The Heart of a Man

Written by Jessie Yates after a visit to the Congolese Refugee Orphanage and School in Nairobi. She and Amy Buchannan, a classmate from Wake Forest University, worked in Kenya during the summer '07 school break with BARA (Baptist AIDS Response Agency).

On the day that he set out on his journey, he had only one thought on his mind, to get to safety and away from terror. He was still young, had a life to live, a wife to find and to love, a happiness to create in his future. He was joined by others, other young men his age as he trekked across the blood ridden countryside. He had pride in his nationality and his language, but he was much more terrified of those men following behind him, raping his sisters and murdering his brothers. He knew only one thing, he had to get out of the Congo and into a life that could never be as hard as the one that he was leaving.

He and his companions had not gone far when they saw the small and huddled figure. The child was crying out in a mixture of her mother tongue and French, crying for her mother. Behind the child's tears, they saw raised cheek bones and hungry eyes, her small feet were unclad, her clothes ripped and muddy. He stooped down and picked her up under his arm, and with the look in his eyes, his companions understood. They could not abandon her, she was so small, maybe they would find her family in Nairobi.

Every child that they saw along that long and neverending journey of fright they called over to them. When the children were unable to walk, they were carried. What little food had been brought was shared amongst them. The tears never ended, but neither did the hope that their families would be found.

He took all the children to a shanty town just outside of Nairobi where he knew others of his country had sought refuge. There he sought for the families of his young friends. God, only God, could have been powerful enough to send him those that he sought. For surely in the midst of those poverty ridden, but safe homes, he found family after family. For those that he did not find, he found others that were willing to adopt in memory of their own lost children. But still, in the end, fifteen children remained. Fifteen orphans, who under the tears and the muddied clothes he had come to love and call his own. Fifteen orphans who became his children and his students.

The years that followed were strengthened in faith, as he found a wife that loved the children just as much as he did. Faith saw him through as he looked through the community and saw so many children, some Rwandan, Sudanese, Congolese and still others that were Kenyan. In all of them he saw the need to create a school, to create a community of children, the need for someone to feed them, and above all, for someone to love them. In the years to come, he would run out of food and money, he would be threatened by his landlord, and he would see the needs of more and more children. But through it all, he would keep his faith and for every step that he took, he would show love in a world that had too long been robbed of that all important emotion.