Thank you for your patience, all of you family and friends of the July Canopy Life team. This team hit the ground running and it has been hard to find the time to post all of the goodness that we are experiencing.
Cara, Sara, Melissa, Jessica and Cydney joined Cindy and Christi at Canopy Life on Saturday morning after landing on Friday night. All day Saturday was spent getting to know the kids through fun and academic activities. We played white board games, talked about the values and vision of Canopy Life, and settled into the facility. Each team member has been assigned two little Canopy Life buddies to invest in and partner with the whole week. 
Sunday was by far the most productive day I’ve ever had in Kenya. We started with a devotion together on the “kingdom values” at Canopy Life. Our values spell the word CROWNS: Creativity, Respect, Order, Worship, Nurture and Service. Afterwards, each team member took their Canopy buddies and got to work on projects to transform the creative and order element of the campus. The best part was that all of the Kenyan adults and the day off so our art projects were truly a surprise when they got back that night.
A majority of the projects were for the creation of the Imagination Room, which will be our library for reading, dreaming, creating and coming up with amazing ideas. We will share more on this room in a later post, but let’s just say it turned out AMAZING and the kids were so overjoyed to be a part of the process of creating.
The kids also made cookies for a delicious lesson by Cydney in sequencing words and Jessica got them started on a project of creating solar system mobiles to hang in the boys room.
The night ended with a huge Mexican fiesta as Christi, Elias, John (and eventually all the team) prepared a mexican meal for the kids complete with handmade tortillas (thank goodness for chapati skills), guacamole, salsa, the most spicy meat you’ve ever tasted, rice and refried black beans with cilantro! The kids loved all of it (even the incredibly spicy taco meat!) and we had a blast.
Needless to say it was a really long weekend, but we’ve been having too much fun to share much about it! Can’t wait to give you more updates!
On a personal notes (from Christi), these last few days has been like watching a vision come to reality. It’s overwhelming to see all the love and creativity come to life on the Canopy Life Academy campus. I am so grateful to God for the journey He has put us on!