Where Did We Begin?
“The beginning is the most important part of the work.”
One of the first things we try to do when we meet a new child or young adult on the street is to find out their origin story. Sometimes, before you can know where someone is going, it helps to know where they’ve been. But origin stories can take time to tell, especially if you don’t trust the person you’re telling it to.
So, the beginning is the most important part of the work. The beginning is building trust and then you will find the origin story will tell itself after some time.
But this is supposed to be our origin story.
Our origin is really a mixture of stories, some of which aren’t ours to tell, but they go back to the stories of people before us, whose paths we crossed many years ago. The best place to start with our story is fire.
We were in Kenya for a completely different reason, not seeking to fall in love with a community or spend our lives working in that community for years to come, but then fire happened. Little fires were burning everywhere in the, what was once small town of Kakamega, that night. So, we asked our host, “what are all of those little fires for?”. That’s when we learned about the hundreds of children (and young adults who never got to be children) who call the streets home. Our lives would forever be changed.
It took a few years before we decided we would take on the challenge of working alongside that community to reach their lost children. It took many conversations with community leaders and many mistakes and misunderstandings of just how big the situation was. We were naive, but not for long.
We started our story with fire and true the spark was lit that night, pun intended, but soap is also a good place to start our story. A little boy who wanted nothing for Christmas but a bath with soap, something he didn’t remember ever having for the entire eight years of his short life. So, as many origins start, we started simply, trying to provide the things they were lacking like food and water and soap. After all, we don’t believe in leaving someone in that type of situation with only kind words and no form of action. But of course, we soon realized those things weren’t the root of the problem and so our real story began.
Now, over a decade later, we have grown from a group of friends who couldn’t bear to turn their back on kids, to an organization who works within, and most importantly alongside, a community of like-minded individuals, and if they aren’t like-minded then we know soon they will be. While gathering the street community together once a week for a hot meal, clean water, and love is still at the heart of what we do, it’s become so much more than that.
When we started the biggest argument we heard was, “that’s going to take a culture shift, do you know how impossible that is?”. We really didn’t, but we were determined to try anyway. We now have projects that include reintegrating children back home when possible, providing small business opportunities for those who can’t return home or to school, education for those who can, and self-sustainability initiatives for children’s homes. Our next initiative, working in partnership with the community and relevant professionals, is to begin to use education to continue the culture shift that has begun. How can you change what you don’t realize can be better?
Life change is at the heart of what we do. Seeing a once tough street “boss” one day wielding his sticks and barking orders who has now become a business owner and father who has broken the cycle of street life is just one story within our story. Their stories are the true stories of heroes.