Joy Matters

MISSIONER NEWSLETTER – Summer 2026

Theresa Glaser, Kenya

Six “informal settlements” surrounding the town of Kitale are the source of our student population at the St. John Bosco Rehabilitation Center here in Kenya. In my role as a support teacher, on a daily basis, my classroom is filled with scrubbed, polite children. But it is in accompanying our social worker on home visits that my passion for this ministry is cemented.

Classroom joy: A young student and his tower.

Recently, we visited Daisy’s home. Negotiating a long, muddy path to enter the settlement, I was instructed and encouraged by neighborhood children to scale a rocky ledge while gripping a chicken wire fence. On arrival, we met Daisy’s twin three year old brothers, dressed in ragged, and ill-fitting clothing, noses running dangerously. I pulled kleenex from my pocket and handed them to Daisy. She looked puzzled and I was puzzled why she looked that way. She wiped their noses and then I understood: there was nowhere to dispose of trash. ‘Garbage collection’ did not exist. She dropped the tissues over a wire fence.

The house was a mud structure, one room in size with few, if any, recognizable furnishings. A rope line was strung across the ceiling with various clothes and other items suspended from it. Jerrycans were moved from behind a curtain to provide us with seating. While Daisy’s mother was engaged in conversation with the social worker, I watched the antics of the twins in the absence of their mother’s attention.

Theresa Glaser leads students through their first painting lesson at St. John Bosco Rehabilitation Center, Kitale, Kenya.

Invited into the conversation, in limited Kiswahili I described Daisy’s great progress and helpful attitude in my classroom and truthfully commented that Daisy and her mom shared a beautiful smile. But mostly, I was left to my own troubling thoughts. What must it be like to live in such conditions on a daily basis? To wake up to this poverty and to sleep in this poverty?

And then I saw it! On the darkened side of the room, tacked to the dismal mud wall, was a beautifully colored artwork that Trasy had completed with a labor of love in my classroom.

There is an ongoing happy ending to this story. At St. John Bosco Rehabilitation Center, we select students, ages 7-12, from conditions of extreme poverty, prepare them for entry into formal school and then follow and support them throughout their entire educational career.

And in my present role there, I resolve to provide many opportunities for pure joy along the way, because joy, it turns out, finds a way to hang itself on even the darkest walls.

Joyful celebrations: students mark the opening of the new library.

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