Missionary of hope
Former Kenyan orphan works to bring faith and computers to his native village
Joe Kohn of The Michigan Catholic
Published July 27, 2007
|
Joe Kohn | The Michigan Catholic
David Njoroge shows off a picture of him, his parents and his siblings. Njoroge was an orphan in Kenya before being sent to the United States for college. Now, he's collecting computers to help teach job skills to Kenya's growing orphan population. |
Christ Cares Fundraiser
When: 6:30 p.m., Saturday, Aug. 18.
Where: St. Elizabeth Parish, 138 Goodell, Wyandotte.
What it is: The Christ Cares Children's Centre is collecting computer equipment and donations to establish computer labs to help teenaged orphans in Kenya find jobs.
What they need: Donations of computers, printers, a server, a projector, clothes, shoes, toys, sports equipment, and about $7,000 to send the goods, and director David Njoroge, to Kenya.
RSVP: Call (734) 686-0321.
Online: Visit
Christ Cares Children Home
| |
Wyandotte When you're standing atop a cliff, with tragedy and hardship, hunger and hopelessness pushing you like a strong wind toward the edge that's when you need roots to keep from going over.
Those roots, says David Njoroge, are born out of trust in Jesus Christ.
Njoroge, a 28-year-old Kenyan man with a soft voice and a big vision, knows this from experiences harsher than the vast majority of Americans will ever have. He was orphaned as a teenager in Kenya and helped care for his five younger siblings through the harshest of poverty.
"When you're at the edge of that cliff," Njoroge says, sitting in an office at St. Elizabeth Parish in Wyandotte, "believe me, you'll trust in God.
I've been to the edge of that cliff many times."
Now, three years after the sacrifices of his native Kenyans sent him to the United States to receive an education, he wants to go back with new hope in tow for those who are orphaned like he was. He is trying to collect computers, computer equipment, and several thousand dollars to transport it, and him, back to Kenya to give teenage orphans skills for acquiring jobs.
For that purpose, St. Elizabeth Parish here is hosting a fundraiser Aug. 18 at the church hall. Njoroge will tell his story, and about the Christ Cares Children's Centre the orphanage that helped give him hope and send him to the United States during an authentic Kenyan meal in the evening.
Childhood tragedy
Born and raised in farmland in rural Kenya, Njoroge, his parents, and his five younger siblings fled their homeland amid deadly tribal wars when he was 15 years old.
During the move, Njoroge's mother fell ill. Because their father had succumbed to alcoholism, like many Kenyan men, she was the family's income provider.
But when they left their farm, they had no means of income. Staying in a house given to them by their aunt in Ongata Rongai, a suburb of the capital city of Nairobi, the six Njoroge children watched their mother's health deteriorate, and had no money to buy her medicine.
Soon after, she died. And after that, their father left to marry another woman. The children would not see him much from that point.
Njoroge and his siblings, the youngest still a toddler, were alone in their aunt's house. By U.S. standards, it was more like a hut a single room divided by a curtain, a mattress on the floor. In the corner was a charcoal stove.
They could not afford charcoal.
"My mom just died. My dad married someone else," Njoroge recalled. "I just dropped out of school. I couldn't think at that point."
For four years, he and his brothers and sisters had no adults to provide money for food. They approached the owners of the nicer houses in the area, asking to do chores for pay.
"What we cared for was to see tomorrow," he says. "We didn't think of our future life, or whether we were going to have a family. It was survival."
Sometimes, Njoroge would be able to do farming for his wealthier neighbors. Sometimes, he would ride a bicycle for an hour to the city's well to fetch water, which was carried in two eight-gallon jugs. Due to lack of food, he weighed a scant 120 pounds the water weighed about as much as he did.
"I would sell them for 10 shillings," he said.
That'd be less than 13 U.S. cents.
A whole day's work, he explained, would yield the equivalent of 90 cents. His younger siblings wouldn't earn much more. His brother, Ngige, would train and sell dogs. His sisters would wash clothes. What they earned would be enough to buy groceries bread, milk and potatoes.
"We ate just once a day, in the evening," he says, "When you go two days without food, that's when you understand what food is."
By the numbers
Republic of Kenya, by the numbers
- 37 million people live in the country.
