Progress in Kisumu

As I sat in the shade of a tiny church in the midst of a giant slum on Monday, I had another moment of realization - God is doing great things through CARE for AIDS, and I am so blessed to find myself in the midst of it! The past few days in Kisumu gave me an opportunity to see how the newest center operating in the area is coming along, and it turned into a great learning experience for me.

The demographics of the Nyalenda slum, where the newest CFA center is located, are quite different than what I am used to around Limuru/Nairobi. For one, HIV is even more rampant around this area, with a prevalence rate of over 20%. Think about that - just walking around the area, 1 out of every 5 people you see are HIV-positive. This is caused by a combination of antiquated cultural traditions (wife inheritance, for one) and a serious lack of medical infrastructure and education, and it results in an area with an intense need for help. When Festus and Monica, the community health workers from the center at Nyalenda Baptist, started recruiting clients, they found a group of over 150 people in less than two weeks - in Limuru we have taken close to two MONTHS to get a group of 80.

Because of the high numbers, they decided to limit this group of clients to people who had been tested within the past year and a half, providing a group of 80 with significant educational and emotional needs. Interestingly, this has led to a group with the highest attendance rates at seminars and center days of any group that has come through CFA - it turns out that in many cases where people have been tested several years before, they learn how to "work the system" and bounce around from program to hospital to government office seeking handouts and sustenance. This group, on the other hand, truly desires the learning, community, and empowerment that they find at the center. In Geofrey (the Regional Coordinator's) words, "Here they are really coming to find a home."

The people in Nyalenda are also very concentrated - all 80 clients live within about 500m of the church building, so it is easy for Monica and Festus to visit all of them each month and spend quality time encouraging them in their homes. This encouragement has gone a long way in creating economic progress as well. Monica tells me that in Kisumu, when people discover that they are positive, most will stop doing any work and start relying on relatives or charity to support them - essentially giving up on their potential to have any meaning in life until they die. By helping the clients to understand how to "live positively" with an optimistic state of mind, while also teaching them about financial management, business, medication, and health, Monica is already seeing a shift in this attitude and is finding more and more clients each week who are doing some sort of work and making money to provide for their needs themselves.

I was also able to talk to the Spiritual Counselor, Festus, about the spiritual state of this group of clients, who are only in their second month at the center. He told me that initially almost all of the clients said they were "saved," because they thought it might be a prerequisite for being part of a church program. After talking to each one at length during the counseling sessions, he found that only 8 out of the 80 were truly believers. We thank God for such an amazing opportunity to share the Gospel with people who have never truly understood it, and in the past six weeks an amazing 36 clients have expressed their desire to follow Christ. Each of these people is going through a curriculum of Biblical teaching with Festus, and we all pray that they will have built a firm foundation and a true commitment by the time they finish the program.

Thank you all so much for your support of CARE for AIDS and your continued prayers - it is only through you that these amazing things are able to take place! Please continue to pray for all of the clients and staff in Kisumu, especially as we look to open our third center in this region sometime in the next month or so. We have so much to be thankful for, but an amazing amount of need still exists!

Picture below from left to right: Geoffrey (Regional Coordinator), Monica (Physical Counselor), Cornel (Director), Festus (Spiritual Counselor)