“You are right,” his father replied.
“So?” Charles said.
“So?” Daudi echoed.
Charles could hear the fear and awe in his father’s voice. “Can you see that the God I worship is much more powerful than our ancestors and their idols?” he asked.
Daudi did not reply. He just kept walking. Charles knew that his father had a lot to think about.
After returning to Eldoret, Charles began to hear things that made him believe his father really was changing. Aunt Muthikwa wrote to say he had stopped drinking. Rhoda had begun attending a local Christian church, and Daudi did not forbid her to go. Charles continued to pray for his father.
Meanwhile, Charles bought a sixty-two-seat bus so that Mullyways Enterprises could take passengers all the way from Eldoret to Nairobi and back. He had plans to buy several more. Also, his family was growing. On August 17, 1979, Esther gave birth to their first son, whom they named Kaleli after Charles’s grandfather. Charles had been praying for a son he could train to follow him into the business. He assumed the girls would follow tribal tradition and marry and move in with their husbands’ families one day. But a son would always stay with him and Esther.
Soon after Kaleli’s birth, Charles received a letter at his office in Eldoret. It was addressed in his father’s childlike handwriting. Charles tore the envelope open and began reading the letter inside. “Son, you have been more of a father to me than I have been to you. You have stood by me when I rejected you. You have helped me when I have harmed you. But I have good news to offer you. I have accepted Jesus Christ.”
Charles felt the tears well up in his eyes. “This is amazing. Thank you, Jesus,” he whispered as he read on.
“It’s hard for me to believe how one decision can change a life, but it has. And I have you to thank. You were right about everything. It’s not easy for me to write this. It’s hard when I think about who I was. This is why I want to ask for your forgiveness for what I did to you. I am sorry, Charles. I was wrong.”
By now the tears were coursing down Charles’s cheeks as he read. His father had finally come to his senses. The nightmare was over. Charles thought about the time he stepped in and spared his father’s life, and now his father had repented and turned to God. Charles wondered what would become of him now. It would be fascinating to watch.
That night Charles went home from the office a happy man. “What more could I want?” he asked Esther. “God has been so good to us!”
She agreed. “Everything you touch goes well. The people say Charles lives in the blessings of God.”
It was true. In the years since Charles had trekked to Nairobi, penniless and alone, his life had unfolded in a remarkable way. He was now the wealthiest man in Eldoret. Not only that, but also his Christian endeavors had flourished. He was an elder in his church, and his was one of three families who, along with a British missionary, were starting a new church, which was steadily growing. Then there was his family. Nothing made Charles more proud than his beautiful wife, Esther, and their five children. They all loved learning, and he was glad to be able to give them all the advantages he had never had.
Things just kept getting better. The next time he, Esther, and the family visited Ndalani, Charles marveled at how much his father had changed. Daudi stayed at home now instead of leaving every morning to get drunk in the village. He read his Bible every morning and prayed with Charles’s mother, who had become a Christian not long before her husband. For the first time, Charles’s children were not afraid of their grandfather. Daudi radiated a calm, loving presence so different from anything Charles had ever seen in him before. And the knot that Charles had always felt in his stomach when he was about to see his mother was gone. He knew he would never have to see her bruised, battered, and bleeding from another one of his father’s beatings.
Charles bought his parents a cow, knowing that this time they would take care of it. He was confident that his father would not sell the animal and use the money to buy alcohol, as he had previously.
Back in Eldoret, the small church Charles and Esther were helping to start continued to grow until over nine hundred people were coming to the service on Sunday mornings. Charles’s daughters sang in the choir, and Charles preached most Sundays. Even Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s president, came to visit him at church, having heard about the great things happening there.
Every day Charles thanked God for his blessings. As far as he could tell, the more he honored God in his daily life, the more God blessed him with wealth. Then something happened to change all of that.
Chapter 8
The Challenge
It was mid-morning when Charles pulled onto Kenyatta Avenue, one of Nairobi’s main streets. He was in a good mood. The drive from Eldoret had been fast, and he had passed his time thinking about his children and the next steps for all of them. It was 1986, and Miriam and Jane were attending Kessup Girls High School, a Christian boarding school twenty miles northeast of Eldoret. Grace, who was academically brilliant, was on track to be accepted into Alliance Girls High School, the most prestigious girls school in the country. She was interested in business and showed promise in music. In fact, all of the children were musical. Charles and Esther had worked with them from the time they could talk, and now they all sang together. The Mulli children had been featured several times on the national variety television show Youth of Today, and reporters had come to the house to film them for a feature story on exceptional children.
While their older sisters either attended or were about to attend high school, nine-year-old Ndondo and seven-year-old Kaleli went to Uasin Gishu Primary School. Charles could hardly believe where the years had gone. He and Esther had had three more children since Kaleli: a now four-year-old daughter, Mueni, and two more sons, two-year-old Isaac and newly born Dickson. Charles chuckled to himself. With eight children, he and Esther had their hands full, but in the best possible way.
