Carli Huston

A blessing in Mathare.

I was sitting at a coffee shop with a friend, days before I flew out to travel overseas with The Hope Venture, sharing what I was excited about and what I was anticipating. I told her I was nervous about the hard stories I was going to hear throughout our travels. You see, I was going to be on a team of four women visiting The Hope Venture’s projects, and my job was to interview people who had been impacted by the projects and document their stories. It was a dream role for me, but also one that I was preparing to be hard on my heart.

Sitting at the table, my friend listened intently and then responded. “Carli, my prayer for you is that the people you meet and the stories you hear would actually be healing for you, instead of hurtful to your heart.”

My jaw dropped. It was profound, opposite of how I was thinking, and such a picture of the hope we try to bring as an organization. Not only that, but it was also a bigger picture of the hope found in Jesus. It was the idea that people are not stuck in their circumstances, bound by a dead end, with their identity cemented as a hard, heavy story. But instead, that there is hope and light and opportunity… there is healing ahead. I loved her response. I tucked it away in my heart and went overseas.

Fast forward a few weeks and I was in Mathare, Kenya, the second-largest slum in the country, located in the capital city. We were visiting one of our student sponsorship projects there, and I was with a group on our way to one of the students’ houses to interview her. Her name was Yvonne, and she could light up a room with her eyes and smile. Yvonne stood out to me and I was excited to get to know her more.

It was about a 40 minute walk through Mathare to get to her house, filled with climbing steep hills, shimmying down narrow passageways, and rounding unexpected corners. Finally, we climbed our last hill and got to Yvonne’s house, positioned so high up you could look out and see the community of Mathare as a whole.

We entered the small house behind us, and her grandma was there welcoming us with chai tea and open arms. I sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Yvonne on the loveseat, and the others crowded into the room and onto the remaining furniture.

Yvonne was 16, the second of five kids, and had lived with her loving, wise grandmother since she was young, along with the rest of her siblings. Her parents weren’t in the picture, and when I asked if she wanted to talk about it, she shook her head no.

I asked Yvonne what life was like before she got sponsored. “Life was challenging,” she replied in her beautiful Kenyan accent. Yvonne’s grandma didn’t work, and therefore couldn’t provide the necessary fees for school. Yvonne spent most of her time at home, and would have to play catch-up whenever she did return to school… a tough cycle that’s not very conducive to learning.

She remembered Fanuel, The Hope Venture’s trusted local partner, calling her and some of the other students to the church on just a normal day—but didn’t tell them why. When they got there, Fanuel told them that they had all been sponsored by The Hope Venture, and she said to me, “I was so, so happy.” Sweet tears filled her eyes as she shared the story. It’s a big deal to be sponsored and the burden of school fees to be lifted.

I asked her what her dreams were now that she was sponsored, and she said after she finishes school, she’d like to go to university to study accounting AND law. She dreams of taking her family to another level and wants to build them a mansion one day, with dark purple walls and red flowers outside.

We were needing to wrap up our conversation and I asked if there was anything else she wanted to say about her story that would make her feel known. She responded, “I would just like to say thank you, because you’ve proven to me that I can achieve my dreams, impact the community at large and also change other children from families like mine. There’s light at the end of the tunnel. Just because you come from a poor family doesn’t mean you can’t achieve your dreams.”

Wow. Suddenly I was the one with tears in my eyes. She was right, and I felt like my heart had just been blessed by her. The conversation with my friend at the coffee shop rushed to the forefront of my mind: “Carli, my prayer for you is that the people you meet and the stories you hear would actually be healing for you, instead of hurtful to your heart.” I felt like Yvonne was an answer to that prayer. Here she was, in one of the largest slums in Kenya, in poverty, and yet was living in a house on a hill overlooking that slum, with dreams for a big career, getting her family out, and helping other people like her. She wasn’t stuck, she was on the move. It was such a picture of hope and healing, and it spilled out from her and impacted me. Beautiful.

More than just a job.

Just when I get used to the work we do at The Hope Venture and think of it as a regular job, I get hit with the story of someone overseas whose life has been changed because of our work. And it becomes real again.

It becomes not just going to a job and scheduling social media posts. Not just attending meetings and answering Slack messages. It becomes an urgent, life saving, life giving mission to be part of something greater than myself. A mission to help my neighbor overseas, because there’s a person out there, and she needs my help, and my efforts matter. They really do count. They really do change things.

I came across Ivy Shilalo’s story, and it made me have this moment of realization. It boiled my world down from being overwhelmed by the masses to focusing on the one. Here’s the story of Ivy:

She’s 18-years-old, from Narok, Kenya, and is in Form 3, which translates to being a junior in high school.

She’s the third of six kids. 

Her dad left when she was young, and her mom owned a school, but sold it to pay school fees to another institution.

Before she was sponsored, Ivy was in and out of school. To try and help with that, she worked at a hotel, but it closed at 10pm and it was too dangerous for her to be out that late.

Then she found Nasha Ministries, the organization in Kenya that The Hope Venture partners with to sponsor high school students. When she found out she was getting sponsored, she said that she knew her dreams were going to be accomplished. Now she’s studying business and English, her two favorite subjects in school.

She knows Jesus, and she praises Him. She says, “He has made the impossible, possible. He has always been there. When we were hungry, He provided.” She says that Jesus and Nasha changed her life, and it feels like they have given her hope.

She found encouragement and refreshment at The Hope Venture summer camp this year. She found hope in places where she thought, “this thing can’t happen.” She says she feels the dignity that we as an organization talk about.

Let me say that again. I want this to be made real for you, like it was made real for me. She says she feels the dignity that we talk about. Our mission statement is, “We’re on an adventure to bring hope and dignity to the most disadvantaged people in the world.” As a staff member on the marketing team, that saying is etched into my mind. I can spit it out on command and say it in my sleep. But man, it’s not just a well-crafted line of marketing copy. It’s what we do. It’s who we are. And the mission statement comes out of that, not just something that feels and sounds good. And for a real human to say that she feels that, wow. That’s what we do. It’s not “normal” work. It’s not just clocking in and out of a job. We get to reach across the world and link arms with someone like Ivy, and walk with her along her journey. Side by side, human to human, together. And you can do that too when you partner with The Hope Venture and donate to a project. It supports real lives and creates real change. We get to do that, and I just think it’s the coolest thing.