My Journey

My full name is Cornel Onyango Nyaywera. I am the second born in a family of seven, with four brothers and two sisters.  My ancestral land is in Kendu bay, but I was born in Kisumu city, which is by Lake Victoria, one of the largest water bodies in the world. I grew up doing a lot of fishing for commercial purposes. I am married to Irene and we have two sons and a daughter named Brian, Justin and Sherry.  I live with my family in Kisumu.

Kisumu is leading in HIV and AIDS prevalence in the country of Kenya. In fact, Kisumu doubles the national figure.  So I grew up seeing a lot of people dying of this disease all the time.  Worst of all, I see very close relatives and friends die of the disease, leaving the children helter-skelter – either leaving them with their elderly grandparents or in the streets with no hope for schooling, not even able to get their basic needs.  Cultural practices like wife inheritance, which is widely practiced, is one of the major contributors.

I also grew up seeing a lot of rejection and stigmatization to those living with AIDS.  The rejection was coming from all over including the health practitioners who would throw heavy insult at the victim, not forgetting the lack of comprehensive care to these people.  God started revealing the story of lepers in the Old Testament to me. I could quickly hear Him say that something should be done to the lepers of today to give them hope in Jesus Christ.

God is good because as He was revealing all these to me, I got a confirmation from my friend Duncan whom God had been preparing and telling him the same story. By this time we were convinced that God was calling us to a ministry of caring for people living with AIDS, but we did not know how to do it because we are very minute in our society and this call was bigger than the two of us. We continued to stay faithful to this call by doing what we could in a very small scale. Some of the things we did were giving this ministry a name and forming a team that would be able to help us implement this.

While we were still wondering how to make this organization bigger in order to reach the whole country, God dropped into our lap three college students from America who had the same passion and vision.  We shared with them what God had been doing in our lives; they were perplexed how exact the vision was with what they wanted to do in Africa.  We again concluded that this was a God thing, because there is no way people from two different continents could have the same thinking. We concluded that the way foreword was to start a non-government organization that would care for both body and soul. The dream became a reality from 2008.