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Pastor Jim Monroe recently returned from his fourth missions trip to Africa

• By: Charissa Bernard  
• Published: 8/11/2009 5:19:31 PM

Photo By: Charissa BernardMan with a Mission
Jim Monroe (left), pastor of Woodburn United Methodist Church, has traveled to Kenya, Africa each of the past four years to help children who have been orphaned because of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Monroe’s team has helped locals build houses, give medication and teach the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

The first case of HIV/AIDS in Kenya was diagnosed in 1984. By 1998, 13.9 percent of the adult population was infected and on Nov. 25, 1999, Kenyan President Daniel T. Arap Moi declared AIDS a national disaster. Ten years later, AIDS has left a trail of orphans across the Kenyan desert and a local church is doing its best to help as many of those children as it can.
For the past four summers, Woodburn United Methodist Church (WUMC) has been sending a group of short-term missionaries to central Kenya to minister to AIDS victims and their families. Inspired by a WUMC member who had been a full-time missionary in Kenya, Pastor Jim Monroe leads this group of 11 to 16 people into the barren, surprisingly smoggy country for three weeks of passing out vaccinations, building houses for orphans and lending any other kind of assistance to area hospitals and missionaries.
While the ultimate goal of this work is to spread the gospel, Monroe said the church’s approach to missions is to plant those seeds by meeting needs.
“Our denomination’s point of view is that the best people to evangelize Kenyans are Kenyans,” he said. “We put our energy and time into training clergy and helping keep Kenyans alive long enough for them to establish the programs.”
After 20 hours of plane hopping, Monroe’s group of 12 people from churches around the Northwest landed in Nairobi, Kenya July 27. A 125-mile van ride brought the group to the city of Maua, where they worked at Maua Methodist Hospital for the first week of the trip. According to Monroe, the 220-bed hospital serves 1 million locals. While completing odd jobs for the hospital, the group also funded and ran a small bush clinic at a small Kenyan Methodist church on the outskirts of civilization.
At the church, the Kenyan medical officers who were treating the locals wanted the missionaries to sit with the patients.
“I think they wanted to establish with the patients that somebody cares about what’s going on in their lives,” Monroe said. “We sat there as they diagnosed AIDS, tuberculosis … I got to where I could diagnose malaria.”
On a different day, the group went to area schools, giving de-worming pills to 2,000 students. Much to their surprise, some of the children were deathly afraid of the white missionaries.
“When they first saw us, probably a fifth of the kids ran back into the little huts they use for classrooms,” Monroe said, going on to explain the folk tradition that white people are pink because their black skin has been peeled off. 
“When you hand them the pills, they are constantly feeling our hands, not just to see if it rubs off, but they are trying to figure out what it is,” he said.
The health of Kenya’s children is a vital component in the rebuilding of the nation. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund, AIDS, disease, starvation and other factors have taken the parents of 2.5 million children in Kenya, also leaving many of the older generation without a financial support system. In hopes of bringing the children and these older generations together, during their stay in Maua, the church group built a house for one family, who was selected by the hospital.
“We let the Kenyans make all the decisions about who gets matched, but if they can find the blood grandparents, they match them up with the orphans,” Monroe said.
This year, the hospital chose a family of four children and two grandchildren whose father had died after contracting AIDS. Their mother suffers from severe elephantiasis and is dying of AIDS, so the hospital wanted to make sure the children would be set up for the future. Over a span of four days, the group funded and built the family a two-room, 12x24-foot house, which dwarfed the stick house they had been living in.
The group converted the family’s old house into a cooking house, to prevent fires in the new house. These fires are the source of Kenya’s terrible air quality and a high rate of lung cancer. Because of the scarcity of wood, the natives use charcoal, mostly cooking indoors, and most of the vehicles run on diesel.
“It’s like going to the stereotypical Los Angeles of the 1960s before Los Angeles started to clean its act up,” Monroe explained.
The group also spent time helping an organization called Giving Hope, which helps give the orphans the tools they need to succeed on their own. This program pairs groups of these children with a mentor within the community, who helps the older children find work to support their families. Monroe said the children take care of each other with amazing resilience.
“If one of the households isn’t doing well in the food department, they pool their food resources together. It’s this little community within a community of children,” he said. “Every year I go to Kenya, I come back more astounded at the resiliency of human hope. It’s absolutely amazing.”
During the group’s second week of work, they traveled to Meru, a larger city in the rain shadow of Mt. Kenya. There, they work at the Meru Bio-Intensive Farm, where locals are trained to utilize the small amounts of land and water they possess to sustain their families.
For example, the small plots of land the locals own are not large enough for grazing cattle or goats, so farmers let their animals wander through the only public grazing area — the highway medians or shoulders.
“Roadkill is a huge problem and that wipes out the livelihood of a family,” said Monroe. “They have children who are the goat herders and the cow herders and their job is to chase them off the roadway, but children get hit as well.”
To resolve this problem, the Bio-Intensive Farm shows the locals how to raise enough money on their own piece of land so they can afford to keep their animals penned up and fed.
The farm serves as a training and demonstration facility, so this year, the group constructed a cow barn and a chicken coop built over a tilapia pond for the farm.
The group ended the trip with a three-day African safari, a trip which each person pays for on their own, not utilizing fundraiser money.
In the past, going to this five-star resort and seeing National Geographic-caliber animals used to bring Monroe a lot of guilt after being exposed to the dire needs of the people of Kenya.
“You look at the money you are spending on the safari, and you look at the needs you just dealt with and you think about how that money for a three-day safari would have dug a well in the community,” he said.
During his first trip to Kenya in 2006, Monroe brought up these feelings of guilt to a missionary there, along with some locals, who were offended at the thought that he would pass up a safari.
“Kenya has little natural resources,” Monroe said, explaining what the missionary had told him. “All they have for a natural resource is their wildlife. It’s the only chance that the Kenyans have to give anything back.
“It’s like Woodburn pride,” he continued. “It’s their version of a blue ribbon, but it’s around this whole network of preserves they have. I still feel uneasy about it, but I no longer feel guilty about it.”
Even though the group returned to the U.S. July 14, they are still financially supporting a well that is being hand-dug 100 feet into the ground in Kenya. The work in Kenya never stops, and Monroe said the team for next year is already assembling.
“We are blessed with abundance,” Monroe said, giving his reason for organizing and paying to go on these trips. “God’s given us more than we need, we just happen to think we want more than we sometimes need. … I come back learning and reaffirmed in the power of the Holy Spirit to inspire people and the power in the strength of faith. I come back with a renewed sense of what is important and what isn’t.”

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