Welcome back to the first day of the Feast of Tabernacles in Sevierville Tennessee. We’re glad to have you with us. We’re gonna have a special treat for you, an update from Kenya from none other than Bill Goff himself, so Mr. Goff, would you like to tell us about it?
Good afternoon, brethren, it’s wonderful to be here. I want to give you a little information about our brethren in Kenya which is over in East Africa. I’ll give you a little background on me. My wife Marie and I came into the church back in 1984 into the Worldwide. We left Worldwide around 1991, and shortly after that I made contact with a man in Kenya who had been in the Worldwide also, and I started asking him about his living conditions. They sounded pretty poor, so I decided to go there myself and check them out, and then when I got there I found out that the living conditions were actually considerably worse than what was rumored. 2005 is when I went there for the first time. I came back to the States and I tried to make other brethren here in America and other wealthy countries aware of the suffering of our brethren in Kenya. I’ll give you this presentation so you’ll get to know them a little bit.
The city you’re looking at is Nairobi; that’s the capital of Kenya, and when you look at it, it kind of looks like one of the cities here in the United States, but it’s not; it’s a pretty rough place. Nairobi, the capital, has a population of around 4 million that live there and another 4 million that come in during the day to work, so on a typical day there’s eight million people there. They have no subways, so you either go around in a car, or most people trek on foot. Most of the people that come in live in the slums, which are on the outskirts of Kenya.
The Radio Church of God first started broadcasting from Radio Luxembourg back in 1953. At that time the gospel of the kingdom of God had begun to take root there, and it has been continually growing since. Now there’s actually thousands that are keeping the Sabbath and the holy days. I’m not speaking of Seventh-Day Adventists; there’s a large population of those, but the ones I’m speaking of here are the Church of God.
We’ve been in the process of helping our brethren and widows. Our focus has been on widows and orphans, and there are many orphans there. In fact, almost half the population of Kenya are children under the age of 14 years old. The population is around 40 or 48 million; around 40-42% are younger than 14 years old. Fifty percent live below the poverty level; 20-23% live on less than one dollar a day. The number of orphans is in the millions, and it’s still growing.
This day there happened to be a baptism, which was actually taken in some pretty nice clear water. That was actually in the Indian Ocean, in Mombasa. [Nairobi is south central in Kenya. Kisii is near Lake Victoria at the western border with Uganda. South Sudan and Ethiopia are north of Kenya, Somalia to the northeast, the Indian Ocean southeast, and Tanzania to the south. Some towns near Kisii are Rigo to the west and Sengera and Ogembo to the south. Farther south is Kilgoris and southwest is Migori].
We started an orphanage in Sengera, and there are some of our orphans. As you can see, they’re quite happy. The schools make them wear uniforms. They also make them shave their heads, for a few reasons. It’s hard to maintain long hair in that third world country, and to keep everybody on the same playing field they may make everyone shave their heads, so aside from the dress it’s hard to distinguish the boys from the girls, and they all have to wear uniforms.
That’s our orphans again at the orphanage there in a little village called Sengera. Again more uniforms; that’s the girls; they had to have some kind of sports uniforms; they were wearing those.
I started out with the first building we built there. It was for a meeting hall, and then we built this Boys’ House, and about a year later we built another house for the girls, but at that time early on we were pretty much doing everything in the Boys’ House. We had no kitchen so we were cooking in there and having Bible studies and things like that all in that one house. We ended up building a new one; we had a problem. The Boys’ House was of mud construction, and it was already starting to deteriorate and starting to collapse, so I had actually started a fundraiser on GoFundMe trying to raise money to build a new Boys’ House, but I had no sooner started the fundraiser when a fire broke out at four o’clock in the morning one day, and the house actually burnt down.
Thankfully no one was hurt, but we struggled for a while. Eventually we built a kitchen and a cafeteria, and that’s where those children are, in the cafeteria there, probably doing a Bible study. These are some orphans from the neighborhood. They’re not actually our orphans, but whenever we have food we try to share it. The government stepped in [and] had a lot of requirements [for the orphanage]. All the requirements that they had were good ones, like they wanted us to build a wall around the perimeter of the complex, put in a well, do all these different things, which were good things, but the problem over there was [that] they wanted them done overnight, and funding was a big problem, but eventually we got things done. We built a seven foot wall all the way around the perimeter. You can see the water tank. We dug away on things like that. Most of the children there, most of the people there, they’re all peasant farmers, and pretty much the only tools they ever touch in their entire lives is a ponga which is a machete and a chamba which is a hoe for digging because they’re peasant farmers, and they have to. There’s no food banks; if you get a good harvest you eat. If you don’t get a good harvest you starve, but the children in the orphanage, we try to teach them as much as we can. I was born and raised where I had my hands in a lot of different uh different fields, so I was like a jack of all trades, so our children learned how to use all kinds of tools.
What you see in that picture, we were building an office, and as you can see they’re all busy working. I’m not too good at doing my PowerPoint, so some of the pictures are a little bit out of proportion. You don’t find too many heavy people there like that. Those boys look [fat]; they’re actually thin and tall, but my bandage job of putting them on the film, no they’re not in proportion properly, but you can see they’re using power tools, and they learn to do a lot of things. We wanted to build the swings; we wanted to have a swing set, so we decided to build everything ourselves. We bought our three inch steel pipes and the children started working. That’s little Timothy. He’s got a chico there with coal in it heating up the metal so we could form it, so we bent [it and] flattened out the ends and things like that to put the swing set together. There they were [sanding] the swing set getting ready for painting, installing [the swings], and it works, and that picture is actually about five years old, so they’ve had this swing set for quite some time.
Again, everything we did there we did it ourselves, so they learned how to do cement. In fact, they got so good at it that if they needed to put some in a patio or something in a certain area they could do all the calculations themselves. They knew how much sand, how many stones, how much cement they needed to add, things like that, and there they were mixing cement for it using a level. We’re making a little table. Like I say, they got their hands into everything, plastering the walls with cement. We taught them how to paint, and in fact we know students started teaching them how to paint. I went away for a few days; I came back and they had the Boys’ House inside completely painted, so they learned really fast.
