Children straving in Kenya a heartache for local woman

postpones

her trip back

By BECKY BROOKS

Enterprise Editor

clydenews@bizwoh.rr.com

On Friday, the former United Nations Secretary General announced an 18-point agreement to end the violence in Kenya which has resulted in the deaths of nearly 900 and displaced 250,000 people, according to international media reports.

For Clyde grandmother, Vicki Kritzell, the news reports about Kenya are not words about a nation half a world away, but reports about the dangers facing her three adopted children and the terrors faced by colleagues and children she has worked since 2001 to support.

Before heading to Michigan to raise funds for Hearth-to-Hearth Ministries recently, Kritzell of 148 North St., sat down in The Clyde Enterprise to share the plight that masses of women and children are facing in Kenya.

The Clyde High School graduate had raised her four children and worked a variety of jobs. She was working at Nichols Bakery in Fremont when she was replaced by technology.

It was not an easy time for the local woman, but it is said that when God closes one door another door opens.

"I retired from my paying job," she said about leaving Nichols.

Kritzell had never in her life imagined she would become a fundraiser for 600 orphaned children and widowed mothers in Kenya and Uganda.

Her trek began when her son volunteered her to do a little writing for a newsletter. Kritzell said she had attended Bowling Green State University and had some writing skill.

"I actually received a telephone call from I didn't know, Ester McDaniel," she said. McDaniel needed someone who could write and aid in the cause to spot light the orphan issue, according the Clyde woman. That was in 2001. While McDaniel began Hearth to Hearth as a women's issue magazine, members of the ministry saw the plight of the orphans and change a monthly column called "Spotlight on Orphans" into a newsletter of its own by 2005. The women's magazine was retired, according to the ministries website.

The ministry began by supporting Pastor Maurice Odhiambo Maina Anyango and nine children. Working with the American volunteers, "Pastor Maurice" as Kritzell calls him has become administrator of Hope for Children Orphanage in Kenya with 250 children. Since 2001, Hearth to Hearth has not only built the Kenya orphanage near Oyugis, it has supported other orphanages in Kenya: Glory Children's Center orphanage and Good Samaritan Lwanda Children's Home. Glory Children's Center, an orphanage near Kisii, Kenya, has moved to land that has been purchased for building a permanent orphanage. The building phase has started and will proceed as funds are available.

The ministry has also expanded into Uganda at Mbale and Kampala, where pastors are working to help widows keep their children in school and provide the necessities for their families and orphans, according to ministry information.

"We built this organization a dollar at a time," Kritzell explained. "We don't have Oprah."

All of the American workers are volunteers - paying their own expenses all the way, she said. The need for their assistance in Kenya and now Uganda has been staggering.

"We honestly never dreamed we would be in this position," she said about a couple handfuls of people scattered throughout the country who support the ministry.

"I didn't think I knew how to do it," she said about fundraising and helping orphans overseas. "You just learn as you go," she said she discovered.

Kritzell and her group visited Kenya in February 2007 and she met the people and children she has been working hard to assist.

"My plans were to leave for February and March," she said about this year.

Those plans, that she carefully coordinated to include other volunteers from throughout the United States in one group, have been indefinitely postponed.

When the results of the presidential election were announced in December 2007 in Kenya, civil/tribal unrest erupted. Kritzell has spent hours watching African news programs trying to keep up on day to day events and handle crisis after crisis for the orphanages Hearth to Hearth sponsors.

"Our orphanages are under lock down," she explained, noting they are being protected by the government. "Our communications has been disrupted because of power blackouts."

In a country where thousands of children are orphans wearing tattered clothes and having no food, the situation became worse after December.

"Our Hope Center was totally out of food," the local grandmother reported.

"I stayed up 24 hours to send a money wire for grain," she said. Because of the crisis in Kenya, a port nation, inflation has quickly escalated.

"Our money is flying out the window," she said about Hearth to Hearth. Kritzell explained that in 2001 a "Lorry" or truck load of grain cost them $1,000. Today that same load costs $10,000, she reported.

"On Tuesday night we had no money to send," she said during her recent interview. Kritzell started contacting people on her list of 500 donors and raise funds for food.

"We've got the best donors in the world," she stressed, noting they came through for the children again.

Now on the board for Hearth to Hearth Ministries, a non-profit, non-denominational organization, Kritzell said she never expected she would be involved in this type of work at this stage of her life. "I always took casseroles to my neighbors," she said about being a caring person. But upon retirement, she thought she and her husband, Larry, would travel South.

"Now I can't even take a vacation unless its to Africa," she shared, noting she is still hoping the turmoil in Kenya will and the country will stabilize so she can return to see her children this year. She is still taking donations for the orphanages and the schools the group supports.

For more information on the ministry contact Kritzell at 419-547-8147 or e-mail her at Vicki@healthtohearth.org. Information and photographs of the orphanages are available at www.hearthtohearth.org.