominated. While they outnumbered us slightly, we were still bigger and had spiffy jerseys that the girls made. They managed to beat us without shoes and being half our sizes and many being newly circumcised…they are just that good.

They really liked the food. That’s an understatement. Since it’s a government institution, sometimes the boys go with one meal a day, sometimes two, sometimes three, they never know. (You can also never tell if they miss on food because the city council forgot them or if their caretakers “ate” the money/supplies.) This particular week, the cook was very glad to have us because the city council never brought them firewood. Since we cooked lunch, we had a balance of firewood left over that the cook could use for dinner. At least the boys ate well that week.

It is no small feat to feed street boys. Those kids can eat! Even the tiny ones can demolish a heaping plate, three times more than I could eat, and still ask for seconds. I’m pretty sure their stomachs are bottomless pits. One boy waited till we left to run away. He had been sick all week but said the food we were giving him was making him well. I guess he must have really gotten well because he disappeared the next day.

Our last day with the boys, we shared the gospel. Someone asked me this week what our long term goals are with the street boys. I didn’t know what to answer at the time. I tend to be bad at long term goals in general, but especially here. What can be done? What can be done to correct a rotten system and a sinful world? Thinking about it now, I realized that the message we shared on the last day is our long term goal with the boys. Maybe one or two lives will change or seeds will be planted. If one boy is genuinely changed, we have succeeded. If not, at least we have tried. We came, we loved them and we will keep coming and loving them. We will keep doing what we can do, keep praying for the boys and for the administration, and pray that God opens doors for us to do more.

We had to say goodbye to the boys. “When are you coming back?” a boy asked Beth.

“I don’t know. I’m going back to Canada this month,” she said. Then the boy broke down in tears. Imagine a big, tough 16 year old boy in tears.

“God bless you all so much for coming,” he said, as he rubbed his eyes. By that, we know, some kind of impact was made. At least to that one, he listened.