That boy there is Manley. He’s now graduated high school, and he’s actually in his first year of University. His dream was to become a [surgeon], but the government told him that he’s better off to be a pilot because he gets paid better and it takes less years to train, so he’s in a university to become an airline pilot. That’s Manley when we rebuilt the boys dormitory that burnt down. We also raised the water tank so we built a platform for it to be up high so we’d have more gravity to send water around the entire compound, and that’s it there; all that was done by the children themselves. There’s one of them on top actually painting at the time, and here he’s pouring some cement, and he’s actually edging the cement.
The person on the right is our officer there. His name is Haron [deceased April 2024] and he’s one of the most humble persons I’ve ever met. He’s short in stature, but he also has a very bad disease; he has leukemia. He’s been suffering from that for quite a few years, and next to him is James who started his first year of high school. This boy here, his name is Brian. He was not doing [well] in high school, so I took him out and I found a carpenter that was about to retire and we paid the carpenter a very small amount of money like a hundred dollars to teach him how to build furniture so he ended up learning the trade and getting on his own where has his own shop now where he’s building his own furniture. The man who trained him, after the first week he tried him, said, “Yeah, this boy has the talent; he can definitely do it, and he can definitely learn it,” and he did. Our goal of course was to try to get all these children to become self-supportive.
That’s Brian [nickname ‘Ibu’]. We did the same with him; he was also not going [well] academically in [high] school, so we pulled him out and we paid a local welder to teach him how to weld, so Brian can weld now. That’s Brian there; Brian there is a boy with the biggest heart. I’ll have a story to tell you about him shortly.
That’s our little store room here. There’s a lot of brethren in Kenya, and we try to visit the remote groups as often as possible. This particular day we were traveling on Lake Victoria in Kenya and headed out to a group that actually lives on an island. It’s a funny country. We got on this, it’s actually a taxi, and he had about five or six stops before we reached where we were headed to, but the first one we got on we were waiting for it to take off and they started loading it and loading it with uh 20 liter junks of water to where it had so much weight in it that we decided to get off of it and the guy who operates it wasn’t too happy; he wanted us to stay on, but it was definitely not safe, so we got off.
Some of the brethren that were going with us hadn’t [eaten]; all they had for breakfast was tea, so I decided, well we had two hours to wait for the next boat, so I brought them next door to a restaurant, and we bought them some lunch, and they got some really nice big chunks of beef, and they ate it, but they only ate a little bit of it, and they left the rest ,and it was taken away, so at that time I said to myself, “Boy, these people, why wouldn’t they fill up on it?” but the problem is they were full; they have such small stomachs from going without food all the time. It’s very common for our brethren, especially now, to go a day or two without food. They can usually go two days with no problem; by the third day if they don’t eat they usually die. Believe it or not, brethren, our brethren have been dying for some time now. We haven’t had a child, we haven’t had an orphan die in about five weeks now, but the last one was an eight-year-old boy who died of starvation.
This is Nehemiah; he’s our eldest orphan, and he actually he actually runs the orphanage, him and Haron [now deceased; his widow Dorcah is now matron], but little did I know when we were going across Lake Victoria, when I took that picture I didn’t realize he was actually scared to death, because he [had] never [been] that far out onto the water where you could barely see any land around, and he was pretty petrified at the time, but he survived. Like I say, there’s a lot of children there in that country; a lot more children than adults, and pretty much everywhere you see your church groups like this, you’re going to see more children than adults, and they’re always smiling. It’s amazing how rough a life they have, yet how happy they are, even though they suffer like they do. As you can see they’re all happy and smiling.
That’s actually Kisii where we built one of our orphanages. This group here, they have By the way, most people there can speak [three languages]; they’re trilingual. Kenya was [part of the] British Commonwealth, so they’re all taught English in school, so most can speak English. There’s about 42 tribes in Kenya, and every every tribe has their own language, so they can speak English, they can speak their own tribal language, and then there’s Swahili, which is an East African language. You guys know some Swahili; everybody knows Hakuna Matata like from The Lion King, like ‘no worries,’ but everywhere you see a group of brethren you’re going to see something to block the sun, [some type of shade]. Most villages [names are hard to pronounce]. This right here happens to be, we call them the Elephant group because they had an elephant that kept attacking them and tearing up their gardens. The villages ended up killing the elephant a few years back, but they do anything they can to put some kind of shade up so they can attend services. As I said, they’re all happy. There’s a tarp over that group, so that’s what we normally do. We’ll help them out, either buy them wood and give them some money to buy metal sheeting for the roof or maybe posts for further support, and they’ll do the work themselves, but they need help financially to buy some of the material, but so many of our groups there we’ve helped them build shade, and I always make it a point to them, once the building’s in and we’ll have services I’ll say, “You know, this is not our church; this is our shade. We all call it the shade, because of course the church is the brethren. This group here happens to be in a village called Nyakach, and they’ve been in drought and famine all the time ever since I met them, but as you can see they’re all smiling.
This was a Feast of Tabernacles a few years back, and on the Last Great Day we had a luncheon for all the elderly, and we got them all a treat. We gave every one of them a loaf of bread, sliced bread, which is a real treat for them. Most of the time they don’t eat bread because they can’t afford sliced bread. At that time it was about 40 cents for a loaf of bread, and we gave them all a bottle of soda, and little did I [expect] that after they started eating, every one of those widows there got up one at a time and started giving a testament of how Kenya Hands of Hope. That was what we named the organization; how can [our hands] help them in all these different ways. I was sorry but I never got to record it, but they were so appreciative.
That’s in Ramula.. That group is actually near the Uganda border. This group here, the man the third from the right in the brown suit; no, the man second from the right in the white shirt, he was [already] a pastor, and he built that mud building on his property. They were Sunday keepers, and he started learning about the Sabbath, and one year he came to our Feast of Tabernacles and said, “Can you please come to our congregation and teach them about the Sabbath, because I’ve been telling about the Sabbath, and I’m losing my congregation. They don’t want to [attend] because I’m not meeting on Sunday anymore.” so we got everybody to come in one Sabbath. We went there, gave them a talk for a few hours, and he got all of his congregation back, and it’s been about four years now, where they’re all keeping the Sabbath instead of Sunday.
