“May we come in?” Charles asked. “My name is Charles Mulli, and this is my wife, Esther. We are here to see if we can help you in any way.”
The woman nodded. The girl stared at the ground.
“Thank you,” Charles said as he sat down on one of two stools inside. Esther sat on the other. “We would like to hear how it is that you came to be here,” he said gently, giving the woman his full attention.
The woman opened her mouth to speak but instead started sobbing. Her daughter, whom Charles guessed to be about twelve years old, joined her. It was gut-wrenching as Charles and Esther waited while the two cried. When the woman had regained her composure, she said, “My name is Chinira. I am a Christian. My family are Christians. We were all huddled in the church at Kiambaa when the attack happened. They threw petrol on us and then the fire erupted. My husband escaped through a window, and I watched the mob kill him. Then my son suffered the same fate. My daughter and I escaped somehow.”
At this the daughter let out a loud wail.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Chinira said, hugging her daughter tightly. Then she turned to Charles and Esther. “My husband has been killed, my son is gone. I am not going to ask God why, but if there is anything you can do to stop my daughter’s suffering, I beg you to do it.”
The four of them, their eyes wet with tears, sat silently in the tent. After a while Charles broke the silence. “May I pray for you?” he asked.
Chinira nodded. Charles began, “Father, You know these precious children of Yours. I pray that You will come into this tent and comfort these suffering people. Let them feel Your love and hope.”
When he opened his eyes, the girl began to speak. “I am Dalila, and I was in the church when it started to burn. I had my baby brother with me.” Dalila’s voice barely rose above a whisper as she told how when the flames came, she almost managed to get her brother to safety only to have him disappear at the last moment in the confusion of the desperate crowd. “I let him go,” she sobbed, “and he is gone.”
Charles let out a deep breath. “I am so sorry to hear that this happened to you,” he said. Then he and Esther talked with Dalila about the certainty that her little brother was in heaven now, beyond all harm. Then they challenged Chinira and Dalila to forgive those people who had done such evil against them.
“You will not be free or start to heal properly until you forgive,” Esther said gently.
Charles knew how hard it is to forgive when someone has hurt you so badly, but Dalila was able to pray. She told God that she forgave those who had attacked the church and harmed them so deeply. Charles then invited Dalila to come to the MCF area, where she could get a meal every day and continue with her schooling. For the first time, Charles saw the girl smile.
As Charles and Esther stepped out of the tent, they braced themselves. There was so much suffering in this one tent, this one family. And there were so many other tents in the camp, each one, no doubt, occupied by people with equally heartbreaking stories. “Jesus,” Charles prayed aloud, “guide our actions and make us a source of healing for these hurting, broken people.”
Charles and Esther visited several other tents, listening to stories and praying with people. When they returned to the MCF area, they found hundreds of children who had already heard about them and were lined up waiting for food.
As time went by at the camp, each day the sixty-five-member team from MCF provided meals for 7,500 children and schooling for 3,500, along with trauma counseling and organized sports activities. Charles was particularly concerned for the orphans and those who were expecting babies.
More than a month after the post-election violence had erupted in Kenya, former United Nations secretary general Kofi Annan came to the country to begin negotiations to end the tragedy. At the end of February 2008, he succeeded in getting the two opposing political parties to sign an accord that established a coalition government in Kenya. The violence subsided, but not before 1,500 or more people were killed and up to 600,000 were displaced. The members of the MCF team continued working at the IDP camp until December 17, 2008. During that time, they fed and taught the children living at the camp and worked closely with the Red Cross.
At the end of their time at the camp, Charles and Esther welcomed into their family 250 camp children with nowhere to go, stretching the number of children they cared for to over 600. Among those relocated to Mully Children’s Family was Dalila. Her mother had asked Charles and Esther to take her, since she was not able to provide food or housing for her. Charles was overjoyed that they were able to give a fresh start to Dalila and the rest of the displaced children left behind.
During 2009, another tragedy befell Kenya—drought. Across much of the country the usual rains did not come. Crops began to dry up and wither, and livestock began to die from lack of water. The Eastern Province of Kenya, where the Yatta and Ndalani properties were located, was one of the areas hardest hit by the drought. The area around the two facilities had always been semiarid, but water from the Thika River and Jacob’s Well at Ndalani and rainwater runoff at Yatta had always sustained those living there. This allowed the fields and greenhouses to be irrigated so that MCF could produce bountiful crops, even when the rains were late or less than expected.
In 2009, however, things were different. No rain at all fell, and before long the normally fast-flowing Thika River, one of the larger rivers in the country, completely dried up. It felt odd to Charles to be standing in the bottom of the river on dry sand and rocks. At any other time, he would have been completely underwater. No one in the district could ever remember the river drying up like this. To make matters worse, as the drought continued, Jacob’s Well also dried up. Now Charles was forced to send a tanker truck to Nairobi each day, a four-hour round-trip, to fetch water.