- 2.55 million die from HIV/AIDS each year.
- 900,000 children are orphaned because of HIV/AIDS deaths.
- $2,600 is the average income, in U.S. dollars, per capita.
- 75 to 80 percent of the population works in agriculture.
- 55 years is the average life expectancy.
- 50 percent of the population is living in poverty.
- 40 percent of the population is unemployed
- 28 to 33 percent of the population is Catholic.
| | Light in darkness
But bread and potatoes weren't the only food that David and his brothers and sisters took in. It was their blessing, Njoroge said, to have been raised with spiritual nourishment.
In their home, they kept a Bible, which David would read often to his siblings. They all prayed. Njoroge recalls taking solace in the story of Job, and could relate with Job's many trials.
"God protected him from the devil," he says. "If He did that to Job then I have that hope."
Indeed, faith and hope carried him from thoughts of suicide, he adds. And they have carried his family through their perils.
"Faith and hope are like a cup and water," he says. "One carries the other, and you can't have one without the other."
And where would he be without knowing that the King of the Universe was knocking at the door to his heart, offering him hope?
"If I didn't go to church when I was young, and learn about faith and hope," Njoroge says, "Today, I could be very different. I could be a drug addict, or like so many people who consume alcohol until they don't even know their names."
The hope afforded him by trust in Christ, he says, allowed Christ to come into his life in a new way.
The Lord appeared to the Njoroge children through the generosity of the people around them, he says. Especially the women at the Christ Cares Children Centre orphanage. The widows who ran the orphanage put the children back in school, after they had dropped out for more than a year.
It was the women at the orphanage, too, who eventually held fundraisers to send Njoroge who showed promise by receiving exceptionally high grades in school to the United States.
"These people helped me to a point you couldn't believe," Njoroge says.
Giving back
Today, David has an associate's degree from Wayne County Community College. He rents a home in Wyandotte with his wife, Hellen, a Kenyan whom he married in a traditional ceremony before leaving for the United States, and who followed him to WCCC.
Most of his siblings still are in school in Kenya. But since crossing the ocean, he never has had the money to travel back home.
But he has had a burning desire.
"I have this depth in my heart," he says, "saying that I have to do something."
The computer lab he is putting together for teenage orphans is just the first phase of his vision. In the future, he wants to establish trade schools in building and masonry.
In Kenya, the orphaned population is staggering because of the prevalence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. According to the Nairobi-based Kenya AIDS Watch Institute, about 700 adults die from AIDS each day more than 2.5 million per year.
That's nearly 7 percent of the country's entire population.
The result is that Kenya now has an orphan population of nearly 900,000 due to the disease. Those raised as orphans will play a large part in the country's future, and must face the problem of rampant poverty.
But orphans, Njoroge says, typically can't afford a $220 computer class in Kenya hence the computer lab he's establishing. Those who have even remedial computer skills, such as typing, have a great advantage when it comes to finding employment.
"At the end of the day, it's very hard to manage poverty unless you give them the power to make their own money," he says.
Fr. Charles Morris, pastor of St. Elizabeth, says his community is blessed to host Njoroge's efforts, because Njoroge puts a human face on the situation so far away.
"It brings a flesh-and-blood story of an individual person, who brings it into our DNA," Fr. Morris says. "It's one thing to throw money into the collection basket and know it's going for a good cause. It's another thing when it's based on relationships."
Njoroge was invited to the parish this spring by youth minister John Grandy when the two took a class together at WCCC.
"If God gives us an opportunity to open a door here, we're blessed," Fr. Morris says. "If we have some resources we can share to make an impact for the better, that's sharing Christ, and we get blessings back."
Right now, Njoroge says he's focused on bringing the fruits of his education and presence in the United States back to his native land. He wants to spend the remainder of the summer and the fall at the orphanage, setting up the computer lab.
Then, he says, he wants to return to the United States and pursue a master's degree in International Studies, while setting up trade schools near Nairobi.
The crux of his entire mission, he says, is to give orphans the hope that the Lord gave to him in the toughest of times, through His Word and through the widows who ran the orphanage.
"In the end," Njoroge says, "I want to be a missionary to my own people."
|