One thing about Kenyans; if you show them the scriptures, if you actually show them a Bible where it says something, they’re quick to change; they go for the scriptures, they believe the scriptures.
Another group used to [have] a lot of thatched roofs there. Nowadays there’s a lot of metal roofs. This is a slum just outside of Nairobi. We have a uh we have a congregation in there, and just getting to the congregation was a real challenge. We have a lot of brethren living in slums; the areas they get are where there’s no value to the real estate like swampy areas. This slum is in Nairobi. The Nairobi river runs right through it, and everything’s open [sewage]. There’s no [closed] sewers there, so you wouldn’t want to fall down where we’re walking through there, because it’s not just mud. It’s so bad there that you can get deathly sick just from breathing the air. Pretty much every group you see the children are smiling, but this particular group here, their living conditions are so rough. I got a close-up of their faces, and there’s not too many smiles; they really have a rough life. After speaking to them at the end of the service I asked them how many had Bibles, because I’m always pushing that if you don’t have a Bible, how are you going to study? How are you going to learn the truth and prove it? Out of all those people there were only one or two Bibles in the whole congregation, so I told them I was going to try them to get them Bibles, and they all they just let
out this [Hurrah!] They were so happy to hear that.
We had plagues for about two years with desert locusts that were eating up everything. You probably heard about that; it was in our news just a couple of years ago. The government tried to tackle the locusts by spraying them with chemicals, but it didn’t even put a dent in it, so little did they know that they could eat them. Yeah they’re starving, and they’ve got locusts, food flying around.
[Here’s] one of the slums again. If you go to a hospital there they don’t want to treat you unless you have money. This one boy who’s one of our orphans living with his grandmother, he was looking [for me]. He called me one day, texted me and he said he needed forty dollars that the hospital was looking for this child. I didn’t have any money at the time; I couldn’t give it to him, and the next day that boy died.
We had a motorcycle taxi that we were using; the driver had an accident and was in the hospital, so one day a couple of our orphans said, “Can you take us? We want to go visit the [hospital]. The motorbike driver’s name was Nyaosi. They said, “Can we go and visit Nyaosi? I said, “Sure!” We pulled into the hospital; I pulled off to the grass and I said, “Go ahead and find him and I’ll come and see him.” They weren’t away from the car for one minute; they came back and said, “We found him!” I said, “How could you find him that fast?” They said, “He’s right up there in the grass!” I went up there; there were twenty people around him. He was unconscious and laying on the ground. This boy was taken to the hospital when he had the accident; the one on the motorbike, and they they got as far as putting a port in his arm so they can give him intravenous or whatever, and by the time they put that in his wrist they come to find out he had [no money]; nobody had money to pay, so they got two people, [they] picked up his blanket and carried him outside [and] set him on the grass to die. So he was unconscious, twenty people around him, [his] friends, including his father, and I had a car at the time. The orphanage, we had bought this little car, so they wanted me to try to take him, they said they knew of a hospital somewhere where they would treat him without money, so I gave them a little bit of money, and everybody pitched in and sure enough, the the guy went to the hospital and he recovered from it, but if you don’t have money here they will not treat you. You’ve got to have to have money; it’s terrible there.
This group here lives in the Mau Forest. [This] is the largest watershed in Kenya, and they were told for about a year [that] they were going to have to move [off of] of their land because they said they were damaging the environment, so these are [those] brethren here. One morning these police showed up with guns and machetes and started burning their mud huts down so they were fleeing [with] whatever they could grab and they headed into the woods to escape. They contacted me and they were only looking for enough money which was like a hundred dollars so they could get on the motorbikes and have them take them to a village called Narok because they felt they could survive if they got to Narok because they could be out of the elements. They could be in storefronts at night time and sleep out of the rain and things, but they lived in the woods for a week. Two of their children died; they buried them in the woods by the time I got them enough money to transport them. A few weeks later the government stepped in; somebody stepped in and gave them some kind of a building where they could lodge in. It was empty, so we went there; we brought mattresses and blankets.
This guy’s name was Joseph. This was at a Feast again, and I saw him with his Bible. I said, “Let me take a picture of that.” His Bible actually wasn’t in as bad a shape as some of them, but anybody you’ll find with Bibles there, there’s very few and they’re really in poor shape. We purchased many Bibles for them; [theirs were] pretty worn out.
Anywhere you go in Kenya it’s called African water; you can’t drink it, so no matter where you are, for a few years we were renting halls in order to have the Feast. Well, this one leader over there said, “You know we could have the Feast at my place; we don’t have to pay anything; we’ll just put a few buildings up.” I said, “Can we do it there?” He said, “Sure; we have water! We can’t do it without water!” They had dug these ponds so we’d have [water]. They used that water for drinking, for cooking, for bathing; everything, and you can see the looks of it; it’s not too good, but if we drank that we would die on the spot, I think.
They say the average American has something like 200 parasites; I can’t remember now, but the average African has like 2,000 parasites. No matter where you go the water’s the same. This pond here is by another group of brethren, and it’s about a hundred miles from the last one, but you can see the water is the same. This boy here was an orphan, Douglas, and he was fetching drinking water, or water for everything, and as you can see that water is the same thing. He ended up coming down with typhoid, so he was in so much pain from it. We got him to the clinic and he got better, but one of the brethren here in the Northwest United States said, “Oh, he’ll end up with typhoid again.” I said, “I doubt it; you know he was in so much pain [but] he’ll drink the water again [anyway]. About a month later he got typhoid a second time.
That’s the same pond; we actually did some baptizing in that, but it’s not a very good place to baptize; the water’s just terrible. That’s that same picture [again] from the Indian Ocean; a lot nicer.
Most of them nowadays have metal roofs, so we went around and started purchasing water tanks so they could put up gutters and collect the rainwater. The rainwater is pure there; you can drink it. It’s not polluted; you can drink it without boiling it. We’re putting in a lot of tanks and we’ve dug quite a few wells. At first they were telling us to hire somebody to dig, and I said, “No, let’s go dig ourselves,” but Haron said, “No, we can’t dig ourselves, because [when] you get down so many feet maybe 20-30 feet, you can get poisonous gases and they’ve had problems with people dying dying from it, so we decided, “Yeah, we’ll just let the well diggers do it,” but it’s very inexpensive. I think we were paying about a hundred dollars, so much per foot, but it was only costing like a hundred dollars to dig a well, and we’ve done quite a few of them; we paid to have them dug.