During the drive Charles’s mind had drifted to the next family vacation. He thought they should all return to Germany. They had vacationed there before, as Charles visited friends he had made while working for Strabag. He loved Germany, with its fast cars and beautiful castles. Charles had also visited a number of other countries—England, France, Canada, and Israel. Some of the trips were for pleasure, and others were for business as he bought engine components and accessories or negotiated oil deals.
Charles watched for a parking space as he drove down Kenyatta Avenue. There were none. He drove slowly through the parking lot next to Nyayo House, the building where he needed to go. Still no parking space. Suddenly a group of seven or eight older street kids stepped in front of his car and beckoned for him to follow them. Charles edged the Peugeot forward as the boys guided him toward an empty parking space.
That wasn’t so hard, Charles thought as he grabbed his bag and locked the car door behind him.
“A shilling. Give us a shilling for helping you,” one of the older boys said, thrusting his hand toward Charles.
Charles hesitated. Normally he had no problem giving street children food or money, but he had caught the strong smell of glue coming from the boys. Two or three of them looked as though they were high. If he gave them money, Charles was sure they would use it to buy more glue to sniff. He shook his head and looked around for a kiosk where he could buy them some food. He couldn’t see one.
“Give us a shilling,” the boy said again. “We’ll watch the car for you and make sure nothing happens to it.”
Charles came to Nairobi at least once a week, and nothing had ever happened to his car. “No, it’s okay,” he said, walking past the boys.
The boys followed him, begging for a shilling, but Charles could not bear to think of supporting their glue sniffing. He walked faster until he reached Nyayo House, where he passed the security guards and disappeared behind the building’s thick glass doors. He was thankful to be inside the government building, where he had come to renew the licenses on his six buses.
The process of renewing the licenses went smoothly, and a half hour later Charles was ready to go home. He walked to where he had left the car, but the space was empty. Thinking he might be mistaken, he doubled back, looking for his gray Peugeot, but he couldn’t see it.
One of the street boys sauntered by. “Have you seen my car?” Charles asked.
The boy shrugged his shoulders. “Did you ask me to watch it?” he said.
Charles took a deep breath. He had to face it. His car had been stolen, and the group of street boys either knew who took it or had stolen it themselves. There was nothing else he could do but go to the police station and report his car missing. Charles could have called for one of his workers to come to Nairobi and pick him up, but he decided to take a bus home, a Mullyways bus that drove from Eldoret to Nairobi and back each day.
It was an odd experience for Charles, now a multimillionaire, to be sitting on his own bus as an anonymous passenger for the 180-mile trip back to Eldoret. He watched as passengers stowed their belongings and their purchases in Nairobi for the trip. Some people were busy in conversation. Others napped or read the newspaper.
As the bus rolled along, Charles’s mind drifted back to the incident of his stolen car. The fact that it had been stolen didn’t bother him too much. He owned twenty buses and cars by now, and something was always happening to one of them. The Peugeot was insured and would be easy to replace. It was the street boys that Charles couldn’t stop thinking about. He wondered how they had come to live on the streets in the first place. Did they have parents? Had they ever been to school? How many of them were addicted to sniffing glue or drinking cheap alcohol? And whose fault was it that the boys were like that? The government’s? Their parents’? Society’s? Charles thought about this for a long time until he realized that it didn’t matter whose fault it was. He knew the real questions: Who is going to fix it? Who is going to help those boys find a better life? The questions lodged in his heart and would not leave.
No matter what Charles did, the image of those street boys in Nairobi kept coming back, and the question Who will help them? haunted him. Three months went by, and then six. Charles spent sleepless nights thinking about the boys, wondering where they slept, whether they were safe, and whether they were hungry. He knew they were most certainly hungry. By now Charles was giving out more bread and milk to local street kids in Eldoret than ever before. He also gave money to his nieces and nephews so that they could attend school, and he gave generously to his church and many other organizations.
Soon another question began to weigh on Charles regarding the street children: Am I doing enough? True, he was doing far more for them than just about anyone else he knew, but was it enough? He wondered if that was all God required of him, or was he missing something? Perhaps there was some new ministry he should add to his life.
Three years after his car was stolen in Nairobi, Charles was still thinking about the street boys and their situation. Then one Monday in November 1989, Charles started to feel sick at work. He quickly took care of the most important matters and told his secretary he was going home to rest. Charles got into his Mercedes-Benz and pulled out of the parking lot.
The next thing Charles knew, he was driving down an unfamiliar road. He wasn’t sure where he was. He studied the next road sign that came up. It read “Turbo.” Turbo? That was twenty miles from home on the way to Uganda! Charles didn’t know what had happened to him. How did he get here? He decided that he must have blacked out while still being able to drive. He thought of all the intersections he must have driven through, all the cars he must have passed. How did he stay on the correct side of the road? Charles was amazed that he hadn’t been killed.
