I met John Paul Vicory a few years ago in Hawaii.  He was part of a troupe of photographers compiling a book of their experience traveling the globe.  I was impacted, especially, by a story he told of the time he and his team spent in conversation with sex workers in the Red Light district of Amsterdam, a story featured in the book Sex + Money: A Global Search for Human Worth. [View John's stunning photography here.]

John Paul’s honesty about his life and experience is disarming; his genuine concern for those who suffer is informed not by pity, but with genuine love.  I was intrigued to learn that he was embarking on a trip to Africa to work with children orphaned by AIDs, something he has done before.

John Paul travels to Mbiko, Uganda and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on 29 June, 2010 to reconnect with two orphan care centers in order to help establish sustainable and transparent Child Sponsorship Programs.  Born in Denver, Colorado, John Paul is pursuing a Master’s Degree in International Care and Community Development.  I caught up with John Paul  (via email) before his adventure to learn more about his project.

Andrew Kooman: You describe, in your recent project proposal for an orphan center, hearing a young choir of orphans in Uganda sing about their parents’ death to AIDS. The thought of that moment sends chills down my spine. Describe what it’s like to encounter young children who have suffered much?

John Paul Vicory: I sat listening to them singing that song for the first time with my hand over my mouth in disbelief. I couldn’t believe that these beautiful children had experienced so much tragedy. It makes me sad. It is such a humbling experience seeing so much pain in these little children. They don’t deserve it at all. I was shamed almost because I walk around so often thinking that my problems are so important. It was, and continues to be, an experience that changes my life.

AK: Can you recount the moment when you decided you had to do something to help orphans in Uganda?

JPV: I remember the exact morning. It was one of the most emotionally charged days in my entire life. I had been in Uganda for about a month, Africa for 3 months, and I was kind of depressed. I didn’t feel like I had any purpose being there and I was tired. Tired of the mundane work I was doing and tired of feeling useless. I wanted to make a difference. A series of divine appointments landed my friend Alex and I at St. Ameria’s [Orphan Care Center] to hear the children sing. Later that week God dropped a vision bomb on my head and changed the course of my life. He told me what to do, He gave me the path. I was wrapped in a Masaai blanket, sitting on a porch looking over the sugar cane fields and Lake Victoria having my quiet time. I literally started crying because the feeling was so heavy with joy. It feels like the scene out of a movie or something.

"Florence" photograph © John Paul Vicory

AK:. The numbers you detail in your proposal are, quite honestly, unfathomable to me. You cite a UNICEF report that estimates the number of orphans in Uganda will reach 2.5 million by 2010 with an unthinkable 53.1 million orphaned children in sub-Saharan Africa alone (more orphans than there are people in my homeland Canada)! How do you place your work and position yourself in the shadow of such a towering problem?

JPV: I can’t even comprehend the magnitude of the work to be done. 53.1 million really makes it seem like whatever I do with my tiny little time here won’t really make a difference at all. But, there is beauty in that too because I serve a God that knows each and every one of those children and loves them with an unreal love. I hope that I can get a glimpse of that love and can share it with as many people as He puts in my path. My place can seem insignificant in the shadow of the issue, but I know that God uses the willing, and I am willing. Even if He only uses me to touch a few lives, it’s all more than worth it.

AK: In your view, why does it matter that people in North America help African orphans?

JPV: It matters because these children matter and we are all connected. We are all God’s sons and daughters. It matters because North America has so many resources to be able to make a difference. Not only do the children need people to advocate for them, but, as North Americans, we need to look outside of ourselves to see the needs of the world and use the gifts that God has given us to share His love. Jesus said that He is the naked, imprisoned, and destitute. If we truly want to seek Him, we need to go where He is… that includes the poor and needy in North America and in Africa as well.

AK: What do orphans have to offer the communities where they live?

JPV: They are the future of their nations and communities. 2.5 million is a lot of people. Given the opportunity, they could become doctors, teachers, community leaders, lawyers, and prime ministers. They are bright individuals who know about suffering. They know what its like to have less than nothing. Because of their experience, they have a greater understanding of what it would mean to cause a real change for the poor people in their communities. They are the ones that can break the negative cycles because they are in them. They can do far more than I could ever do because I am and will always be outside of the system. Even if they don’t become prime ministers, they can still make a big difference in their communities. Take Edith, the director of St. Ameria, as an example. She is an orphan herself and now directly cares for over a hundred children.

AK: How much of your development work for orphans will involve addressing the issue of AIDS/HIV?

JPV: Initially, addressing HIV/AIDS is going to be related to the direct and immediate care of orphans who are HIV positive, and whose parents have died from AIDS. I would like to focus on the immediate care until that has reached a level that can be reliable. After that, HIV/AIDS will be particularly addressed from a community development standpoint. If HIV is going to be something that generates more orphans, then it is going to be a priority. I don’t know how that is going to work yet, but I have thought about using the orphan care centers as places where the community can come and learn from each other, learn about prevention, hear guest speakers, take votes on the issues that are most pressing, etc.