Here’s one here; they started out with getting that lighter colored dirt or sand or whatever in the beginning. Then they hit the red stuff and then they hit the stones. Once they hit the stones we’re getting down to where there’s water; they’re usually about 30 feet down, but just in recent years we’ve had so much drought that we had to – even our well at the orphanage, we had to go and dig another six feet down in order to get water again, and you have to lock the water [fence] so nobody falls in and so nobody’s just stealing it at night time or doing anything to it. You can see the water from the well; it’s clearer than the regular groundwater, but even that water you can’t drink it. You can see it’s clear, but you cannot drink it. It has to be boiled first.
This group here is in Ikenye, a little village and the brethren there needed a toilet, so they needed help to dig it. They would do the digging themselves, but in order to do it they needed help [from] us to give them some money to buy food, because they were too weak to dig. They had to have sugar and beans and maize. Once we gave them food they were able to dig and they got down pretty deep.
Actually the motorbike driver there is Nyaosi. He’s the one I was telling you about that was at the hospital carried outside to die, and the three children that are with him are all orphans, and they’re actually brother and sister. That’s Maureen in the front, Anita right behind Nyaosi, and Francis in the back. Pretty much all the orphans that we have came from remote Church of God groups, and [their] parents or grandparents or whoever’s there didn’t have enough money and weren’t able to take care of them, so they heard we had an orphanage, so they gave them to us.
That’s a little girl named Naomi; same thing – her parents died; she was living in that little hut that didn’t even have a door. They were worried she was gonna get eaten by some wild animal. They really suffer a lot; it’s just amazing how much they suffer and they don’t complain. It’s like they’re just so used to suffering. That’s Nehemiah there; he’s the eldest orphan that’s been pretty much running the show there. What we try to do is get as many of them as we can with Bible lessons for the children, and we’ve been just going online and he’s been getting the old Worldwide Bible lessons, and they’re so [thankful]; they just love them.
This guy here on the right lost one son. Quite a few of our families there are being headed by the oldest orphan, by the eldest sibling I should say, and here he was taken care of with his brothers and sisters.
God brought us to these people, this boy here as well. Nehemiah was headed somewhere on a motorbike and a storm came along and they ended up losing control of the bike with his motorcycle taxi and they ended up getting into a stream, actually a flash flood, and they almost died in it, him and the bike driver, but they ended up in the hospital where they survived. Their clothes were all torn up and they were all scraped up. Nehemiah came and told me about it hours later, the next day. He said, “By the way, I lost my wallet.” He had the church debit cards, so that’s terrible. Well, the next day he called me and said, “Oh, I got a phone call. Somebody found my wallet.” Here’s the guy on the right. He was praying and praying for God to help him because he already had one of his siblings die from starvation and he’s praying, “God help us.” He went out to bathe in the stream the next morning and found a wallet. It was Nehemiah’s wallet. He lost it in the stream. It actually even went over a waterfall and ended up where this boy was bathing. I said, “Hopefully you’re going to have your debit cards.” The boy gave it back intact; he touched nothing, and here is this young boy that found it and gave it back to him, so we’ve been connected with them ever since.
They were Sabbath keepers, but they were previously Seventh-Day Adventists. They’re learning all the truth now and there they are. They just love learning the scriptures and they’re studying Bible lessons. To be in school there is a great thing. In fact, they hate when they’re not in school, so she ended up [attending here]. She was one of the girls that was on the motorbike a few slides back, and she was so proud [that] she got a uniform [and] she’s going to be in school there. [They used to] have to bring a plate and a spoon because they were feeding them in school ,but it didn’t last but about a year or two, and then the school stopped feeding them because they didn’t have money to buy food, so they send them home.
This guy here, it was his first day at the orphanage, and he got up after we ate here. We were living, eating and cooking in the Boys’ House. Even the girls started coming to the Boys’ House to eat, and this guy [after] we finished eating, he picked up all the plates and he was ready to go out to wash them. I saw him and said, “Oh, wait right there; Kodak moment,” so I took a couple of pictures of him. You’re going to see him again in a few minutes. His name is Enoch, and the one day [that we were] there we had to put them all in school; they’ve opened in grammar school at the time, but school closed for a while. He was on a two-week break, so he wanted to go home to his homeland because he had a grandma there and he wanted to go and see her, so I said, “It’s no problem,” so we made him a care package; a little box of food, but he never came back. We [wondered], “Where is Enoch?” We couldn’t find him for over a month; we couldn’t find this boy, and we went to the village chief. They said, “Oh, I know about that grandma; she moved somewhere, we don’t know where.” Well, maybe two months later here Enoch shows up one day looking for food; he was really hungry. I asked, “Where have you been?” He said, “I went to visit my grandma. I couldn’t leave her alone; she’s old, she has no one to collect her firewood, she has no one to fetch her water. I had to stay with her and help her.” He’s still to this day living with her. We learned [that] the best way is to help these people where they live in the bush instead of bringing them to the orphanage, because once the government found out we have an orphanage they’ve got their hand in our pockets all the time, so we try not to take any new orphans in. We’re actually caring for 20 orphans at the orphanage and 30 orphans that live out in the bush and doing our best to accommodate them with food and clothes. That’s him with his grandma.
Oh, we built the Girls’ House, and that was a typical room. I think the Girls’ House has five bedrooms. We were paying a carpenter $80 to build those bunk beds, so with a bunk bed, mattresses are about $60 each, so two mattresses and of course you have to have mosquito nets, but that’s what they moved into places like that.
