TRANSCRIPT OF CAFO 2015 SUMMIT SPEECH
A Story of Transition from Orphanage-based Care from an African Perspective – Dr. Kenneth Acha
My name is Kenneth Acha, I am really, really excited and thrilled to be here. I have met many new friends already, and I have been learning a lot. It is really exciting. Have you guys been learning as well? Yes… I have been, it has been awesome. Whenever I get the opportunity to hang out with people that are passionate about serving orphans, that love the Lord and want to share that love with other people I just get happy, I get motivated, and it’s awesome to have that kind of energy together and learn from people who are doing this kind of work.
Like many of you, what motivates the work that I do at Shaping Destiny and that I do in my personal life is our belief that orphans deserve the highest standards of care possible. And what also motivates us is the fact that there is a movement that God is raising all over the world, that we really as a global community can, we can actually raise the standards of orphan care. And not just for orphan care but for every child. We have what it takes to be able to do that on a scientific level, on a manpower level and on “money” level. That drives us. We also really believe that we can as a global community change the way we perceive orphans. And that when we start perceiving orphans the way we perceive our own biological children, then the way we treat them will start following. So these things motivate us and I am sure they motivate many of you and that is why you are here seeking to be able to improve and grow, to be able to serve orphans really well.
For me, my life is a story, and for all of us our lives are stories. I am going to share a little bit about my own story with you as a way to then introduce us to start talking about the transition. You guys understand that everything we do is part of that story that we have. For me, my father was born in a remote village in Cameroon, in Africa several decades ago in an area where baby formulas did not exist, and my father was born a complete orphan at birth. His mom bled to death and his father died before he was born. So for a child like that, born in that day and age, if you don’t have a mother you are out of luck and my Dad came in to the world like that. And not only was my Dad born a complete orphan, he was named “Muwai” – in the language that means “one who is thrown away,” “abandoned”. So he was labeled like that from day one and he grew up with the scars of raising himself. And we grew up knowing a man who truly loved us. He loved us but he bore the scars of being abused and of raising himself.
Let me just stop here and tell you a story of how my Dad’s name affected us a few years ago when my wife and I had our first baby. Our first son is Joshua. We were excited like every other parent when we knew that we were going to have a baby, any baby. But when we found out the sex we picked the name Joshua. We said we want to give a name to our son that speaks of what we hope and aspire that he would become and we wanted him to be Joshua. Then as time was coming we realized that culturally speaking we needed to name him in honor of my late father. And the name that we were supposed to give him was the name Muwai. And that didn’t really sit well for us. We were struggling, like our dad, my dad really meant a lot to me and I wanted to honor him, but the only way that was available was to call our son “a child who is abandoned” from day one. So we started consulting elders that are Christians in the culture and praying, and then we felt like just before we were supposed to fill out the birth certificate, we had a revelation from God. We felt that God was saying through those elders and through our prayers that it is good that we are looking at the name Muwai and considering the meaning. We should also look at the name Joshua and consider the meaning because the child is going to be called Joshua Muwai. Now Joshua means “God Saves.” Then the revelation was that “God Saves Orphans” was a message that we need to be reminded every time we see our son. Not that ‘he is one who is thrown away’, but a child that reminds us every morning… And this is to a young couple that has been serving orphans for 6 to 7 years. At the time I had resigned from my medical residency in Waco to go focus on serving orphans and we were going through some tough times and so our son became to us a message that God indeed is saving orphans and you guys are a testimony of that because you are doing that kind of work.
So I grew up, after my Dad died I when was 9, we sort of went through a lot of difficulties. I am sharing these things with you because they inform the work we do. And I couldn’t go to school, I dropped out of grade school and then I ended up in the U.S. I ended up in the U.S. in December 2000 and through a lot of miracles that we don’t have time to share here since we want to move quickly. And became born again in 2002. Then by 2005, between 2002 and 2005 I started really feeling God’s call to start serving orphans and that’s when Shaping Destiny, which I am here to talk about, was born, in 2005. That was just a few months before I started medical school at Texas A&M. That is when Shaping Destiny was started. I started sponsoring three (3) children with my student loans. I don’t advise that, but that’s what I did. And then my classmates started seeing what I was doing and they started supporting and then we went from 3 to 11 children in the orphanage, to 21 children in the orphanage, to 41 then to 85. By the time I was done from medical school there were 85 children in the orphanage. And then we were helping some outside the orphanage – pay tuition and things like that.
