On to Bwaliro

June 15-17, 2010

Tuesday was a travel day. Our mission team of seven divided up into two groups and set out for different parts of Kenya. Vernon, Sharon, Carl, and Alice headed off to Nakuru to do some shopping and visit a game park, while Stephen, Claudia, and I headed straight to Eldoret to visit our missionaries, Keith and Grace Gafner. We certainly had a lot to do while in Eldoret, and we spent much of Tuesday and Wednesday visiting various friends, deaf people, and church leaders that Stephen knows, but a major purpose of this stop in Eldoret was to serve as a staging point for the next leg of our trip.

If you recall from last year's Kenya trip, Stephen and I and five others spent an evening in mud huts in a little village called Bwaliro in the district of Busia. There was a Kenyan man living there named Christopher Otsieno who had moved from the big city of Eldoret back to his home village during the post-election violence a couple of years ago.

The prevalence of AIDS in Busia is particularly high. The district commissioner told us that 14.8% of the population of Busia has AIDS. This, of course, means that the orphan population in this district is very high as well. So, Christopher noticed that there was a big job to be done in the area and he started taking orphan children into his own home and taking food to those that he couldn't house..

While we were visiting him last year, we asked Chris lots of questions about what we could do to help him in this very important work. So, Chris told us his big dream for a place called the Blessed Family Center. It was to be a home for the orphans and widows in the community where they could be fed, housed and cared for and where they could grow in faith and discipleship.

When we got back to the States, a few of us, Stephen Greek, Gordon Fry, Scott Darrow, and I, got together to see if we could find a way to offer some assistance to Christopher in his work. Fortunately, Christopher is a friend of Keith Gafner, our congregation's missionary in Eldoret, and Keith had already been helping Christopher financially out of his own pocket. So, the four of us decided to help Keith help Christopher help the orphans. For a while we tried giving money to Keith through our local church, but it was a bit too much money to pass through the church without any oversight, and our mission committee already had its hands full with Sam's Place and couldn't really afford to oversee another orphanage project.

So, we decided to go another route and create a new tax-exempt public charity so that we could continue to support this work tax-free and invite others from around the world to contribute to the work as well. The charity is called “Huruma House” (huruma is Swahili for mercy), and we just received our 501(c)(3) status this March, so we are really just getting started. But it is very exciting to have this new instrument which God can use to bless the widows, orphans, and needy persons of East Africa.

So, naturally, Stephen and Claudia Greek and I wanted to devote a significant portion of our trip to visiting the work in Bwaliro that we had been supporting. And since Keith Gafner is the missionary who is advising this project, it made sense for all of us to travel there together. So Thursday morning, bright and early, Keith kissed his wife and children goodbye and herded me, Stephen, Claudia, and Joyce (an old Kenyan friend of the Greeks) into his Pajero and we set out for the tiny village of Bwaliro just near the border with Uganda.

Something you need to know is that about the time we started supporting this project, Christopher's friend, Paul Bwire, also moved to Bwaliro help Chris with the work. Paul has done a phenomenal job, and one of the first expenses of Huruma House was to allocate funds for Paul to build a house for himself and his new bride. Now, buying someone a house may sound like exorbitant compensation, but he only asked for about $700 to do it, so we went ahead and gave him the money. And, at the time, the decision to give Paul money to build a house was nothing more to us than some transactions in a spreadsheet and a bank account.

But when we pulled up to the very homey, well-decorated mud and wood structure that Paul and Lillian call their home, suddenly it all became so much more real. This is a real house. People really live here. It has a kitchen and a living room and a bedroom and a covered porch for entertaining guests. There is a clothesline in the front with real people's clothes, and in the back there is a wooden rack for washing and drying dishes. There are doors and windows and there are pictures of real people on the walls. There is even a TV and electric lights. This is a real place where a man comes home and kicks up his feet. And it is almost miraculous that our $700 mixed with lots of love and sweat actually built this. In Kenya, for less than the price of a laptop a man can build a house for his family. That experience certainly encouraged us about the potential effectiveness of the funds that will be channeled to this project in the future.

Well, Lillian Bwire quickly ushered us into her home and served us a scrumptious meal of turkey and watermelon and mashed bananas and some other select choices from their shamba (garden). But before we ate, we first observed their tradition of introducing everyone present at the meal. One of the women being introduced stepped out of the house and onto the covered porch to greet us, and as she did she accidentally bumped against the doorway, and to our surprise a huge chuck of the mud doorway broke off the house and landed on the floor. The woman was very embarrassed, but Paul was very gracious about it and acted like it wasn't a big deal. Apparently, things like that just happen occasionally when you live in a mud house, and you just learn to mix up some more mud and fix it when it does happen.

After the meal we went to visit the elderly widow woman who is selling us her land for this project. Her name is Elizabeth Olo, and she is one of the widows who is currently being aided by this project. I got to impress Elizabeth by showing her a picture of herself that I had stored on my iPod, and she got to impress me with the huge pile of recently harvested millet that consumed a large part of her living room floor.

Later that evening, after we had thoroughly explored the 5.2 acres that had been purchased for helping the orphans and widows here, it started raining. It started raining hard. So, we all ran inside Paul's mud home with the metal roof to escape. But it was raining so hard, that the sound of the rain on the metal roof was deafening. So, we couldn't even talk to each other. We just sat in the midst of the rumbling and the eerie glow of the kerosene lamp and looked at each other. Fortunately, I had my laptop, so I got to get some writing done. And I let the two little Kenyan kids sitting next to me watch “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” on my iPod (each one sharing an ear bud).

After the rain let up, we headed down the dirt road to Christopher's place, and as we drove between the fields of sorghum and sugarcane along the winding, narrow path to his house we were met, like last year, by a chorus of singing and dancing Kenyan women and children excited to welcome us into their home. And even though we had just eaten at Paul's house, Christopher ushered us into his home for yet another Kenyan feast.

After dinner, Christopher led us two-at-a-time to his brand new pair of bathrooms just next to the new choo he had built, so that we could give ourselves sponge baths from basins of water. Then it was pretty late, so we all turned in. Keith Gafner and I slept in the same mud hut I got to sleep in last year, while Steve, Claudia, and Joyce bedded down in Christopher's house.

Christopher gave us each a new pair of slippers for our baths, and as we entered our mud hut to go to bed, I took my shoes off at the door. And then there was the following exchange:

Kenyan: Why are you taking your shoes off? Leave them on.
Jeff: Because my slippers are very muddy and I don't want to track mud inside.
Kenyan: But the floor is made of mud.
Jeff: Good point.


O God, may Huruma House be an instrument in Your hands to do Your work in the world. We offer it to You to use in Your service. Protect us, Lord, from developing any personal attachment to this human institution we have created. As long as Huruma House glorifies You may it continue to grow and prosper, and when it ceases to be effective in Your Kingdom, Lord, we ask that You give us the strength to let go of it gracefully. Amen.