This boy here is not one of our orphans, but he lives in the village, and he’s very poor. Well, that boy I was telling you about before, his name is Brian who I was saying he has a very big heart. Brian and I were in Nairobi one day. Well, we were in one of the cities, Kisii actually, and he kept asking, “Can we buy some clothes? There’s this little boy that needs some ,” so I said, “Yeah, we’ll buy it,” so we went and bought this guy clothes to take back to the village, and he said, “Oh, let me bring these clothes to this little boy.” I said, “No, tell him to come here. We’ll take a before and after picture.” You can see he’s got his new used clothes on. You have to buy them used clothes, because all their new stuff is from China. We have a lot of stuff here from China, but the quality is not that bad. Well, the stuff they get in Kenya from China has no quality control and it’s really really poor quality. If you buy a new pair of pants, the first thing you have to do is bring them to a seamstress and have them re-sew everything; otherwise it falls apart. You have to have them put a new zipper in if it’s boys’ pants, because [the] zippers are no good, and then the button for for where you button your pants they don’t even they put a little spot where you’re supposed to have the hole; they don’t even put the hole in. You have to do that yourselves, so I’ve taught them how you always have to buy used clothes because they’re cheap and there’s so much better quality.
That’s Brian sitting on the floor. The little boy is really happy. He’s standing there; they are working again. We were building the Girls’ House, and plus they were helping plaster the outside walls. Again, we taught them how to do cement. I went away for a few days then came back, and here that was actually the Girls’ House, and we had some toilets outside, and they went in and they poured a slab of cement where it was all mud before, so they could do all that now; they’ve learned how to do it. We were building our kitchen, and again, doing all the work ourselves. I taught them that the work’s not over until we clean up every night. I try to teach them the right working skills; clean up your stuff so you start fresh in the morning.
Now again [here is] our kitchen. I put those metal pipes across the top and I started putting hooks and they kept asking, “What are all these hooks for?” I said, “You’ll find out.” I kept trying to get them to guess and they couldn’t figure it out but finally they did. We filled it up with pots and all different kinds of cooking tools. While we were working in the kitchen at the Boys’ House I heard a motorcycle pull up outside and I knew it was probably the guy bringing a metal door that we had ordered, so by the time I stopped what I was doing and went to go outside here were these neighborhood kids carrying the door, so I said, “Wait right there; another Kodak moment.”
There’s Brian and two of the girls. They’re actually building something in the chicken house, but I make them use combination squares and all the right kinds of tools so they learn how to do it right. They all know how to read a ruler and all things like that.
Here’s the kitchen getting a little bit better. Finally the Board of Health eventually came in and complained that our cement counter was not sanitary so they said it had to be tiled but we didn’t hire anybody. We went out and paid $200 to buy a wet saw and we just tiled it ourselves, so they got their hands into so many different things.
That’s looking in the kitchen from the outside. You can see some of the stuff hanging up; frying pans and things, and you can see they’re all happy. We even bought a stove with an oven in it, so I was going to teach them how to make biscuits, but we gave up on that because the oven came from China and there was no insulation in the oven. Some of this stuff was cooked and actually burning while other stuff was still dough, so we couldn’t use their oven; it was very poor quality.
We learned online how to build rocket stoves because their way of cooking was to put three stones in and they used lumber to cook with and it’s not very efficient, so we started building these rocket stoves which are really efficient; you only need a little bit of wood. That was the first one we built. Again, I went away for I think five days; I came back, they had a second stove right next to that one, just a little bit shorter. They built it and it worked just as well, and they did it because their staple food is ugali, which is made from corn flour, and you have to stir it with a big stick; you have to get on top of it. The first stove we built was too high, so they built a shorter one, but they learned so quickly how to do things. That’s one of the stoves there. Like I said, the first building we built was a meeting hall for the church, and eventually we built this outdoor kitchen. Right now there’s actually just over 800 brethren right now keeping the Feast there; I forget how many sites we have, I’ll know better tomorrow, but there’s about eight or nine sites, so they’re using that. It has two rocket stoves in it, so they can cook there.
That’s one of our orphans again, and we started building rocket stoves, so our plan was that they could probably make $40 on a stove, which was a lot of money to them, but our plan was that we were building rocket stoves for widows and the church for free; we wouldn’t charge them.
This one’s name is Ian. He also was in high school, and we were building a rocket stove for this group here, after we built the well at our orphanage. The well was near the house. We had one small piece of ground which we weren’t using, so I figured that we’d run a pipe and run some water down here and we’ll start growing some vegetables, but I didn’t end up with a picture after we finished this. What we did was put little holes in the bottom of those pipes so the water would just drip out, and the other end of the pipe that goes up along the house was right next to the well, so whenever they were pulling water off from the well (we didn’t have a pump at the time) they would pour it into that pipe and it would irrigate the vegetables, but a funny thing while we were doing that. We have all these little kids in the neighborhood all standing outside the fence watching. This one kid asked me, “Do you know what you call that type of irrigation?” I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “That’s called overhead irrigation.” I said, “Wow, here this little kid knew it!” but it worked.
We also had a large field; they grow a lot of tea there, and we had a large field with tea. It took me about a year to convince the older people there to get rid of the tea, because they showed me their receipts. These elderly women would pick tea every day. They’d be picking all this tea. They showed me all their receipts for one entire year. I think they made $80. I said, “What a waste!” so we finally got all the tea out, and removing tea was not easy because they’re just little plants with leaves, it looks like, but it’s actually a tree underneath it with a big root, but we removed all the tea and we divided all that into small plots so each child had his own little area, and one of the brethren in the church who worked for Lowe’s in the garden department, they were throwing out all their seeds at the end of the season. They gave them to them, so I went there with a lot of seeds, so they all got to grow whatever they wanted to grow themselves. Some were growing corn; some were growing tomatoes, and they just loved [the variety of vegetables].
There’s Francis and James in the corn, hands-free there. They’re carrying 20 liters; I forget how many pounds that adds up to, but it’s not all that light, and they’re good at carrying it, but not as good as the next one here. That’s that little Naomi that was in that little hut without the door. Here she comes walking up from the river with a big smile on her face. The river’s not far. They call it the river where you can get water. We didn’t have a pump at the time, but as she came walking up with 20 liters on her head carrying a bag and smiling, I said, “Stay right there; another Kodak moment.”
This is our overseer Haron with leukemia. That’s his father, and not all of those children are orphans. I think about two of them are his grandchildren; the rest are orphans. Everybody there has orphans; anybody with a heart has orphans. This is one of the brethren who actually has a job working as a security guard in a tea factory, and these are just neighborhood kids. He feeds them lunch every day, and that’s some of his neighborhood orphans that come around that he feeds.