With no water from the Thika River to irrigate, the crops began to dry up and fail. The normally green fields turned a dirty shade of brown. The situation became desperate. Charles called all the children and staff at Ndalani and Yatta together so that they could all pray for rain. For hours on end, they knelt and prayed, but still the drought continued unabated.
Charles had to bring in not only water from Nairobi but also food to feed the ever-growing Mully Children’s Family. But buying food in the middle of a drought was expensive.
In the area around Ndalani and Yatta, approximately forty thousand people lived on farms and in small villages. Charles soon learned that hunger was rampant among them. Most families ate only once a day and sometimes skipped a day’s meals to conserve what few food supplies they had on hand. As a result of their hunger, many children began missing school. Charles knew he had to respond to this need. He decided to provide one hot meal a day for the neighboring children throughout the area. Each day, on average, one thousand children made their way to MCF for a meal, some of them walking six or more miles to get there. Sometimes a child would be accompanied by a hungry parent or guardian. Charles fed them all, and as the people sat and ate, he moved among them, talking to them and telling them about God’s love.
Charles spent many hours in prayer, praying not only for rain across the country but also for the money to pay for the desperately needed food and water. As news of the drought and famine in Kenya spread around the world, people began donating money to MCF to help sustain them through the challenging time.
Although MCF fed the children from the surrounding area one hot meal a day, Charles knew that he also needed to help their parents and other family members. He organized a day when MCF would donate food supplies to families in the surrounding community. To Charles’s amazement, ten thousand people showed up to receive maize, beans, and flour. It took some quick planning on the part of the MCF staff to get everyone organized and in line. First, those who came were given a hot meal, and then the food supplies were distributed to them. It took four hours to distribute all the food to the crowd. To keep order, Charles had to continually reassure those at the end of the line that there was enough food and water for everyone.
During 2009, in the midst of the drought, Charles received two honors. He was awarded an honorary doctorate degree in humanities by the United Graduate College and Seminary in the United States. With the conferring of this degree, he became Dr. Charles Mulli. He was also given the Head of State’s Commendation for his service to his fellow citizens through MCF. This award was bestowed on him by Mwai Kibaki, the president of Kenya. While Charles appreciated both honors, receiving awards was not the reason he did what he did. He did it because he believed that God had told him to do so, and there was a lot more to do.
From the beginning, Charles had looked for ways to make Mully Children’s Family self-sustaining. At the house in Eldoret, they had begun growing vegetables in the yard. Not only did this help feed the children, but the children also learned new skills as they tended the garden. Now at both Ndalani and Yatta, large-scale farming and market gardening operations were going. Both properties had vast greenhouses in which produce could be grown year-round. This helped to feed the children and generated income for MCF through the export of French beans to Europe. And the fish farm at Yatta was still flourishing.
Charles wanted to do more. Yet the drought demonstrated just how dependent they were on the climate, especially located in a semiarid area as they were. Charles realized that the land hadn’t always been that way. Once the area around Ndalani and Yatta had been much greener and the climate milder. However, over the decades, as a result of human activity, most of the trees in the area had been cut down. This had led to two things: soil erosion when it rained and an increase in the temperature as the area turned semiarid. Charles decided that if the actions of people could so drastically change the climate of the local environment over the years, determined human activity could change it back. He decided to turn his attention to creating a microclimate around Ndalani and Yatta that would provide a cooler environment and create more rain. This would make the land more productive, not only for Mully Children’s Family, but also for all those living in the local area. To create this microclimate Charles turned to trees.
Trees had been planted on the two properties from the beginning, mostly for beautification purposes and to act as windbreaks for the crops in the fields. But as the drought began to abate and water returned to the river and well, an intensive tree-planting operation got under way on the two properties. The operation initially involved two particular drought-resistant, fast-growing trees, grevillea and senna. Large swaths of land were set aside on both the Yatta and Ndalani properties. The children and others who came to help and learn about conservation and taking care of the land set to work. They didn’t plant just a few trees. In all, they planted nearly four million trees on the two properties. And as Charles envisaged, a microclimate began to develop and change the area. Clouds formed above the glades of trees, and it rained regularly. The trees also brought down the temperature, making the area around Yatta and Ndalani cooler. The once arid, brown land turned lush and green.
Charles was so encouraged by the success of the tree-planting operation that he partnered with Norwegian Church Aid to replicate the microclimate change in other parts of Kenya. A tree nursery was established at Yatta to produce a million saplings a year to be freely given away for planting in other regions of the country. In 2010 Charles was awarded a certificate from the United Nations Environment Programme, recognizing his efforts at making a tangible difference in the environment of Kenya.
