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By Purity Kiruri, KENYA
I was a 16-year-old running away from home. I had boarded a bus headed for the city of Mombasa because it was located on the coast. I planned to drown myself in the ocean because I didn’t want my family to see me again and have to bury me.
While a high school student at a boarding school, I had taken ill. The headmaster sent me home. Instead of getting the care I needed, my father beat me severely. He had often physically abused me as a child, but I determined when I grew up my dad would never beat me again. I was humiliated because he beat me, a teenager.
My troubles began when I was about four years of age. Mother took me with her to the garden in the bush. She must have forgotten me, because I woke up in the night and I was all alone. It was very dark and I cried in terror. My brothers, who were coming from Grandmother’s, heard me and took me home. My father asked why I was left behind and he beat me. I was traumatized by the experience. After that I was very fearful and felt sad and rejected. Because I never seemed to fit in, I didn’t think I was part of the family. I worked very hard to prove myself. When I failed in the process, I would get more beatings.
I was born into a Christian family, the seventh in a family of 15 children, eight boys and seven girls. Father became a Christian at a mission school so our family attended church faithfully. Because he taught school some distance away, he was home only on weekends. However, Mother taught us about Christ and always prayed at mealtimes. Father’s career enabled us children to have an education.
When I was in high school in the 70s, there was a move of God in Kenya. I met a young man who had received Jesus Christ as his personal Savior through this evangelistic movement. I had always gone to church and Sunday School, but the gospel was not clear to me, so I never knew about being born again. The young man got permission from my father to take me, a 13-year-old, to Bible Camp.
The people were very happy at this Camp. They were singing, shouting and praising God. Everything was so beautiful, but I was concerned; I didn’t want anything that was fake. I prayed, “God, if all this is true and if it is for me, reveal it to me. I have to have an experience; I have to know the truth.” I remember falling down. When I woke up I had the most wonderful peace and joy. I knelt down and told the people who were praying for me that I wanted to give my life to Christ. I repented of my sins and invited Jesus Christ into my life. I still remember the flood of joy the Lord gave me.
I went home singing and shouting. I shared this wonderful experience with my sister and she gave her life to Christ. My eldest sister went to the same Bible Camp and she also gave her life to Christ.
I had been a born-again Christian for about three years, but I still had a lot of struggles. So when Father beat me because I was sent home sick, I thought I was no good. That is why I wanted to kill myself. The young man sitting next to me on the bus asked me where I was going. I told him I was going to the city to drown myself. He took me to his sister who took me in and helped me.
While in Mombasa I started going to church. I prayed to God to show me why I always felt abandoned, unloved and no good. I kept asking Him to show me His purpose for my life. I wanted to go back to school, so I decided I would go back to my father. He never spoke a word to me for a whole year, though I worked hard at home and in the coffee plantation trying to win his love.
When my sisters came home from boarding school I got into an argument with one of them. Since Dad thought I was the bad one and would spoil his girls, he told me to get out. My sister threw me 10 shillings for bus fare as I was leaving.
I felt rejected and I prayed and cried all the way to Nairobi, a 45-mile journey. I saw from the bus a church with a sign that read, Christ Is The Answer. I got off the bus and went in. I knew God could solve my problems and answer my prayers.
I went to the church office and said to the office girl, “I need a job.” I was crying and was all messed up. The young lady called for help.
“Oh, I need someone to help me with the children,” she said happily. The lady was an American and the headmistress of a kindergarten school. She hired me to assist teachers and to clean up. She told me her daughter had returned to America and that her room was available. So not only did I get a job that day, I got a place to stay—a beautiful place, one of the best in Nairobi. God had answered my prayers. That was the beginning of His power and change in my life.
The missionaries loved me as their daughter. Since I worked only half days in the school, I also helped them with housework and with the laundry. I told the couple that I really wanted to go back to school, so they helped me get a British correspondence course to study by mail.
The missionaries also worked with literacy and evangelism, so I started helping them with these ministries. Three years later, the Lord opened a way for me to study Economics at the Youngstown State University, in Ohio, U.S.A.