Markato; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia - photograph © John Paul Vicory

AK: You’ve done work documenting and addressing the reality of children trafficked for sex in Africa. How are orphans particularly vulnerable to traffickers?

JPV: Orphans are vulnerable on a variety of different levels. Since they don’t have families to care for them, they are disregarded by the general population. Who would miss them if they are gone or being taken advantage of? If they are not being cared for, they often end up on the streets trying to survive any way they can. They can fall victim to prostitution and trafficking due to the fact that they need to eat and pimps and traffickers can provide that for them. I have even heard cases of illegal adoptions, which is trafficking as well, and orphan care centers selling children to make money or to keep the doors open and the lights on. There is some really terrible stuff that happens hiding behind a facade of care, which is why accountability and transparency is so important.

AK: What are your goals for your upcoming trip to Uganda and Ethiopia?

JPV: The overarching goal of the trip this summer is to begin the formation of a Child-Sponsorship program at 2 orphan care centers. I need to gather a lot of information and a lot of pictures and video in order to do so. I will also spend a lot of time talking with the directors of the orphan care centers to establish methods of communication, accountability, organizational structure, and general vision for the future of their ministries. The child-sponsorship program will set the stage for future involvement.

AK: What will a successful trip look like to you?

JPV: Hmm. I guess I haven’t thought about that one too much. I would love to bring back compelling footage and get all of the stories of each of the children at each center. I would also like some great ideas for partnering with the directors to come up with sustainable solutions for each of the centers.

AK: You describe a decisive change in your life where you abandoned the pursuit of your own greatness and realized you had a calling to become an advocate for others. What triggered this switch?

JPV:Wow, that makes me sound much cooler than I actually am. I still really live for myself way too much, but I have had a change of heart. The switch was triggered during my conversion actually on a November night in Kohala, Hawaii. Pursuing my own greatness had left me with absolutely nothing except for darkness and death. I didn’t want to live anymore. In the silence of the night I had a conversation with God. I didn’t want to live and He asked me why I was living? At that moment, I realized that I had been selfish. I realized that I needed a Savior, and that Jesus was the only one that could save me. I asked Him to come in and change the way I lived. I woke up the next morning and felt transformed. Everything that I saw, read, and heard, it was as if I was experiencing it for the first time. I was born again.
Soon after that, He gave me the opportunity to spend six months in Africa and showed me who I was to become and the people that I would advocate for. Since then, I have gone places, done things, and met people I never thought possible, and it’s just the beginning.

AK: What advice would you give to people who are touched by the plight of orphans and, beyond giving money, aren’t quite sure what to do?

JPV: I would encourage people to go spend time with my friends in Uganda and Ethiopia. I guarantee that their lives would be changed. Beyond that, there is so much that people can do besides giving money. God has created each of us with gifts. In fact, I believe that we all are uniquely created unlike anyone else and can do things that no one else can do. They can use those gifts to uncover the beauty of God’s creation and to bring Hope where there is none. We need each other to make the biggest change. No matter how smart or dumb I am, I need all kinds of help. I don’t know how to run businesses or construct buildings, but other people do and can provide their gifts for the enrichment of little children that God deeply loves.

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Follow John on his blog.

Learn more about how you can donate to his important work here.

In 2006 Andrew traveled with a crew of six independent filmmakers to shoot the film E for Everyone: The Mouse and the Elephant. The following is an excerpt and a behind the scene look of Andrew’s experience on set.

Previous Entry

Are death and life mere facts only God can bend and change?  What do the dying think about on their deathbeds, and what do the dying think of the living who visit their bedside then go about living once again?  What did that dying Mama think as she overheard from her bed our interaction with Lydia just outside her hut?  How did Nathan, once sharp and able, think about us as we, though tired and hungry, walked away from him, never to meet again and sure to regain our strength?

So much of our lives we are watched or are watching, limited by time and space.  The scene changes so we change with it.

Scene One – Interior

Death House.  Mood: Somber. Woman is dying.

Scene Two – Exterior

Front Lawn of Death House.  Mood: Happy, Festive.  Child is about to receive gift from strange foreigner.

Scene Three – Interior

AIDs patient’s house.  Mood: Awkward. Foreigners are uncomfortable.

But what about the fringes?  What about the greater scenery and soundscape?  What happens in those rooms out of focus beyond the lens?  The story continues there too.

***

Through Kisa and area winds a river, mud-red from the clay in its banks.  The river might be a symbol of the place: the goodness of life muddied by death, hunger, disease, yet still flowing, still starting new, with still something more beyond the mud and muck of it.

Our last visit in the area was paid to Julie and her three siblings, orphaned not a year ago.  We met the children very near to where their parents were buried in the ground, humps of red earth bursting from the soil like large pregnant bellies, like beached clay-coloured whales.

