When I was in high school, my parent’s adopted two Kenyan orphans, Calvin and Joash. After their parents passed away from AIDS, three brothers, Roger, Calvin and Joash, were left alone in their mud hut. Calvin, after reading a novel titled The Color of the Carnations about a Kenyan boy who studies in the USA, began to hope and pray that, like the protagonist in the book, he too would find a way to study in the US.Those around him upon learning of his dream laughed and encouraged him to be more realistic. At the time he had never even met an American. He was malnourished and had two pairs of pants to his name. He walked for hours just to attend school. His dream was impossible.

Then Calvin met Evan Beauchamp, a missionary stationed in Kenya by the Bismarck diocese. He saw his chance and asked Evan to take him back with him to the US. He was once again told this was unrealistic. Evan was 68. Calvin, as I’ve come to learn, is persistent. He pressed Evan until he agreed to find out if there was anyone willing to take him in and sponsor him to come to the US. Evan, a family friend, brought the case to my parents and after a long process they adopted Calvin and then a year later his younger brother, Joash.

Now, nine years later, Joash is now an all-American track-star in Mississipi, placing nationally in the NCAA cross championship.  Calvin is two years away from becoming a doctor. He’s in Kenya now, finishing up paperwork for his residency program and volunteering in a hospital for dying AIDS patients. His dream of coming to the US against the odds fulfilled,  he now is working towards becoming a doctor and returning to help the poor of Kenya. He has two years of residency before he takes the Hippocratic oath.

This trip back to Kenya, Calvin has met a family of three kids who have lost their parents and being raised by their grandmother and alcoholic grandfather. It reminds him a lot of his and Joash’s story. The kids can’t afford school and are living in a weathered shack. Calvin has secured funding from the Bismarck diocese to build a house for them and he and the rest of my family are raising money to send these kids to school. My brother Tyler and I will be in Kenya January to assist with the house construction. On a longer timeline, our goal is to lay the groundwork for opening an health and education charity there to help kids in the same situation that Calvin and Joash found themselves in before coming to the US.

Four of the last five years, I’ve spent in Guatemala directing a health and educational organization. With that experience now behind me, I am now looking to Kenya, homeland of two of my brothers, and with the support of friends and family, plan to open an health and educational NGO there so that impoverished children orphaned to AIDS will be given opportunities of health and education.