Hitting the road for Kenyan kids

Zablon Kuria used to sell insurance. Now, he’s selling hope.

The techniques for both, he said recently, are very similar.

“Referrals are very important,” he said. “You talk to one person, and ask them for the names of two or three good friends. That way, you can use the first person’s name and aren’t going in cold. You must also be a trustworthy person. People give you their business because they trust you.”

Evidently, Kuria has the second part down.

“I was at a church in Roswell, Georgia,” he said, “and they decided to have a gold party and donate to me anything they had that was gold that they could part with. We wound up raising $3,500.”

Kuria will take this windfall, and whatever else he can raise during a six-week visit to the United States, back to Nikuru, Kenya, and put it toward the construction of a new school for orphans. Because of a rampaging AIDS/HIV epidemic in the country, Kenya has more orphans than it knows what to do with — three million, of which Kuria’s ministry cares for 65.

“My church also has a street family ministry,” Kuria said. “We spread the gospel by going to the streets.”

We Americans tend to lump Africa together in our minds. Everything south of Morocco, north of South Africa and east of Egypt is just a big, dangerous and fuzzy place.

“People think Kenya is a jungle,” Kuria said.

It can be, but only in the metaphorical sense. Kuria knows of no one who was ever eaten by a lion, but plenty who have fallen victims to AIDS or violence. Most recently, the 2008 elections triggered fighting that killed more than 1,000 Kenyans and displaced more than 250,000 others.

“Everything in Kenya is very tribal,” Kuria said, “and they take politics very seriously.”

While Kuria is a member of the largest tribe, the Kikiyu, he tries to ignore that.

“Now that we’re building the school,” he said, “people will say to me, ‘Why are you helping the Luo? They fought against us.’ I don’t care. We just want to help orphans, no matter what tribe they come from.”

I met with Kuria and two of his American contacts, Vern and Verna Weis of Forest, at the Good Cherry coffee shop in Forest.

Yes, Vern and Verna.

“It gets kind of confusing,” said Vern.

The Weises got to know Kuria when they lived in Cincinnati and all three were involved in a Presbyterian Church program to send computers to Kenyan students. Kuria participated at the Kenyan end, and the three met when he came to the U.S. for visit.

“I have a lot of American friends,” Kuria said. “I have friends in North Carolina, in Tennessee, in Boston, in Atlanta, in Montana. And now, in Virginia.”

During his brief stay in Lynchburg, Kuria was hosted by the Weises, who are now members of Forest Presbyterian Church.

“I would like to be part of the bridge between the United States and Kenya,” Kuria said.

He went to college in this country, graduating from Beulah Heights Bible College in Atlanta with a degree in leadership.”

“That was in 1999,” he said. “My second day in the U.S., I enrolled in college. I had family in Atlanta.”

Americans, he said, “are much more generous than many people in other parts of the world think. They have been very kind to me.”

The stereotypical African student in America is here to play some kind of sport — and Zablon Kuria does, indeed, have a gold medal.

“I got it for selling insurance,” he said with a wide grin.