KenyaRelief.org I 1000 Sixth Ave., S.E. I Cullman, AL 35055 I 256.531.2535
Steve James honors his daughter’s memory with humanitarian work
Steve Doyle, staff writer, Huntsville Times, edited and reprinted with permission.
Steve James’ T-shirt tells only part of the story. Somebody in Kenya loves me, it says. Actually, hundreds of people in the East African nation love James, a big-hearted nurse anesthetist at Huntsville Hospital.
They love him for opening an orphanage that has rescued 96 children from the brink of starvation. They love him for piping fresh water to arid villages that time forgot. They love him for turning a primitive hospital with spotty electricity into one of Kenya’s best health-care providers. Mostly, they love James for believing the old-fashioned notion that one person really can make a difference.
It all started with a TV commercial. You’ve seen the ads: African kids in fly-infested huts, their bellies disfigured by hunger. For just a few pennies a day, the announcer says, you can save a child. James, 49, was skeptical. He wondered whether the kids were real. And he figured the relief workers pocketed most of the money.
James’ 16-year-old daughter, Brittney, was more trusting. After seeing a Christian Children’s Fund commercial in 1998, Brittney and a friend from Cullman High School pledged $24 a month to a hungry Kenyan boy named Newton. The friend eventually dropped out, but not Brittney. For three years, she worked after school at doctors’ offices to keep her promise to Newton.
Before starting college in Asheville, N.C., Brittney begged her dad to take her to Kenya so she could meet him. Dad’s response: Africa is too dangerous. They went to Italy instead.
Barely a year later, on Sept. 14, 2001, Brittney was found dead in her off-campus apartment (James suspects foul play, but no one was ever charged). She was 19. James and his wife, Greta, figured the best way to honor Brittney would be to do something nice for Newton. They set up a college fund for him at South Trust Bank in Cullman and asked friends to donate money instead of sending flowers for her funeral. Within days, they had $3,000 -- a huge sum in Kenya.
The story could have ended there, and everyone would have applauded the Jameses for making some good come out of Brittney’s death. But something told Steve James the college fund wasn’t enough. He had to do more. He had to go to Kenya. “I just felt drawn there,” he said. “It was out of my control.”
OUT OF AFRICA
James’ to-do list for that first trip in March 2002 was short: Meet Newton. Volunteer at a hospital.
Before leaving, James e-mailed several hospitals asking whether they wanted his help. Only one wrote back: Ojele (pronounced ah-joe-lay) Hospital in Migori, a dusty, AIDS-wracked town in western Kenya.
Not wanting to arrive empty-handed, James asked his bosses at Cullman Regional Medial Center, where he worked at the time, if they had any surplus medical equipment. They did. Slightly used heart monitors. Surgical supplies. A cauterizing tool. Enough good will to fill a large wooden pallet. James spent $2,000 having the stuff flown across the Atlantic.
OVERWHELMED
James’ wife, Greta, was scared. She didn’t want James, a lymphoma survivor, tromping around a Third World country still plagued by typhoid, malaria and yellow fever (not to mention lions, rhinos and stampeding wildebeest). But James, a devout Christian, felt God was pointing him toward Kenya. He was convinced of it after learning the names of the Ojele Hospital administrator and his wife: Joseph and Mary.
Kenya was much, much worse than in the TV commercials. Everyone seemed to live in smoky huts made of dried mud and cow dung. No electricity, no toilets. Children left homeless and parentless by AIDS wandered the roads or were forced to work in the fields.
Conditions weren’t any better at the hospital. Because there was no running water, surgeons rinsed their bloody hands in a communal Igloo cooler. Patients slept two to a bed. Needles were dunked in cold water and reused. A hospital patron tried to sell James a live chicken for $2; he needed money to get his dying daughter a blood transfusion.
James called home crying. “I was overwhelmed by the poverty,” he said. “I was just a wreck.” A couple of nights later, James had a dream about Brittney. She told him she was proud that he had gone to Kenya. James saw it as a sign from above.
After meeting Newton and his mother at a hotel in Nairobi, Kenya’s sprawling capital, James made up his mind. He was going back. And he was taking reinforcements.
New orphanage just a start for dad
From ALANA News Bulletin. Permission from Jim Henderson.
Steve James didn’t go to Kenya intending to become a hero. All he wanted to do was meet Newton, the little boy his daughter had helped save from starvation, then hustle back home to Alabama. But after seeing the crippling poverty in the east African nation in March 2002, James, a nurse anesthetist at Huntsville Hospital, couldn’t walk away.
Kenya is one of the world’s most desperate places. Adults rarely reach their 50th birthday. Some 900,000 AIDS orphans -- enough to fill a city Birmingham’s size -- wander the streets.
