Saturday, April 13th, 2024
5PM | Dinnner
7PM | Free Concert
Our fundraising event this year will feature an authentic East African dinner in our fellowship hall including a “Surf and Turf” meat raffle and fundraising appeal in support of our ongoing mission work in Ribe, Kenya. Dinner will be followed by a free concert featuring a bluegrass and southern gospel performance by Siegmann Family Music. After the concert there will be refreshments and an opportunity to meet the musicians or learn more about our fundraising goals. Pre-event reservations are not required for the concert, but signing up to attend the dinner is. Click here to sign up for dinner.
History of the Ribe, Kenya Mission Project
The relationship between Highview EPC and the rural village of Ribe, Kenya dates back to the late 1990s, when Kenyan international students attending Carroll University in Waukesha worshiped with our congregation and a mission team from Highview ventured to East Africa to walk beside supported missionaries in the region and meet the families of these Kenyan students. Eventually this led to the formalizing of a project and programming partnership in 2012, with church and village leaders from Ribe working together with a planning team from Carroll and Highview to provide oversight of annual funding goals and prioritized village outreach initiatives. Initial projects focused on renovation of Ribe’s flagship missionary church, new primary school construction, and an innovative gravity-fed potable water distribution system for the community.
Over the next 12 years, the partnership expanded the list of tangible project implementation targets to include electrification of churches and schools, funding of an outdoor cultural center (with playground area and sanitary restrooms), equipment and facility upgrades to the village’s sole medical clinic, and renovation of abandoned mission houses to house local teachers and clergy. Of equal importance, various intangible program targets were identified, including a lunch program for primary school children, a health and hygiene mentoring program for young women, a malaria eradication bed net installation program for families lacking nighttime protection from mosquitoes, a seasonal seed corn distribution program for small family plots, and a land/water stewardship program (reforestation and “victory gardening”) spearheaded by the local school chaplain. The latter programs have enabled our partnering church women and men’s groups to extend the gospel message more visibly and effectively to a community critically impacted in recent years by pandemic isolation and persistent drought.