But the problem that we faced then was that the orphanage was overcrowded. There were 5 children sleeping per level of bunk bed. So on one bunk bed there were about 10 children. So we raised money, God was very gracious and raised over $180,000 and built a very huge facility to care for orphans. And we were hoping, with this facility, to increase the number of children living there from 85 to 150. The capacity of the facility is 150 orphans. The goal was build this, and you know then there is another plot nearby and raise some more money (side note: if God does it once you believe He can do it a second time right? If He gives you once then faith grows) to build another building next door and then we would have this one for girls and then the other one for boys. And then there would be 300 children there just loving God and growing.
And then you know how God does things. In 2011 God intervened, at the time we were excited, I had left residency and was serving orphans full-time. I was doing some seminary training to sort of grow and prepare myself for really dedicating myself to serving. And then I was praying one afternoon; we were all happy with everything we were doing, we were happy about the success, hundreds of children had been served up to that point and we had even adopted a couple of children to Waco, Texas to a friend of mine who is a colorectal surgeon. He is a mighty man of God. He is Paris now training to go serve in Cameroon. So he had adopted 2 children. I just couldn’t imagine that a little person like me God would be using to do all these good works. I was happy and we weren’t thinking about any transformation or any transition at all. So I was praying one afternoon and I felt like God revealed something to me. After I finished praying, and I went and talked to my wife and she felt like God was actually speaking to us. The revelation was that I needed to write down scriptures–only scriptures–and send as a letter to a local Pastor who was on staff at our orphanage. I would tell him not to interpret it or add anything to it. Just take the scriptures and go and read it to people living around the orphanage and after he’s done, he should not interpret or preach anything. He should just ask one question: “do you want to join God in serving orphans?” That’s all. No interpretation on my end or on his end, but just ask that question. I figured King James would not be good for this. It’s complicated. I used The Living Bible to make it really plain. I sent that as an email and then pastor printed it. And then after three days of going and doing that, I called him and I was shocked when I heard him say that he had a list of 53 families, that had written down their names.
Some were very emotional when they heard the scriptures, it was like they were hearing it for the first time and that they wanted to take in orphans and love them as their own biological children. This was a community that I had grown up in and I did not think that the people even cared. I thought they just sort of lived for themselves. And God was opening our eyes to seeing things very differently. This revelation began the transition that we went through. It took 2 to 3 years to go through. So we didn’t do the transition because we were unhappy with what we were doing. We didn’t do the transition because I thought that I had seen some new research. It was after the transition that I actually started doing research and started looking into seeing family-based care and seeing how family-based care was the right thing for the environment that we were serving, the community that we were serving children in.
We went from 85 children in the orphanage to right now as we speak, there are 7 children in there, there are 7 children and 2 staff members. It’s not an orphanage, it’s like a family and we use that as a transitional home. Like recently (recently as in the day before yesterday), I was speaking to Jackie who is the manager that works with us on the ground and there were two twins that she went and discovered and they were with a woman that we had already taken away one of her children because she “is not good up here”, mentally, and she goes around and she gets herself pregnant and she was going around carrying the two children on her back saying please take them please, I don’t want them, they give me too much trouble, take them. Those are the kind of children we take into our center and nurse them to health and then try to place them. I think I’ll end here.
There’s a lot that we did with the transition. There is a lot of complexity. For example, we needed to figure out “was this legal in the first place?” Now for us to start doing all this foster care work outside, is it even legal? We figured out that was legal. Now these 53 families, well not all of them may be good enough for us to be able to put a child into their homes. You have to come up with a system to sort the ones that are capable from the ones that are not. Then the children, you don’t just put any child with any family. You have to sort of figure out which child will be best with this family now that you know this family and know this child.
We went through all of that. And training from Austin Bible Institute was very helpful, because we found that one of our greatest challenges was the staff that we had. Change is good, but people resist change. They don’t like change, and we first had to help them be able to see and have this new paradigm, to be able see that really orphan care within families is not only good, but it is what we should be doing in that environment.
And the training was helpful to be able to give them that. They had been used taking care of orphans only within the orphanage; they needed new skill sets, training to be able to learn how to be able to do a new thing. And you guys know when you don’t know how to do something you are resistant even before you want to hear about it because you don’t know the demands. So we had to help them, and they still continue to take the training because we felt like we need to keep pushing for higher standards of care.
Now I will stop here and give you opportunity to ask questions for the rest of the time to ask questions.