Years ago I hiked up a mountain above the Kijabe mission compound in Kenya with my parents, who spent years there as medical missionaries. Monkeys moved through the trees over the path. We slowed to a shuffle as the trail got steeper. Somewhere up ahead was the house of a man named Francis Maigwa, whom my parents had met on an earlier hike and promised to visit again.

Kids poured out into the yard when we got close, some of them barely older than toddlers and already carrying babies on their hips. Francis met us with a huge smile and a complicated handshake. "Jambo! I have been praying that you would come today!"

He had been getting ready for days. His two-room mud-brick house was spotless, set as if for a state dinner, and his wife Esther brought out chicken, rice, cabbage, and soup, far more than we could eat. Francis was feeding thirteen people in that house, most of them not his own children. He gave anyway. You can read the whole story here, including the letter that came afterward.

I think about Francis every time a team lands in Nairobi. Our young people go thinking they are the answer to somebody's need. They usually find out they were somebody's answered prayer instead.

Eleven countries, eleven months #11n11

This fall, a squad heads out on what we call Expedition: eleven countries in eleven months. Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. Some of them have never had a passport stamped.

That kind of route asks a lot of a young person. It asks even more of the people who love them, which is part of why I am writing this.

Why Kenya first

There is a reason we start there. Kenya has been a training and sending hub for East Africa for decades, the place missionaries from the West and from Asia land first before they go anywhere harder. English is spoken widely. The country is stable. Roughly eight in ten Kenyans call themselves Christians, which means these teams are not planting a flag in new soil; they are joining a church that has been at work for generations and knows the ground far better than they do.

Our own history there runs deep. It started with my parents in Kijabe. We visited, we started sending teams, and eventually an orphanage and a school came out of it. Kenya is not a stop on a route for us. It is family.

The squad will be with four hosts we have long relationships with:

New Dawn African Girl Initiative is a girls home for vulnerable and at risk girls, many of them orphaned or neglected. Teams live at the center and minister to girls ages 5 to 16 through programs and activities, and visits to local schools and churches.

Spiritual Life Mission sits in a village and meets the needs around it. Village evangelism, school visits, farm work, and helping widows.

Dream Academy runs a community center and school with daily ministry to children and nursing mothers, a day and boarding school, a feeding program, and a sports ministry in the local village.

Kilaatu Baptist Church was founded in 1991 under the Baptist Convention of Kenya and serves the Wamunyu location in Machakos County. Door to door evangelism, village outreach, youth ministry. Their culture is summed up in a phrase I love: everybody is somebody.

What a boy named Joel taught a team about timing

Some of the prayers below are hard ones. Families back home who are not taking this well. Parents who are against the trip. A few of these young people are leaving from houses where nobody is celebrating.

So let me tell you about Joel. A team in Kenya met a boy who was blind in his right eye, and one of the girls, Leigh, asked if she could pray for him. He said yes. She prayed. Nothing happened. They came back four days later and his eye was still white. They spent the next week wrestling with God's goodness and their own faith and had pretty much written the whole thing off.

Weeks later, they were sitting in a restaurant when one of Joel's friends started banging on the window to get their attention. Joel could see. Their Kenyan pastor confirmed it two days after that. The full story is here.

God still heals, but he is not a vending machine, and his timing is rarely ours. If you are a parent whose son or daughter is going and your heart is not settled about it, or if you are one of these racers praying for a family that is not on board yet, hold onto that. The answer came. It just did not come on the day anyone expected it.

The squad

Here they are. Learn the faces, because names are easier to pray for when you can see who you are praying for.

And these are the leaders going with them, the ones who will be awake at 3am in Addis Ababa counting heads and sorting out visas and sitting with a homesick nineteen year old on a curb.

How to pray for this squad

These are their own words, gathered before they launch.

For their families and friends back home

• For friends and family stateside: softened hearts and a new desire to seek the Lord if they do not already.

• There has been an increase of interest in God among family and the people they interact with daily. Pray those people come to understand Jesus through their actions and obedience, and have a personal revelation of who He is.

• For family and friends who are taking the transition hard, and for peace of mind while the squad gears up for the race.

• For one racer's family in particular, who are strongly against this trip. It is a difficult situation, made harder by still living at home.

• For family back home, and for peace over hearts and minds as they say yes to the race and to all God is doing in them.

For the nations they are going to

• That the Lord would give them a word for each of these eleven countries, and that they would intercede for the communities there.

• Over the nations and over our own country, that the Lord would grant Ephesians 1:17 and 18, and that friends, family, the Body of Christ, and the lost would have the same mindset as the merchant in the parable who sold everything for the one pearl and would truly devote everything to Jesus.

Print this list. Stick it somewhere you will see it. Pray for Francis's neighbors while you are at it, because somewhere in a village in Machakos County there is a family who has been asking God to send someone, and eleven months from now these kids will be standing in Colombia wondering how they ever doubted He would.