Wife’s memory spurs Camarillo man to open home for Kenyan orphans

By Jeffrey Dransfeldt jdransfeldt@theacorn.com

BETTER LIFE—Larry Hines, right, visits in 2007 with Lucy, an orphan from Kenya, whom he and his wife, Nadine Griffey, began sponsoring eight years ago. Hines has helped Lucy and other Kenyan children better their lives by providing educational oppotunities through the nonprofit named in honor of his wife.

Larry Hines continues to honor the memory of his late wife, Nadine Griffey, with his ongoing committment to further the pledge the Camarillo couple made eight years ago to help a young Kenyan girl.

Since his wife’s death in 2004, Hines has worked to transform the lives of a growing number of Kenyan orphans through the Nadine Griffey Academy of Kenya. The mission of the nonprofit is to help improve the education of childen in Nairobi.

How it started

It was 2002 when Hines and Griffey began supporting Lucy, a young girl living in the slums of Nairobi.

Two years later, Griffey, a longtime public school teacher, died after battling a chronic autoimmune disease.

Despite his personal loss, Hines knew his wife wouldn’t have wanted him to stop the humanitarian work they’d begun a few years earlier.

In 2005, Hines had the chance to visit Lucy for the first time. She was living in the Mathare slum in Nairobi with her aunt and eight other children in a small room with a dirt floor and lacking a door, a toilet, heat, light, furniture and water. He was moved to find a way to change her situation.

“You can’t solve all the problems of the world, but you can tackle a few of them,” he said.

Hines, an attorney, started the Nadine Griffey Academy of Kenya to help educate orphans in Nairobi.

Originally, he’d planned to build a boarding school to provide educational facilities as well as a home for orphans, but he ran into problems with the governmental approval process.

Instead he decided to create a home where children can stay between school terms. The academy’s board of directors will also sponsor orphans to attend already established private boarding schools in the Nairobi area.

The children will attend Musa Gitau Primary School, St. Elizabeth Academy or Madaraka Primary School. Students will be chosen with the help of Kenyan educators, who will look for determination and a willingness to learn. They will be educated from about fourth grade through high school, and possibly beyond.

Five children have already been selected, including Lucy, who attends St. Elizabeth, and her sister, Lydia.

Hines has made several visits to Nairobi on his quest to help educate young people.

“If you just gave them a ton of money, it would somehow get taken away from them or they would waste it, and it doesn’t change their view of things,” Hines said. “Only through education and putting them together with peers of people that will end up going to college . . . (will) you break the cycle.”

Griffey had always maintained a passion for education, said Hines. She worked for the Santa Paula School District from 1975 until her retirement in 2004.

“She loved teaching young kids,” Hines said. His wife’s passion inspired him to create the academy.

Video hits home

The nonprofit’s website has been updated with a 15-minute video that Hines made during his most recent trip to Nairobi.

“You can describe it all you want, and you can see still pictures, but movies help a little bit,” he said.

The academy’s board of directors is made up primarily of local educators with ties to Trinity Presbyterian Church of Camarillo. Board member Shirley Smithtro said the goal is to help transform the lives of the orphans so they don’t have to return to the slums.

“You don’t have any hope at all if you don’t have an education,” she said. “You have no skill set. You can’t read. You can’t write.”

The board members didn’t gain a complete understanding of the situation until five of them— Smithtro and her husband, Stan; Bob and Ruth Fraser; and Hines— went to Kenya in October.

Witnessing poverty

The group first visited the Mathare slum, which has an estimated population of 500,000.

“Some of the alleys between the houses are only wide enough for one person to walk through . . . (straddling) this sewage drain that’s going down under your feet,” Smithtro said. “I scrubbed (our) shoes with Clorox . . . when we got home.”

The smell had them breathing through their mouths during the visit, she said.

The rural impoverished areas they later saw weren’t much better. Smithtro said the classrooms were larger and more airy but lacked supplies. Her husband took a photo of her holding a soccer ball made out of plastic bags.

For lunch children ate beans cooked in huge pots and made porridge out of ground lentils, beans and soy. For many of the children, that was their only food for the day, with nothing to eat at home, Smithtro said.

“You can’t go to school and learn if you’re terribly hungry,” Hines said. “It just doesn’t work.”

Bathrooms consist of two little sheds, one for boys and one for girls, with holes in the floor.

Outside sits a bucket of water, but no soap.

The teachers are untrained and make $60 a month, Smithtro said.

“They really would love to get more education,” she said. “They have such passion for the children over there.”

The Smithtros sponsor a child, Karen, through Compassion International, a Christian childsponsorship organization. The couple spent a full day with Karen in Nairobi. “It changes your life when you actually can go there and you look at the face of poverty,” Smithtro said. “These sweet children—it just breaks your heart to know what they live in, and yet they’re happy.”