When Hope Enters: This Inspiring Kenyan Rescues Pregnant Girls

Please note: This story mentions topics including sexual assault that may be confronting.

Looking at Maureen’s life now, it would be fitting to describe her with words like “success,” “inspiration” or “servant leader.”

But when she was a young girl, her peers had another word for her: “hyena.”

Why? “Because every time people were eating, I would go and ask them to give me food,” Maureen remembers.

Her family lived in an overcrowded, impoverished community in Nairobi, Kenya. At times they would go without eating for four or five days. When they did manage to find food, it was often the rotten fruit that the market vendors were unable to sell.

Her father was a casual laborer who made about $10 a month. Since the family’s home was $6 a month to rent, that left just $4 a month to cover all their other needs. “In the slums people are so hopeless, they don’t know about tomorrow,” Maureen says.

“So life was unbearable.”

Hunger affected more than just Maureen’s physical health. “You cannot concentrate on an empty stomach,” she explains. “And so many of the times, I would be last in class.”

And there were other factors hurting her school performance. Sometimes Maureen’s parents couldn’t cover her school fees, and she would be sent home from class. Sometimes her books and homework were ruined when her home’s dirt floor turned to mud after it rained. All the family’s few belongings would get soaked since there was no furniture to put them on.

With such a miserable beginning to life, Maureen saw no reason to believe in a better future. “There’s no ray of hope in everything that is happening in my life,” Maureen says she thought at the time. “So that actually made me hate myself so much. And hate God.”

Believing the message of hopelessness that poverty sends to children, Maureen thought her family would be better off dead.

A New Message

“Hyena.” “Unbearable.” “Hate.” The words echoing in Maureen’s young mind were powerful. But they weren’t stronger than hope.

When Maureen was 7, she began hearing new words when her mother took her to a local church and registered her in Compassion’s Child Sponsorship Program there. Maureen started going to a child development center on Saturdays.

“I was always looking forward to every Saturday because it was like Christmas to me and my family,” says Maureen, recalling the nutritious meals she ate at the center. “There is power in food, and there is power in opportunity.”

Soon Maureen realized that the program offered much more than food. “I was taught to pray, and I felt loved,” she says. “The church was the first place in my life where I got a hug and someone showed concern.”

The program covered her school fees and supplies, which inspired her to study as hard as she could.

Words of encouragement came from her sponsor. “My sponsor wrote me letters, telling me they are praying for me and love me. One of the biggest things they did was to tell me I am beautiful. I never saw myself as beautiful.”

Empowered with education and the words of the Bible and her sponsor, Maureen’s self-worth grew. “I started believing that I could do something. My dreams are valid.

“All these things are because of what I learned from the Compassion project.”

Called To Serve

Maureen completed high school and then became the first in her family to attend university.

She was enrolled in Compassion’s former Leadership Development Program. At the time, the program enabled her to pursue a university degree in education and learn about servant leadership from a Christian perspective.

“I used my allowance from the program to move my parents to a better house with running water,” says Maureen.

With the education degree she was earning, Maureen originally planned to teach high school and volunteer in the Compassion center she’d attended.

But her plans shifted when she went on a three-month trip to the United States in 2010, speaking on behalf of Compassion about her experiences growing up in poverty and being released from it. During her trip, she had a dream.

“In the dream, I felt God was calling me to serve, but I did not know how,” she says.

She shared her dream with her friend Kristen, a popular writer from Texas who had met Maureen on a recent blogging trip to Kenya. The women prayed together and trusted God to show Maureen what her next steps would be.

Weeks after Maureen returned home, Kristen reached out to her to tell her about a troubling TV news story she’d seen about Kenya’s backstreet abortions. She learned about young girls being sold into sex work by their desperate parents. Forced into such a life, many girls experience unwanted pregnancies and then die from illegal, botched abortion attempts.

Maureen confirmed what Kristen had seen in the news story; she had seen the horrors firsthand. She had several friends who were sexually assaulted as children. “I have a very close friend who, while in elementary school, aborted six times,” Maureen remembers.

Since both friends felt desperate to do something about the problem — and since Maureen was feeling called into service — they started shaping a plan for serving girls facing crisis pregnancies. Together, Kristen and Maureen decided to start a foundation and home in Nairobi for pregnant girls. Maureen would serve as director, and Kristen would raise funds through her blog.

In March 2011, Maureen opened Rehema House, “a Christian nonprofit organization, which rescues young, poor, pregnant girls from the streets and slums of Kenya,” Maureen says. “Rehema” means “mercy” in Swahili.

The Power of Mercy

The home shows mercy to girls experiencing critical situations. Many have been sexually assaulted, beaten or otherwise abused. Maureen is able to connect with them because she grew up in conditions similar to theirs.

“Growing up in the slum is one of the worst experiences in the whole world,” Maureen says. “But I thank God that I passed through it so that when I speak and touch the lives of the teenage mothers and babies, I am doing it out of experience.”

Rehema House offers counseling, life skills, education, nutritious meals and — for the first time in many of the girls’ young lives — a safe environment.

“I love them until they love Christ,” Maureen says. “I don’t even need to tell them or preach to them.”

But when the girls inevitably ask why Maureen does so much for them, she tells them she’s there to transform and empower them in Jesus’ name. This opens the door for discipleship, one of many benefits the girls receive. They also learn trades like cosmetology, sewing, music, cooking and baking.

All this work requires a steady funding source. Maureen and Kristen formed the Mercy House Global foundation so that generous donors keep Rehema House going.

To help support their life-changing efforts, Compassion International recently collaborated with Mercy House Global to launch the Compassion Collection. It’s an online store selling unique products made by women who live in poverty. Sales empower the women who create the handicrafts, and they also help fund Rehema House.

“Many of the family members of the Rehema residents become a part of the artisan programs in Kenya as a way to provide income for their families,” explains Kristen. “Everything we do at Mercy House Global helps fund the work of Rehema House.”

When Hope Enters

Maureen is now married. Her husband, Oliver (pictured above), helps run Rehema House. Rescuing and empowering pregnant girls in crisis isn’t easy work. But the reward of their servant leadership is seeing babies grow up healthy and loved and mothers recognizing their worth.

“I love when they come and hug us and say, ‘Thank you for loving me so well.’”

As long as the moms and children are in Maureen’s care, she will share with them the hope of Christ — the same messages that lifted her up and restored her spirit when she was a child in Compassion’s program.

“There is power — let me tell you — there is power in holding other people’s hands. That is what Compassion did. That is what my sponsors did. It’s hope that trickles down to the family, to the community and to the world.”