Take a few minutes to read this beautiful news story… -John Roney

Local ministry born in African slum

By Steve Arney
sarney@pantagraph.com

Nairobi, KENYA, April 2006 — In a slum called Mitumba, on the city’s outskirts, Chad Parker of Bloomington started getting used to the stench — a blend of rotting garbage and raw sewage. | Photo gallery

As he and friends toured the slum, adorable children kept repeating, “How are you?” Their chirpy voices reminded him of birds, and life didn’t seem quite so desperate.

Then it rained.

Parker saw a child of Mitumba scoop water from a puddle for a drink. Nearby, a naked toddler defecated. Children were walking around the filth — and in it — with no shoes. Broken glass and rusted garbage were a part of the unpaved paths through the slum, a squatters zone with homes of scrap-metal construction.

The longer Parker stayed, the more he loved Mitumba’s people and the more he understood their privation.

The children of Mitumba don’t see giraffes. They see their mothers and friends dying of AIDS. They die of poverty, in poverty.

Parker’s group spent a couple hours with a woman from the neighborhood. Parker connected with her son; he guesses his age at 9. They horsed around for a time, and the boy fell asleep in Parker’s arms.

As the boy slept, the mother told the group that she was HIV-positive, her son had AIDS and advanced tuberculosis and the boy had six months to live.

Parker recounted recently: “I walked out of there and bawled my eyes out, just crying like a little girl.”

By the time the group’s plane landed in London for a stopover on the way home, Parker had outlines for a group that would become Goya Ministries. It would be a Christian-driven, non-governmental organization based in Bloomington working with a Kenyan group to radically improve lives in Mitumba.

At that moment, he had two certainties:

• One: The Kenyan group, Rural Evangelistic Ministries, would at minimum see its budget double. It ran a community center — a combined school for 60 kids and a church — on $60 a month. Parker intended to instantly double that with his own money.

• Two: His friends would be skeptical of his ideas for the organization.

Emily Okall, one of the people on the trip, recalls telling Parker: “Great, Chad. I’m behind you.”

But she admits she thought: “Not going to happen.”

BLOOMINGTON, November 2007 — At Goya Ministries’ monthly meeting, at Parker’s house, nine people provided various updates. The latest on missions trips; report on donation of supplies; report on speaking engagements to draw interest; talk of Web updates and the need for updates; report on the sale of Kenyan jewelry and crafts to help the Mitumba people provide for themselves.

There are short-term goals, mostly involving food, water and clothing to get Mitumba through another day. There are long-term goals of getting this community moving under its own power.

For Goya, there are unmet goals on both accounts. But the group, in less than two years, has started a transformation in partnership with the Kenyan ministry group, its non-denominational minister, Shadrack Ogembo, and Shadrack’s wife, Violet, who runs the school.

The school’s attendance has quadrupled since the April 2006 visit. Water comes into the community in limited quantity. Mitumba has its first public, flushing toilet. Goya will be involved in sending three or four missionary teams in 2008.

This year’s $50,000 Goya budget mostly reflected the channeling of tax-deductible support money to missions volunteers from their supporters, but there are signs of bigger developments.

Jacob’s Well Community Church intends to participate in a water project. HighPointe Community Church will sponsor a Mitumba teacher and has its youth group involved in providing supplies. Eastview Christian Church’s missions department is participating in a trip next summer.

And Goya has adopted a style patterned after Parker’s brain-blitzing method: Propose ideas, no matter how improbable, without preconceived thought of limitation. Then, develop these thoughts into viable projects and tangible results.

Back in April 2006, Parker had talks with Shadrack on what could be done in Mitumba if there were no limits.

“I don’t think there are limits,” Parker says now.

The unpaid founder and executive director of Goya, Parker is a 26-year-old college dropout who runs Cybernautic Design, a Web design company based in downtown Bloomington.

After making Cs with half-effort through high school, he tried to enroll at Illinois State University. ISU wouldn’t take him. He enrolled in Heartland Community College and, in 2000, left college to open his own business.

Parker withholds gory details, but he says that during his Heartland days he strayed markedly from the Christian ways taught in the home of Peggy and Doug Parker. Wounded, he returned to the faith.

The experience, he said, keeps him from the impediments of conventional thinking.

“I saw what God could do in my life when I was a wreck. I saw limitless possibilities. I went to Mitumba and saw limitless possibilities.”

Goya mainly is composed of people in their 20s who go to Eastview Christian Church and Evangelical Free Church of Bloomington-Normal, but Goya is more about action than doctrine. Teresa Szczepaniak fits right in; she attends Moses Montefiore Temple and is converting from Christianity to Judaism.

The signs of the emerging generation are obvious beyond the youthful looks of the Goya team.

Three people at the November meeting used laptops for notes and wireless Internet hookups. “The brain” is Parker’s iPhone, which doubled as telephone and reminder notepad, and the small talk of the night included weighing Safari vs. Firefox Internet browsers.

At his first Goya meeting was Brian Bielby, 22, who intends to make a documentary on the Mitumba slum.

Dan Okall, the only Kenyan in the group, came in for kidding for being so old — at 31.

Goya has oversight of a board, composed of older people with Christian missions experience but willingness to let the young people dream, plan and act.

Goya works with a sense of call.

Said Kera Storrs of April 2006, “I was put in the slum on that day for a reason.”

They hadn’t planned on going there.

Beginnings

Parker, Storrs and three others went to Kenya for three weeks to volunteer at an orphanage. Another friend from town, Emily Fogleman, who subsequently married Dan and became Emily Okall, worked there as a volunteer. The team became discouraged because, according to Parker, it was obvious that Western aid was going to the operators and not the children.

Dan Okall, who knew the Americans from time at Illinois State University, met up with them halfway into their trip.

Dan also knew Shadrack and Violet Ogembo from having worked at an aid organization. He took the Bloomington group to Mitumba. Most of the group spent parts of a couple days there, but Parker diverted his time away from the orphanage and toward Mitumba for the remainder of the trip.

Back home, the skeptical group started meeting. When Lincoln Christian College showed interest in sending students to Mitumba in cooperation with Goya just a couple months into the project, Goya started to look like much more than a group of friends talking at Chad’s house, recalled Monica Wilcox, another who made the first journey to Mitumba.

“We were sending a team. We were setting dates.”

They had created a group that truly does something. Indeed, Goya’s name comes from the phrase “get off your” — well, you get the idea. It’s a raw phrase not commonly heard from a faith-based group, but Mitumba’s circumstances are cuss-inducing desperate.

The unplanned 15,000-person squatter settlement is next to an airport runway. The government’s insistence that this settlement is temporary makes getting services complicated.

Because the residents don’t pay taxes, they don’t get public schools. Parker said he learned in 2006 that the Mitumba children as old as third grade didn’t fully grasp the difference between the airplanes and the moon until the ministry school arranged a field trip to the nearby airport.

The slum had no running water, no reliable food source, no land to till, few jobs, no toilets. “Feeding” the children, even with American help, means vitamin-fortified porridge for one meal and rice and beans for the other six days a week.

Children have been raped and are taught a buddy system. Orphans crave for touch, and they sleep on the floor of the school. People drink a “home brew” that causes intoxication sometimes and death at other times. Huffing glue is popular, even among some of the children, as it is a cheap high and it takes their minds off of hunger.

But Mitumba also has a spirit, resilient children, determined adults and, through Goya Ministries, Western hearts and resources.

“The children were lit up like firecrackers,” said Parker. “The joy of the children overpowered the stench of the place.”