Kenya say Inspirational?

I knew you could...

This weekend, we were visited by one of our Kenya partners, Mercy Chidi, who is in North America for a conference and also to visit her charities various sponsors - including Lakeside. On Sunday, at church, she shared the following story. Any mistakes in the retelling are due to my faulty memory...

After growing up in Isiolo (a town about an hour north of Meru), Mercy went to University in Nairobi. After graduating from University with a degree in Social Work, she took a job in Nairobi, got married, settled down and had kids. She was living a very normal life. But then, one day, everything changed.

Her best friend was dying from HIV/AIDS. For months on end, she would spend every weekend driving from Nairobi to Isiolo (about 8 hours) to tend to her friends health. At the time (about ten years ago) there was a huge stigma against AIDS. If you had it or were dying from it, you told no one. So Mercy was her only friend that even knew she was dying. She tended to her care as best she could, but, of course, AIDS is still a death sentence. When she died, the stigma was so strong, her friend's parents simply told their daughter's friends and community that she had emigrated to the United States rather than admit that she had died of AIDS. Mercy was heartbroken at the loss of her friend.

She turned to God in prayer and asked for some guidance because she saw how many children were affected by AIDS in Isiolo and Meru and she wanted to do something about it - maybe something to do with prevention or education. God told her to move back to Isiolo. To do so, she would have to uproot her family, quit her job, and force her husband to leave his well-paying UN job. But God told her what to do, so she did it. She moved her family to Isiolo and began to work with AIDS education and treatment.

The organization she created from scratch at the behest of God now serves over 12,000 children and just recently opened the first Pediatric hospital in all of central Kenya.

I can tell more inspirational stories... and I will... but the real inspirational part of this story was how normal and human and Christian this woman is. She laments the fact that because her organization has grown so big, she can no longer go to the local hospital and visit the children in the Children's Ward. She was telling us about confronting the heirarchy in her church by being seen with a known drinker at a bar who had been so excited by Christ until the church had discovered her secret and rejected her. Every time I get a chance to spend time with her, I come away even more inspired than I was before.

More to come tomorrow...