It was very muddy when I first went to Kenya in 2005. The only asphalt you could find, the only paved roads were previously paved by the British, and the British had pulled out in the 1960s, so the roads were really really bad. China owns Kenya now, and they’re putting roads and asphalt pretty much everywhere, but getting around is tough sometimes. You can go to a place, and if it starts raining you might spend two days there before you can move, because the mud is so thick.
There’s a lot of drought. This is a dried up riverbed, and as you can see in the background they’re digging in this dried up riverbed for water, and here they hit water, and they’ve got all these people lined up waiting to fill their jugs, but notice the guy drinking in the back he’s called the Mosaic. He’s an elderly person, and in Kenya it’s not like some of our country. They have a lot of respect, so an elderly person can walk up with his cane, and everybody just stops what they’re doing; he gets to drink water, so they have a lot of respect for their elderly.
Again, a lot of places if you find water you’ll find people there taking it home, washing their clothes, bathing their children. This is an unbelievable story, but it’s true. I can’t think of the name of the village for some reason, but this is another church village. We were there all day on a Sabbath, and these kids, they all know their Bibles. They don’t have Bibles, but they know the scriptures because they sing through all the Old Testament stories with choreography, so they sing for us all day long doing all this dancing and everything. After we left the person I was with the native there said, “You know they have jiggers; all those kids have jiggers.” I said, “You’re kidding!” I’m from New Jersey, and my children used to get jiggers, and it was so irritating. The only thing they could do to get rid of them, my kids would go in the bath. I would bleach and scrape until it was almost blood coming out to get rid of the jiggers. There’s a couple of different kinds, so when I heard these kids had jiggers, after we left I couldn’t get them off my mind. I said, “We have to help these kids!” We were on our way to a village called Kisumu, so I went to the pharmacist there and said, “Hey, I got a bunch of kids with jiggers. What can you sell me to get rid of these jiggers?” He said, “Oh, you need iodine.” I said, “Okay,” so I went all around that whole village. It’s actually like a small city. No one had iodine. [Jiggers are chigoe fleas, also known as Tunga penetrans].
A week later we were in Kisii, and Kisii had iodine, so here I got a bottle of iodine, and a week later I headed back to this village to these kids, and I had them prepare. I said, “We’re coming with iodine. We’re gonna get rid of these kids’ jiggers, so get ready for us; get all the kids together and start washing their feet.” We showed up there and they were washing these kids’ feet right. Once I saw the jiggers, I said, “Yeah, I should have warned you on this. I’ll go through it real quick.” Once I saw their feet, I said, “Wow, iodine’s not going to work,” so I said, “I’ll go to the hospital and see what they can do about these kids’ jiggers. This guy in the white is a doctor. He said the only way you can get rid of jiggers, you have to cut them out with a scalpel. We got a price from him. The whole thing was like $200. We had to transport all these kids from the village to Kisii Town where the hospital was, and we had to pay for the transport, then we had to pay for the doctor, which wasn’t a lot, but we had to buy them lunch, because if they don’t eat three square meals they get hunger pains really bad, so we had all this planned out – transport, food for lunch, doctor paid, it was all like $200. We just didn’t have a lot of money, but we had $200. We raised it so Haron [could take them]. I was in the States at the time, and I called him on the phone. “Did the doctor remove the jiggers? Did you get to Kisii?” He said, “Yeah, we’re here.” “Did they remove the jiggers?” “Not yet.” It was like nine o’clock [at night]. “Did they remove the jiggers yet?” “Not yet.” I was starting to worry. I said, “If they don’t get the jiggers taken out now, how long is it going to take to raise the money again?” You know, for them to go back. Haron finally called me back and said, “Yeah, this doctor said that he will not remove the jiggers here; he wants to do it at their village.” So these two doctors took all these kids, stuck them in a hospital van, brought them all back to their village, removed all of their jiggers like he’s doing there, and taught them how they get the jiggers. They live in the sand, and the biggest thing was, he said, “You have to have shoes.” I asked Haron how they were doing. He said, “They’re getting the jiggers out, but it’s very bloody. Imagine that open scalpel, and these kids don’t even cry or anything. Remember they spent a whole Sabbath [doing] choreography, singing, doing all this dancing, and never even complained once about the jiggers in their feet.
So they were really happy, but it’s a rough country. In fact, after that incident, some of the kids came and said, “There’s another village and there’s these poor kids that are suffering from jiggers,” so we got a price again, we raised the money, we sent the doctors there to remove their jiggers, which they did, and the next day we went to go back with sneakers, with shoes. You can buy used shoes, they’re like sneakers, for $2 a pair, so we were ready to go back the next day. We found out, “You’d better not go back too quickly, because the local authorities are looking to arrest you.” Yeah, they were going to arrest us, so we had to sneak in to get them to bring them their sneakers. No matter what you do there, they want their hand in your pocket, and they just love to arrest you, because then you’ve got to give them a bribe to get out of jail.
This is one of the slums in Nairobi, and we went to visit this group. The administrator there was a member of the church, and we didn’t get there till like noon time, and I just happened to bring – it’s a British Commonwealth, so a lot of times you can buy biscuits or whatever like cookies in the store, so I went there with a box of cookies, so here it was noon time. That’s Kenyelli there, one of our guys. He took out the box of cookies, and as you can see, if you can tell from their faces, there was not one eye that wasn’t on the cookies. Little did I know then after they started eating the cookies. Then they wanted to show us their classrooms, so we went to their classrooms. Notice the teacher, her left hand is full of cookies.
Little did I know that most of these kids hadn’t eaten anything all day. They come to school, a lot of them with no breakfast and nothing for lunch, and the ones who have have food that they bring for lunch, they try to share it, so the next thing we did for them (that’s one of their classrooms) we also brought in some teaching materials like dry erase boards and things like that. That’s the guy that’s in the church on the left there. You won’t do too well if you’re a dentist there, because no matter how old they are, they all have pearly whites, I guess because they don’t eat a lot of processed sugar.
