It's a long time since I've written a blog post - sorry to those of you who've persistently pestered me to do so for the past year and a half! I'm taking it up again this summer cause I'm off to the other side of the world once more, and I've found its a great way for me to keep in touch will all the people I care about back home, as well as a place for me to process some of the things I'm doing and seeing, both in the moment and when I'm reflecting afterwards, its so helpful to see what I was doing and feeling at the time.
So what am I actually up to over my ridiculously long summer break?
First of all, I'm off to East Africa as part of a team called the 'Summer Justice Mission' to work with legal aid organisations in Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya (in that order!). I'm going with a team of 11 others from the Lawyers' Christian Fellowship, an organisation which supports both law students and practitioners to integrate their faith and their vocation. The twelve of us on the team range from first year law students, to newly qualified solicitors, to senior partners who are approaching retirement. In Africa, we'll be working with local Christian Lawyers' organisations who work to secure access to justice for those who need it most. In England we have a legal aid system (despite the cuts and so on, it still exists) which still supports a certain level of access to justice. In Eastern Africa, there is no such provision by the state, and so it falls to NGOs to promote access to the courts and educating communities as to their legal rights. We'll be working alongside these NGOs (Lawyers of Hope (Rwanda), Uganda Christian Lawyers' Fraternity and CLEAR Kenya) running community seminars, Christian law student conferences and various other meetings. We have a team blog too if you want to follow that! https://justicemission.wordpress.com/
After the team go home, I'll be staying on in Nairobi for a few days to visit Franklyn and Violet, and Vision Peoples in Mission. For those of you who don't know, Franklyn and Violet are good family friends who run a project in the Korogocho slum of Nairobi, with a church, school, clinic, orphanage and vocational training centre. I've visited them a couple of times in Nairobi before and am really excited to be going back! They are like my Kenyan family!
At the end of July, I'll then be flying to Singapore to visit some of my uni friends out there. This will be much more of a holiday, but I'll probably still blog then! I'm hopeful I will also be able to get my blipfoto photo journal up and running again, but I'm not confident I'll actually be able to upload photos from Africa, so it might be a case of mass updating once I get to Asia. We will see!
If you're not used to my blogging style, I should probably explain that I'm an engineer at heart (see maths and science A levels), who's ended up studying law at uni, so eloquence and flowery descriptions are really not my forte...I just write what's in my head at the time, so I hope you don't mind that too much! I have no idea how often I'll be able to blog, as African internet is anything but predictable!
Prayer requests:
- Thank God for all his provision in trip preparations up to this point, for opening the door for me to be able to do this, including financially.
- That I would have a really good few days at home with family before I fly - that we'd be able to spend good quality time together
- That my final preparations would go smoothly
- VISAS! We've all applied but almost all of us have not heard back, so please pray that we'd hear back before we go, or that it'd all be smooth once we land!
