KIBERA, Kenya -- The bus came to a stop just as it crossed over a hill, and we climbed out, somewhat subdued by the sight that lay before us.

Thousands of tin-roof sheds, packed as closely together as sardines, filled the valley below, extending out of sight to our left and to our right.

We were not alone. The fringes of the Kibera slums extended up the hill towards us, and a few scattered families were close enough to see and pay attention to us. Children, naturally curious, came up to the bus to see what was going on.

Later, as the LEAMIS International Ministries mission team held one of our daily team meetings, we would discuss the thorny issue of photography. Some of us took photos that day from the bluff. Others did not, feeling it would be intrusive and inconsiderate to do so because of the residents wandering nearby.

I, for one, do not regret using my camera that day. Grace Mbithi, one of our hosts, later noted that the people of the slums do not seem to mind photography. And I was concerned that words alone would fail me in trying to tell you what I saw in Africa.

From Aug. 22 through 27, 14 of us -- four LEAMIS staff members and 10 volunteers -- ministered in the Kibera area in cooperation with New Life Restoration Centre, the seven-year-old church founded by the Rev. Paul Mbithi. We taught cottage industries like soap-making, jam-making and (my responsibility) copper foiling. We worked in street ministry and made door-to-door visits in the slums. We participated in worship services at the church and we made balloon animals for the children. Other members of the team helped construct schoolroom desks and demonstrate a water purification system.

We knew we were going into a situation of poverty. LEAMIS, based in Marion County, believes strongly in pre-field training, and we'd been told some of what to expect. We'd had a weekend of training stateside in March, and a day of training in Kenya after our arrival there. I'd been on a previous mission trip to rural Nicaragua and had spent a week living with a Nica family in a rickety dirt-floor shed.

There was something different, however, about the poverty in the Kibera slums. The slums, on the edge of Nairobi, have a population of more than a million people, by most accounts. The scale of them, and the fact that people live so closely together, made this a different kind of poverty.

I did not have my camera with me on the day we went door-to-door in the slums. This wasn't a deliberate decision; I'd simply decided to take a break from carrying it around, and at the time I didn't know what our exact schedule would be that day. I would certainly not have been intrusive enough to take photos inside people's homes, but I might have been able to give you a better idea of what the slum looked like up close.

We had broken up into teams of four or five each -- two LEAMIS team members and a couple of New Life church members in each group.

We were in a neighborhood called Soweto (not to be confused with the well-known city of Soweto, located far away in South Africa). The narrow dirt pathways between the homes were rutted and sometimes had dirty water, perhaps even sewage, running between them. It was precarious to try to climb through them as we made our way from home to home.

I noticed several children in the streets pulling toy trucks made from coated paper juice boxes (a large one attached to a small one, with makeshift cardboard wheels).

The homes themselves were sometimes made of tin, sometimes dirt. A 10-foot by 10-foot home rents for the equivalent of $10 or $15 per month in Kenyan shillings, but the average wage in the area is only about $38 per month. During our visits, we saw only the "living room" -- which could be as small as a walk-in closet -- which was separated by some sort of flimsy barrier from the room where the family slept.

More than a million people live this way, in the Kibera slums.

John, our guide from the church, took us to two different homes, where we prayed with the residents and invited them to church. LEAMIS co-founders Gail Drake and Debra Snellen, at a team meeting, had told us that we would not be trying to hard-sell people into a spiritual commitment during such a brief and cross-cultural visit; the main emphasis was to try to bring them to church. Later, as Pastor Paul was sending us out, he noted that we wouldn't have time to stay long at any one place.

"Short prayers ... and don't cast out demons today," he joked. Then, after thinking about that a second, he added: "Bring them back here and we will cast out the demons."

But once we began visiting the homes, it became clear that the New Life church members had been told that we would in fact be trying to get people to pray the sinner's prayer, and in fact to keep track of the number of people who'd done so. In fact, the church members really expected that it would be us, the American visitors, who would be doing the heavy lifting in this regard. Since this was a matter of tactics and not principle, Jim Upton and I, in our group, went along with what the locals expected.

My first attempt to lead someone through the prayer of salvation was somewhat circuitous. It was obvious I wasn't much of an evangelist back home in the U.S.

After our first two stops, John took us to a third home, which was just as shabby and substandard (to our Western eyes, at least) as the first two. He beamed at us.

"This is my home," he said, introducing us to his wife and one of his children. He was obviously pleased to have us as visitors and show off -- show off! -- his home.

John does not live in a vacuum. He is close enough to Nairobi that he has certainly seen how the residents of the city (including Pastor Paul and a few others from the congregation) live. But this is his home, and he was proud of it, and proud to have us as guest in it.

The people of Kibera live with poverty. Poverty has very real, very serious consequences related to health, education and survival. A woman named Rose told Gail Drake that each night before she goes to bed, she puts her hand on each of her children's tummies and prays for God to fill it the next day.

We in the developed world have responsibilities to help the people of the developing world deal with some of the consequences of poverty, a topic I'll revisit as this series continues.

But the people of Kibera do not hang their heads.

Each morning of our trip, when we were being taken by bus from the homes where we were sleeping to the church, we saw throngs of Kenyans walking to work through the dust at the side of the road. Their clothes were clean -- almost inexplicably clean, given their environment.

Pastor Paul and Grace, housing eight of us in their modest townhouse, had no washing machine and no ready access to one. LEAMIS provides some reimbursement to the people who host its team members, and Paul and Grace used some of it to hire two young women for the week to help with cooking and cleaning. All of us had packed light, and so we needed clothes washed. But, just as I discovered in Nicaragua, it's humbling to leave your laundry with someone and think about the fact that they're going to do it by hand.

Our laundry would be neatly folded in a stack in each room when we returned home at the end of the day -- bright and white and crisply ironed. The Mbithis had an electric iron; the little laundry which operated out of a stall near the church used charcoal-powered irons. These were metal irons into which hot coals were scooped.

The Kenyan people know all about capitalism; various streets, whether paved streets near the slum or the dirt streets of the slum, were choked with stalls like the one occupied by the laundry selling everything from produce to cell phone accessories. Many of these were composed of four unfinished tree branches holding up a simple roof -- corrugated tin, plastic bags or what have you.

Part of our work with the LEAMIS mission project would be to teach some marketable skills to some of the church members, so that they could produce products for their own use or to sell through a cooperative formed by the church.

We knew as we looked off the bluff into the slums that it was going to be a challenging and rewarding week. But I think even some of the more seasoned members of the team didn't realize how much we would learn from the people of Kibera.

TUESDAY: The outhouse of friendship