Anyway, what we ended up doing for that group was, this was like a year later, you can see the one building in the back is new. We built them a kitchen, and the door is actually on the other side, but it’s divided in half. Half of it is their little jiko cooking area, using charcoal to cook. We’re going to get them more [ingredients] so they can have porridge every day.
The other half is for the security guard who sleeps there at night, because if you don’t have a guard sleeping in there they’ll steal your food because everybody’s starving. Our plan was to give all these children and the teachers a cup of nutritional porridge in the morning and a cup of nutritional porridge in the afternoon. About half the time we weren’t able to make the porridge because we didn’t have the money to buy it.
This was Kisii. When I saw this I knew what was coming; it was lunch time, because for sanitary reasons, everybody there before they eat they wash their hands, so everybody gets their hands washed, and then they serve the food. Here’s a bunch of them; this was another Sabbath, and they’re all doing their singing for us. This is another group. This was actually in Kisii, and they all had a variety of songs and a variety of footwear. Most of their footwear wasn’t even their size, but they had something to wear, as you can see.
As I said, they’re all happy. When I went to Kenya for the first time in 2005, my wife and I raised eight children. I brought my two youngest, a boy and a girl, probably around 12 and 14 years old, and I told them before we went, “You know, you’re getting too involved with the world. We’re gonna give you a reality check,” so I got us all passports, and we headed to Kenya. When I got done there, what a time I had trying to get them to leave. I had to use a crowbar to get my daughter to leave; they just loved it so much, because there’s no peer pressure and everybody’s so loving and so happy there.
On the way home we had a layover in London at six o’clock in the morning. We were on the Underground headed for Piccadilly Circus. Because I’d been to London a few times I wanted to show it to my children. We had eight stops to make on the way to where we were headed. Every stop more and more business people got on, and they all had their leather shoes, their leather briefcases, their suits; they’re all very wealthy, not a smile on one person’s face, and when we we got downtown the headlines that day in London was “London the largest growing number of Alcoholics in the world was London,” and it was a shocker because we came from a country that’s so poor but everybody’s happy, and here we went through this country where it’s so wealthy and nobody’s happy, so money doesn’t bring you happiness.
Another orphan; his name is Douglas. He also was living by himself in the bush after his parents died, so we took him in, put him in our orphanage, got him enrolled in school, and got him a mattress for sleeping. That’s a couple more orphans. Those three orphans are brothers all living at that same orphanage we built. The nearest school was so far away, it was too far for elementary school, too far for the children to walk to, so we built a three room classroom and hired a few teachers.
That was the rocket stoves that we were learning how to build. Here we are trying to visit some brethren living out in the bush and trying to find them.
This was another Feast of Tabernacles. This was funny; we were headed from one church group, from one site to go to another site. On the very front of that motorcycle is a young boy. I can’t remember his name, but he had been going for weeks with a problem with his eyes. [We] kept hearing that there was a clinic in a town near Migori, and doctors went there and started this eye clinic from Northwest United States. We brought him there and it was very inexpensive. They wanted $4 to get him in and treat him, and all he had was sand in both eyes that they cleaned out. That was his problem to see. There’s one [child] to how many adults there, three or four [treating that boy]. It’s amazing; there’s so many Kodak moments there. If you were a good photographer you could make a million dollars there with pictures.
There’s a lot of brethren living really deep in the bush. At that time we were headed for the highways and the byways. We were going to visit this group, and we were pretty far far into the bush. Some places you can’t even use a motorcycle; you have to walk. This is Nyakach again. They were the poorest of all our brethren, and they always had a lot of drought, so we bought them food. Here they’re all headed home with sacks of grain, probably beans and maize.
Here are some more orphans; not necessarily all orphans, but they’re neighborhood children. You can see they’re very very poor. This lady lost her husband; she was living with two children, and her deceased husband’s brother was troubling her, trying to come and take the furniture. He said, “It was my brother; it’s my furniture,” so here’s this widow living with these two kids, and I got her a Bible and told her she didn’t have to worry because they weren’t alone, that Christ was with them and would take care of them. The next thing [was that] she started having other people meet with her and she made it [through and helped them too].
That was her kitchen; that’s a typical kitchen – three rocks and a pot for cooking. That’s another typical kitchen with firewood. On our way there was this lady uh selling tomatoes; we bought all of her tomatoes. Some people saw this picture and asked, “Why would they want to get pregnant now with so many people ?” but they’re peasant farmers. You need a lot of children; you have a lot of weeding to do, plus so many children die.
That’s another girl near Lake Victoria, in the church, again totally malnourished. Those are not rocks in the water; those are hippopotamus. The number one killer of foreigners in that country is hippos. The number two killer of foreigners is getting hit by an automobile. Pedestrians do not have the right of way, so if you’re near the road and a car is coming and you get in its way it just runs right over you. There was a big problem with street kids, orphans, whatever, living on the street, and they sniff glue in order to ease their hunger pains.
This one here, we started buying them; we didn’t just give them money, we went to the grocery store. I bought him a little bit of food. He’s got hands-free with his glue; they have it just stuck to his lip. They just take a bottle of glue and they stir it to get the fumes and sniff it so they get high.
This was another Feast of Tabernacles. We had 200 brethren at this Feast site, and they wanted a cow; they wanted to eat beef, because they went all year without it. They just can’t afford beef, so I sent Haron. I think at that time he paid $60 for a cow. He sent me this picture and I said, “Haron, couldn’t you find a fat one?” He said, “This was the fat one.” A lady in the church up in New England saw the picture and chewed me out. She said, “You went and slaughtered this cow?” I don’t know much about cows. She said, “It’s a female cow. You could have fattened it up and it could have had more calves!” I said that to Haron. “I know,” he said. “I tried my best to get them not to slaughter the cow, but if they didn’t slaughter the cow they would have slaughtered me. There was no way I was going to stop them.”
Here we are back in the Boys’ House. Again, we get the children involved with as much construction as we can, pulling wires, running electric, plastering walls. That was actually the cafeteria we were building there. Here they are getting ready to work in their garden. They all have their jembes. [That’s the Swahili word for ‘hoe’].
