In January 2017, I summited Kilimanjaro with a team of dedicated volunteers intent on providing access to education by building additional classrooms for one of the 24 schools at Missions of Hope International in Nairobi, Kenya (MOHI). Kilimanjaro is 19,341 feet and the tallest mountain on the continent of Africa.

This was never on my bucket list. I don’t even have a bucket list!

On my way back down the Mountain, I declared, outloud, that I would never, ever do this again!  I am not an expert climber and apparently my body rebels at high altitude.  I puked, hallucinated, and fell asleep all the way up to the Summit.

Has anyone ever said to you…”never say never”?  Have YOU ever done something that you swore you would never, ever do again?  I swore that was the only time…and I promised myself I would never put myself through the gut-wrenching, miserable pain again.

And now almost three years later and I am attempting to do it once more. Why? Because, I fell in love.  Deeply and passionately. It’s the kind of love that means you will risk everything for it!  

No, not with the love of climbing but with the incredible children in the Mathare Valley.  

As I walked through one of the largest slums in the world watching these joy filled children, this question sang out in my heart, ”Where do they play?”  

The majority of children living in extreme poverty, like the children in the Mathare Valley, have little access to education and no sports programs.

MOHI serves over 19,000 children in extreme poverty.   They provide excellent education, health care, meals, small business job creation, access to university, job training and more. But, there are no sports programs that teach them life skills that can’t be learned in the classroom.

So a huge team of passionate volunteers, too many to name on this page, have joined together to help give these children a sports discipleship program and a clean and safe place to play!

For more information on my story you can read my blog post: How to Live “Outside the Box”