“It’s the greatest problem, in my mind, anywhere,” James said. “It’s monumental. It’s biblical.”
James, a 49-year-old cancer survivor, knew he couldn’t fix Kenya’s problems alone. So he made a slide show. He took his gripping pictures of Kenya to church, to Cullman Regional Medical Center, where he worked at the time, to Lions Club lunches, nursing homes -- any place with a crowd.
Most people who saw James’ presentation wanted to help. They’d give a couple of quarters, a dollar bill, a $10 check. Before long, James had raised $25,000 and formed a non-profit corporation, the Brittney James Child Fund, named for his late daughter. The name later was changed to KenyaRelief.org.
Between her sophomore year in high school and her sophomore year in college, Brittney gave hundreds of dollars to Newton through the Christian Children’s Fund, a hunger relief agency.
Staying busy kept James from grieving so much for Brittney. He organized a medical mission to Kenya in September 2002 to mark the first anniversary of her death. Seven friends volunteered to go with him, including a doctor and a nurse. James also persuaded Cullman Regional and nearby Woodland Medical Center to donate 20 tons of surplus medical equipment to Kenya’s Ojele Hospital, which couldn’t even afford baby blankets. New moms covered their infants with bubble wrap.
HOT, SOBERING
Months earlier, James spent $2,000 flying a pallet-load of supplies to the little hospital. This time he paid $6,000 to have a much larger load, including bicycles for all 58 hospital workers, shipped to Kenya’s seedy port city Mombasa. Dockworkers there often loot incoming boats, but everything arrived safely.
James and his friends spent two weeks volunteering at the hospital, showing doctors how to use ultrasound machines, cauterizing tools, fiber optic surgical lamps. Then they drove to Newton’s village, Naru Moru.
It was a hot, sad, sobering trip. Everywhere you turned, AIDS. But James felt God had led him to Kenya for a reason. Ideas somersaulted through his brain. He had to do more.
James and his wife, Greta, raided their retirement fund to help Ojele Hospital build a modern patient wing and operating room. (The first baby born there was named Steve, in James’ honor). They paid to send a teenage girl -- the oldest of 17 kids from a poor family -- to boarding school. They bought a cow so Newton’s family could have fresh milk.
They worked with their former project in North Little Rock, Ark., to pipe clean river water two miles to Newton’s village so farmers could irrigate their corn and beans. “As you drive in, everything is brown and dead,” Greta says. “But now there’s this little island of green.”
Still, Steve James wasn’t satisfied. He was haunted by images of a man he’d met named Victor. Victor was in his late 20s, skinny as a walking stick, dying of AIDS. He’s asked James -- begged him -- to take care of his children, Victor Jr. and Stancey, when he was gone. “I’d given just about all my money away,” James said. “I just told him I’d pray about it, and we’d go from there.”
A GRAND IDEA
Those prayers spawned the grandest idea yet: An orphanage where Victor Jr., Stancey and other homeless kids would never again have to wonder where their next meal was coming from.
It came together quickly. During his third trip to Kenya, in September 2003, James met Fred Otieno, a local pastor. He agreed an orphanage was badly needed and offered the use of two abandoned church buildings.
James, who by then had raised more than $40,000 for his Kenya relief work, had never felt surer about anything. He shelled out $6,000 to have the buildings renovated. “At that point,” James said, “we were really doing something Brittney would be excited about.”
Today, there are shelves for textbooks donated by the Cullman school system, a stout barbed-wire fence to foil cow and chicken thieves, and a mural of Jesus in the classroom that doubles as a cafeteria.
When word circulated on Easter weekend of 2004 that the 10-bed orphanage was ready, more than 200 parents showed up to hand over children they couldn’t afford to feed. The first two beds went to Victor Jr. and Stancey. Another went to a young boy found tied to a mango tree.
I CAN TAKE MORE
While James was thrilled about the orphanage – called Marindi Children’s Home of Grace -- he hated turning away so many needy kids. Orphanage staffers soon rearranged the buildings to house 96 youngsters. “It was like Schindler’s List on a tiny scale,” James said. “I kept thinking, ‘Give me more kids; I can take more.’ ”
Not sure where he’d get the money to keep the orphanage running long term, James went to friends in Cullman and North Little Rock. He quickly found sponsors for all 96 kids at the shelter. Their $75 a month pays for food, school uniforms, guards, teachers, cooks and caretakers. Keeping the orphanage open may get a bit more expensive in 2006: The village is about to get electricity.
“Brittney thought you should be able to see people’s faith in action,” Steve James said. “Being able to care for the poor children, that gets past things and gets down to what’s really important in life.”
YOU, TOO, CAN HELP
KenyaRelief.org
1000 Sixth Ave., S.E.
Cullman, AL 35055
Katie Lambert
All donations to KenyaRelief.org are tax deductible.
