This Is Not Our First Trip to Kenya!
This April, we’ll mark twenty years since our first trip to Kenya. We didn’t know it at the time, but that single trip in 2007 was the start of something we’re still living out today: a relationship with a country, a community, and a calling that has shaped nearly half our lives. This is the story of how that happened. And it’s an invitation — to be part of what comes next.
How It Started
In 2007, we landed in Kenya for the first time with a group of Oakland CA high school students and no real idea what to expect. What we found was a country full of warmth, resilience, and possibility — the kind of place that gets under your skin fast. What we didn’t expect was that one trip would turn into two decades of returning, again and again, to the same communities, the same friends, and eventually, the same quiet realization: this place had become part of who we are.
That first trip planted a question we’re still answering: what does it actually look like to show up for a place, not just visit it?
Twenty Years of Showing Up
Since 2007, we’ve led small groups back to Kenya to work alongside local partners on community-led projects in healthcare, education, and economic empowerment — never projects we designed for people, but ones designed and driven by the people who live there, with us simply offering our hands and resources in support.
Over twenty years, “showing up” has looked like a lot of things:
- Sitting in homes for meals, not just visits.
- Celebrating weddings, graduations, and new businesses alongside Kenyan friends.
- Grieving losses together, the way family does.
- Worshiping in local churches and building real relationships with pastors and congregations.
- Partnering with schools, conservation groups, businesses, and mentors who’ve become collaborators in the truest sense of the word.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, our language changed without us really noticing. Kenya stopped being a destination we traveled to and became a second home we returned to. The people we met stopped being contacts and hosts and became family — the kind you call when something wonderful happens, or something terrible does, because you know they’ll pick up the phone.
Christina’s Babies
One relationship in particular has grown into its own calling. Christina volunteers with the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, the Nairobi-based organization known for rescuing and rewilding orphaned elephants and protecting critical habitat across Kenya’s wild lands. Through SWT’s education program, she gives introductory presentations to schools across North America, bringing elephant conservation — and the story of Kenya’s wildlife — straight into classrooms full of kids who may never have thought about Kenya before. It’s just one thread in a much bigger tapestry, but it captures something true about our whole journey: what starts as curiosity about a place has a way of becoming an investment in its future.
Where Coffee Comes In
For much of our life outside of Kenya, we’ve worked as producers in film and television — an industry that, oddly enough, revolves around a table. On every set, Craft Services (or “Crafty”) is the quiet backbone of the day: the coffee and food that keep a crew fed, energized, and connected between takes. It sounds like a small thing, but it matters enormously. People do their best work, and treat each other best, when they feel cared for.
That observation is what led us to start Crafty Coffee Company. We wanted to take the spirit of hospitality we’d learned on set — and the spirit of connection we’d found in Kenya — and put it in a cup. Crafty Coffee sources and roasts specialty coffee with the same intention we bring to our trips: build real relationships with the people and places behind the product, and let that story reach the people drinking it.
Coffee turned out to be the perfect bridge between our two worlds. It lets us bring a piece of Kenya home, literally and figuratively, and gives us a way to share the relationships we’ve built there with people who may never set foot in Nairobi or Tsavo. Every bag we roast is, in some small way, an extension of the same values that keep pulling us back to Kenya year after year: show up, build trust, and share what you love with the people around you.
Why We’re Sharing This Now
Twenty years is a long time to fall in love with something. It’s long enough to watch kids we met as toddlers graduate from university and to see our own son grow into a young man with deep roots in Africa. Long enough to see a small community health initiative grow into something the community now sustains on its own. Long enough that we’ve stopped keeping count of our trips and started counting our relationships instead.
We’re not telling this story to look backward. We’re telling it because we believe everything we’ve gathered along the way — the relationships, the trust, the on-the-ground knowledge of how to do this well and respectfully — is something worth sharing with more people. Not as tourism, and not as a one-time service trip, but as a genuine chance to experience the Kenya we love, through the people and places that have shaped our lives there.
An Invitation, Not Just an Anniversary
So no, this isn’t our first trip to Kenya. It’s not our fifth, or our tenth. It’s one chapter in a relationship that’s nearly twenty years deep — and one we’d love for you to be part of, whether it’s your first trip to Kenya, or someday, far from your last.