In Kenya people are blunt.  Kubondo did not mince or step lightly around the topic of death, but asked, inches away from their graves if Julie remembered their dying.  In Canada we would much sooner imagine the death away, pretend it never happened, wait until the child was ready to talk about the facts at a much later time.  In Kenya you talk with the child on the spot where, if you put your ear to the ground, you can almost hear the sound of still decomposing flesh.

Julie.  Thirteen, and suddenly mother, nurturer, teacher, provider are titles added to her already full resume of orphan, child, daughter, sister, schoolgirl.  Smart, pretty and a speaker of good English.  Her youngest sister clung to her, eyes swollen and red, she was quick to shake any visitor’s hand.

Joel asked the usual set of questions: what do you think about, what do you need that you don’t have, what do you have that you can do without, what worries you?  And though most answers were brief, there were a few that shocked us, though outwardly it may have looked like we didn’t miss a beat, her answers given so matter-of-factly.

The children did not have sufficient clothes or shoes.  They needed sweaters and uniforms for school.  They occasionally went without food.  They are sad when people beat them and treat them harshly.

A day in the life of an orphan.  Julie somehow thrust into shoes too big for her, though they are not the shoes she needs for her calloused feet.  Somehow alive and not infected with the disease that claimed her parents.  Somehow learning, managing, growing.

I was compelled to give money to Julie and her siblings, only five hundred Kenyan Shillings, but a lot for her.  Secretly I hoped she would squander it on something fun: chocolate, or ice cream, a colouring book for the children.  But she could afford none of those luxuries.  When she thanked me for the too small gift, she said it would be helpful for her young little family to buy maize flour and rice.  Food to fill their small bellies.

As we waved good-bye, turned to walk back to our vehicles, the thought of her life was nearly too much for me to bear.  But I was proud of her too.  So strong and bright.  I turned as I walked, arms folded across my chest, and saw the same look on Em’s face that I imagined was on my own.  I have not spoken with her about it, but I’m sure I do not need to.  The thought of a child so young left to face the world.  The unthinkable thought that she and so many other children go even one night without the comforting voice of a father or mother.  The future.

***

On the edge of the land where Julie’s parents’ bodies are buried is a tree, the tallest one I saw in Kenya.  It stands there like a watchman or a sentinel, guarding, able to see far and wide all the land, every area the river covers, all its mud and dirt, and the lush green banks too.  It stands there and grows higher to the heavens, even as it digs its roots deeper into the ground – ground nourished by the water that snakes its way through the town and the nutrients sucked from buried bones.

So many things it sees.  People walking barefoot on dirt and gravel.  A husband bringing AIDS into the home.  Long painful suffering.  Death.  Children burying parents, huddling together in the dark of night, shuddering at the sound of the wind.  Cow trails and the rising sun.  Chickens clucking and beaking the ground.  An angry villager striking a frightened orphan-boy across the face.  Blood, tears, spit, semen.

Julie, a baby, an orphan girl, now a young woman with a husband and children of her own.

The tree is rooted there, quietly watching all these things.  Remembering names.

* * *

A story, if it is any good, needs a beginning, middle, an end.  Or so I’ve been told.  I’ve already gone and muddled things up.  I started with Kisa, though we didn’t visit it until halfway through our time in Kenya when the only ugly things we had seen were hunger and drought.  But it felt right to start there, and I’ve had to ask myself why.  Perhaps it felt natural to start with the middle of our time in Kenya because when I think of it, Kisa revealed the heart.  Sickness and pain, suffering, but much beauty, resilience, and happiness too.

Take, for instance, Mama Josephine who welcomed us into her home for a snack and later for lunch when we visited Kisa.  She told us she was humbled to have people from the West visit her simple home.  A woman who gives much of her time to see the forgotten child without parents, the unimportant man dying of AIDS, the unknown woman hungry and alone remembered, valued, known.  A widow herself, still recovering from the too-soon death of her husband, a wound opened further and made more grotesque by the much too soon recent death of her eldest son.  Their graves were also visible on her small plot of land, so close to where the van parked to let out its foreign cargo, so close to where she warmly greeted us and first shook our hands, dirt still fresh, no trace of greenery or life covering the nutrient-rich beds of death.

Plain facts for the eyes to see.  Not hidden.  Not covered up.  Exposed in the daylight.  And when she thanked us for the little relief we brought to her community, she was not ashamed to ask us to pray, to remember her, a widow, with a dead son also buried in the ground.

Maybe this is the heart of Kenya, Africa.  Hurt and wanting but unashamed, a heart whose honesty I can learn from, should learn from, must.

An unnamed woman. Lydia. Nathan.

Julie.  Kisa.  Josephine.

Kenya.

Remember.

© 2010 andrew kooman

Remembering Names: Reflections from Kenya :: $2.99 :: Download the entire Ebook HERE

E for Everyone: The Mouse and the Elephant :: $20.00

Motion Picture Soundtrack – E for Everyone: The Mouse and the Elephant :: $10.00