SHERRY KARANJA smiles down at the 10-month old infant she is cradling in her arms. When she first found him in the hospital, abandoned by his parents, he was a five-month-old with respiratory complications who weighed less than two kilos.
“On Monday when I took him they said he’d be dead by Friday. I said God will never let him die. I gave him the name Sampson, the strongest man in the bible, and [the surname] Munene, which in Kikuyu means a ‘big man’. And look at him now.”
Sampson Munene is one of the 70-odd children that Karanja cares for at a children’s home in Nyeri, which she established in 1991. About a third of the children are infected with HIV.
Not all of them were infected at birth. “I have a 12-year-old girl named Shirley whose mother and father were both HIV positive. The mother went crazy and chopped Shirley in the head with an axe. Then she slit her own wrist and deliberately infected her.”
Another girl, Margaret, was infected by her father, who raped her 40 times. “He infected his wife and she died so he took on his little girl as his wife.” When Sherry found her in a hospital that provided free HIV treatment, she was 15 years old, weighed 24 kilos and refused to take any medication.
“She asked me if I thought her father would come to the hospital. I told her that if he did, I would take a runga [a small Masai club] and beat him to death. It made her laugh, and when she started laughing, she started taking her medicine.”
Sixty years old and full of vitality, Sherry appears at least a decade younger and has more energy than most people who are half her age, which may not have been all that astonishing had she not had HIV for the last 16 years.
In 1991, while working as a nurse in Columbus, Ohio, Sherry was infected due to carelessness on part of one of her colleagues, who had just administered an I.V. to an HIV patient. Instead of tossing the infected catheter in its proper place, Sherry’s colleague disposed of it in the clean medicine room. The needle box was full but she threw the catheter into it anyway, leaving the needle sticking up.
Sherry was later demonstrating to a medical student how to inject medicine into an I.V. bottle. As it was a clean medicine room, Sherry was not as careful around the needles as she would have been elsewhere. When she flicked the needle into the needle box, the other protruding infected needle penetrated her finger to the bone.
Two weeks later she became ill. “At first I thought I had hepatitis. You just didn’t think about HIV back then. I just couldn’t believe it when my doctor said it was HIV.”
Sherry found she began to suffer from severe memory loss so she decided to quit her $80,000 a year job lest she injure a patient. “One thing people don’t understand about HIV is that you can look physically healthy on the outside but things change on the inside.”
Sherry had been visiting Kenya since 1989, but it was only after she was infected with HIV that she “felt the call of God stronger than ever”. In November 2006, after Archbishop Makarios of Kenya offered her an abandoned convent at the base of Mt. Kenya in Nyeri, she opened a children’s home, which she named the Archbishop Makarios of Kenya Orthodox Children’s Home.
Numbering only 19 last November, which included two young girls who had been living in a pit latrine, the children at the shelter now total 70. Sherry supports them with her $1,200 a month social security disability check and through donations.
She is quick to point out that it is a children’s home, not an orphanage. “I call it a children’s home because you don’t need to be an orphan to be in need.”
She also set up a primary school on the grounds. “We have so many kids that are HIV infected and they can’t be walking to school when it’s cold and rainy.” Archbishop Makarios pays for her schoolteacher’s salaries.
But despite the success of the home, Sherry continues to struggle with limited resources.
She almost lost a six-month-old to respiratory complications just last week simply because she has no vehicle and had to hike with the infant a quarter of a mile to the road and wait for a matatu (a public transport van) for a ride into Nairobi. It was only because a group of government workers stopped and drove them straight to the Nairobi hospital that the six-week old survived after an emergency I.V. treatment.
Sherry now views the freak accident in which she became HIV positive as the reason why many of the children now have a chance for a decent life.
“I have a twelve-year-old who, when she was eleven, was sold for three goats to a 55-year-old man to be his wife. He had 12 children older than her. She took a beating and ran away.
“If this [being infected] hadn’t happened to me look at how many kids would still be living in pit latrines or abused or whatever else.”
For more information go to: www.myspace.com/makarioschildrenhome
or email: [email protected]
The Cyprus friends of Kenya
CYPRIOTS have also taken a keen interest in Kenya in recent years. Four years ago the organisation Friends of Kenya was established to aid Archbishop Makarios of Kenya’s Orthodox mission in Kenya.
Every year for the past four years, the Friends of Kenya have organised a ten-day trip to Kenya in which Archbishop Makarios of Kenya tours them around the country’s Orthodox churches, schools and orphanages, many of which were built thanks to their contributions.
Demos Galatakis, one of the principal founders and organisers of the group who has been to Kenya on every one of the yearly trips, said that the improving conditions he has witnessed each year are astonishing.
“The first time I came, none of them had any shoes,” Galatakis said. “And they were wearing whatever clothes they could get. So you would see a three-year-old wearing the shirt of a 20-year old, with the sleeves hanging down over his hands.”
Galatakis points to the cafeteria across from the orphanage church at the Nairobi seminary. “There was no cafeteria. They would instead bring out a tub of milk and the children would dip rusty tin cans into it that they found on the side of the road.”
He said that many of the children who stayed outside the seminary grounds with relatives would often take some milk in the can back with them when they went home at the end of the day.
Last summer, the Friends of Kenya sent four crates of materials from Cyprus to Kenya, including many of the tables, chairs and icons in the orphanage church, along with £200,000.
Another shipment is scheduled for this summer. Galatakis hopes they will improve on last year’s contribution.
“Our aim is to build wells in 300 different sites throughout Kenya so that they can access clean water. We may not be able to do it all in one year, but we will try.”