That’s our little church building and that’s our address. I’m not trying to put the big groups down, but they turned their backs on us. Not to mention names, but there’s our biggest organization as far as the Church of God goes. They put their financial statements online every year. They bring in 20 million dollars a year. When the Boys’ House burned down we went and paid to have bunk beds made and we put them in the cafeteria; that’s where they were living. We were struggling our best to get their house built. Even though [this organization] had over 20 million dollars, their assets grew by another million, but they wouldn’t give us a penny. It was terrible.
Some places where you go into a hotel there’s jailhouse bars. Wherever there’s a window there’s a jailhouse bar, not to keep us in but to keep the bad guys out at night time. At night time it’s a very unsafe place to be, and this hotel, no matter what floor you’re on – there were three floors, if there was a window, there were bars. When you went to check in in the lobby they’d open up this big gate like a prison cell, you walked in and they would close it. You can leave any time you want, but it was there so the bad guys can’t get in. That’s on the upper floor, and as you can see all the windows and doors have bars on them.
These two, my wife saw this picture and said they’ve got to be brother and sister. Nancy is on the right and that’s Nehemiah on the left, but they had no idea that they were. When Haron first started bringing some of these orphans in they were just little toddlers walking on the street on the dirt road.
Here are typical foreign toilets. That first picture you saw of Nairobi, like I said it looks like a regular city in the United States, but it’s not once you get down on the street and see the people. You’re definitely not in Kansas anymore, or not in the United States anymore.
I wrote this paragraph “Africa, the Prize of Humanity. Some say Hell has seized parts of the continent of Africa. In recent times 31 out of Africa’s 55 countries were suffering civil war or serious civil disturbances. Hundreds of thousands of people died, not from bullets but from hunger, bad water and disease.”
Our brethren are still dying from the same thing today. They’ll get malaria, and malaria is curable; you can buy pills, you can buy the medicine that kills malaria for $2, but we have brethren that die from malaria because they don’t have $2 to buy it.
Let me finish reading that. It says, “But amid Africa’s wars and man-made famines and plagues, they are a people getting on with life, rising gloriously above conditions that would break most of us. Even in the worst of times you do not hear the tones of doom and gloom, but instead the tone of Hope.” So they’re amazing, brethren.
We have there, the guy in the middle with gray hair, Joash is his name. He introduced himself years ago to me as the eldest elder in Tanzania. There’s a lot of brethren in the neighboring country of Tanzania also, and that man says he was the first one to pick up Armstrong’s broadcast from Radio Luxembourg back in the 1950s. He says he went around [preaching] and he said that all these churches came from him. I don’t know if that’s exactly true, but he definitely did a lot of walking.
We were crossing the Rift Valley to go from Nairobi the capital to the orphanage, and we pulled over to a rest stop and here was this farmer boy with a herd of either sheep or goats. You notice what he’s carrying in his hand, well you can’t tell in the picture, but he’s been carrying that weapon for a long time;he’s got a hole in his pants. The top of it is actually a root, and when I saw him carrying that weapon I thought, “Oh, that’s probably because of wild animals,” but it wasn’t to protect him from wild animals; it was to protect him from other humans. When we first pulled over he had this herd of sheep or goats. There was another herd on the other side of the street; that was a little further down after we talked to this boy. I turned around and here that man, probably his father, had moved his herd up and I couldn’t get that boy to come near us. I was trying to give him some money because he let me take his picture, but he wouldn’t let me get within 10 feet of him because he was scared of getting abducted. Once we gave him the money, you can’t tell from that picture, but he was all smiles once I threw him some change.
We went to leave, and there was a family of baboons there and one of them started to yell and they all started yelling. They were just as fearful of us as the boy was. All these baboons ran away.
That’s the orphanage; different times we were building things. We finally brought in electricity a few years back. To put electric poles in people hand dug the holes; the men dragged the poles into the area with a rope and lifted them up manually. I’ve seen so many lorries or dump trucks being filled with sand, and I’ve never seen a front end loader. Five or six guys shovel in all the sand to fill up a dump truck. We in the United States and some of these wealthier countries have no clue what it’s like to live in these third world countries; they really suffer.
I don’t know if anybody has questions, but if anybody ever wants to donate, we have some donors. We keep picking up a few over the years, but most of our donors are poor brethren themselves, but ones with a heart, and the money adds up. Just like now there’s around 800 of the brethren [not specifically claimed by any of the larger groups]; they’re keeping the Feast, and we’ve had years when we only had enough money to buy tea to have tea at their Feast, and they were happy. It doesn’t take much [to make them happy]. Most of the widows that we’re supporting now – we’re supporting about 50 Church orphans and about a dozen widows, and what we’re giving them is [just] enough; we have [just] enough money to give them. [It’s not enough to] buy a bunch of food; [instead] they’re making nutritional porridge and they’re surviving on porridge and they’re not complaining, but every now and then they’re dying because we just can’t afford to do more.
I’ve been around many [Church of God] groups [in America], and again, the best places to go are small remote groups. The big groups [not only don’t help], they don’t even let the brethren in the big groups know that these people are suffering. If they knew they would help, but [we’re not allowed to] let them know because the hierarchy at the door won’t let us in. They won’t allow us in; they won’t allow their brethren to even know there’s brethren suffering, so we’ve got to be careful because one of our biggest obligations, you know, we have to preach the gospel to the world, we have to feed the flock, and we have to do [what it says in] James 1:27 [to] take care of the widows and orphans in their affliction and of course keep ourselves, like the scripture says, unspotted from the world.
So that’s the story. I have cards that have our website on it. If anybody wants one I can give it to them and they can look at pictures of orphans. You had a question? Okay, where’s it located? It’s near a village called Kisii. It’s about a five hour drive from the capitol; it’s in the western part of Kenya, but we have brethren scattered around many parts of Kenya, even near the Somali border, and some of our brethren still today go all the way back to the Radio Church of God. Some of them have been in the church a long time.
Thank you very much, Bill. God bless you for the work you’re doing over there. It was great to hear what’s going on. I’ve heard lots of things, but it’s good to hear from boots on the ground; it’s what’s going on. It’s a pretty serious situation over there. It’s a little worse than I thought, but again, thank you Bill, and bless you for that.