When I got my degree in Economics, I went to Howard University where I got my master’s degree in Third World Development Economics. While at Howard I met and married a young Kenyan, Simon Kiruri, a student at Biblical Theological Seminary near Washington, D.C. After graduation, we started a tour company which was connected to a company in Kenya. The business was successful. We lived well in suburban Virginia.
Life was great until my first pregnancy ended tragically. The baby died prematurely before birth. To add to the trauma, I lost a fallopian tube and an ovary. It was a very depressing time in my life. However, two years later I was pregnant again. We were very excited when Evelyn was born. To our shock, she was born with a heart defect. For almost four years, she was in and out of hospital. The doctors were very encouraging, saying surgery would correct the heart defect. Evelyn’s 1993 operation was a success, but while in the hospital she picked up a virus that caused her death.
We took Evelyn’s body to Kenya for burial. I was at my lowest emotionally and in deep depression. Nothing made sense. Why would God let me suffer all that with Evelyn and then take her life? Why did He give me that child?
We were staying at a hotel at the time. I went outside in a lot of pain that I cannot explain. On the street, I saw a little girl that looked like my little Evelyn. The little one stretched out her hands to me. I wondered who she was with. I looked around but saw no one. I thought, Such a little girl on the street. Where is her mother? As far as I could see, she did not have anybody. Before I could figure all this out in my mind, I heard an inner voice say to me, Purity, the way you loved Evelyn, that’s the way I love that child. All the grief and pain in my heart disappeared. I knew God had spoken to me. I looked around again and my eyes were opened to see the street children. I had never noticed abandoned children before. I wondered what it all meant.
After the funeral we returned to the U.S.A. When we got back home, I talked with Simon and he said he had a burden on his heart for Kenya, too. We had become American citizens by that time, but we packed up our things and returned to Kenya. We took all our small savings to buy a property where we could bring street children. God led us to a little town, Naivasha. There was nothing on the property, not a single building. The rains came before we had any shelter. We went ahead with building until we ran out of money. We were stopped before we had reached one street child for Christ.
Was this what God wanted us to do? Perhaps He wanted us to get out on the streets to talk to the children. So we went to Naivasha and spoke with government officials and anyone who could give us a place. But no one could help us. Had God called us or was all this just in our minds?
God used an old pastor of mine to introduce us to a pastor in Naivasha town. This pastor opened up the backyard of his church where we could meet.
So we went out on the streets to make friends with the children and invited them to come to the church yard. We fed them porridge, told them that God loved and cared for them, taught them the Word of God and reading and writing—under the tree.
One day it rained so hard that the church let us come inside their building. From then on they allowed us to meet inside—after 18 months.Through the pastor’s wife’s intervention, we were given a place where we could keep the children overnight.
As we worked with the children, my husband realized that he needed more education in the area of counseling. So he returned to Biblical Theological Seminary to take a course on counseling. While there, he got involved in a church that is very supportive of our ministry.
We are now back on our property. We have a Children’s Home with a boys’ wing and a girls’ wing and an apartment where my husband and I live. This year we constructed a school and teach up to 6th grade. We have four teachers and two staff workers. We take turns with the teachers to be dorm parents. Our ministry work is known as the Evelyn Memorial Education Services.
We still take children from the streets, but we cannot bring them into the residential school until they are rehabilitated. We need a Rescue Center in town and hope to start one soon.
We have worked with the children in residence since 1994. We do not have discipline problems because the problem children dropped away a long time ago and did not come to the Home. All 64 children know Jesus Christ as their personal Savior and attend the church we planted in the community. Some of our children are orphaned, some abandoned, but all are traumatized and rejected. I cannot explain what it does to a child not having a family or community. I can empathize with them for I never felt that I had a family. I know what rejection is and I know what it means to have someone accept you and aid you in the Name of Jesus. I never liked my childhood, but now as I look back I thank God for it because I can feel the childrens’ pain. I have proven that only God can heal our rejection and then use us to serve the unloved and abandoned.
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