Petaluma church group visits Kenya on work trip

The group of men from Calvary Chapel spent a week building a village church.|

For Petaluma pastor Tom Freitas, the 24-hour flight to Kenya, several-hour van ride to the small village near the Tanzania boarder and week-long stay in a small hut was nothing new. He has made this journey almost annually since 1999.

What made this trip different was the nature of the work he did on the ground. Freitas, the assistant pastor at Calvary Chapel in Petaluma, and five other members of the congregation spent part of this summer building a church in the village of Kehancha, Kenya, and building friendships among the villagers.

“People there eek out a subsistence living. A lot of people live in one-room huts,” Freitas said. “The work itself was very labor-intensive. Unlike construction here, it is all manpower.”

The crew of six men from Petaluma’s Calvary Chapel - Freitas, Michael Belfor, Ebin Koenig, Tim Tillman, Art Adams and Ryan Lee - were invited by a Kenyan pastor who became affiliated with the church through Freitas’ ministry work in the east African country. He was looking for volunteers to help reconstruct the village house of worship.

“In Kenya, sometimes a structure doesn’t last very long,” Freitas said. “His church was a mud and stick building. He decided he wanted to build a more permanent structure that wouldn’t get degraded over time. We’d never done anything like a construction project before.”

Besides Freitas, the five other men on the trip had never visited Africa before, but they had a life changing experience learning about a new culture, eating different foods and making friends.

Tillman, a tile contractor, said he had never considered a trip this far from home. But, he said, it was a life changing experience.

“Once we got there, it was pretty amazing,” he said. “It was a real eye-opener.”

The men spent their days pouring concrete, bending rebar and moving loads of bricks to make the frame for the village’s new church. At one point, they ran out of the wood they were using to make frames, and, without any lumber stores, the local men went into the forest to cut down some more wood, Tillman said.

“It was quite different from the way we do things,” he said. “Made you go back 40, 50 years. It was amazing.”

Tillman said he plans to go back to help lay tile in the church sometime in the future.

At night, the group hung out with the Kenyan pastor and his family and were hosted at dinner parties.

The trip in late June coincided with the run up to Kenya’s presidential election this month, and Freitas said they saw signs of the campaign throughout the country.

“There was some tension,” he said. “People get inflamed easily.”

The closely contested poll, won by incumbent president Uhuru Kenyatta, was proceeded by several days of riots, though nothing close to the post-election violence that Kenya experienced after the 2007 presidential election that killed 1,500 people and displaced thousands more.

Despite Kenya’s potential for political violence, Freitas said the country on the whole is stable. He said the potential instability has not kept him from traveling to and working there for nearly 20 years, and he plans to return again next year.

On the way back to the capital, Nairobi, the group from Petaluma stopped off at one of Kenya’s famed wild game parks, the Maasai Mara. There they spotted most of the country’s characteristic animals, including elephants, lions, leopards, buffaloes and rhinos, and were treated to the spectacle of a million wildebeest migrating across the Serengeti plains.

Helping the far-flung village in Kenya with its church project was extremely rewarding, Freitas said.

“For the guys that went, it was a very satisfying trip,” he said. “For me, it was satisfying to help in this way.”

(Contact Matt Brown at matt.brown@arguscourier.com.)

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