Little Boys Begging

by Gene Shelburne

In Nairobi, Kenya, the average age is 12. In this burgeoning African city, officials estimate that 250,000 children live on the streets. That’s 8 percent of Nairobi’s population. Homeless. Hungry. Unwanted.

Missionary Laura Reppart recalls that her own girls were small when her family moved to Kenya, and the plight of that army of homeless children prowling Nairobi gnawed at her heart. Simple pleasures like eating ice cream cones with her own children in a downtown shop lost all joy when she looked through the window and saw a pack of urchins picking through garbage looking for something to eat.

“It’s hard to go to church services when I must step over little boys sitting begging on the door-step,” Laura writes. While she worships, she can’t keep from thinking about those waifs, who probably have not eaten that day.

Rain on the roof of Laura’s home sounds cozy when her kids are snug in bed, she says. But the sound of the raindrops torments her soul when she recalls the names of boys the age of her son James, boys who are sleeping that night on cold concrete with nothing to shield them from the pummeling rain.

What would it do to your heart to know that right in the town where you live pre-school boys and girls were sleeping in alleys, huddled under bridges, dining out of dumpsters? As a believer in the God of mercy, what would you do about it?

In Kenya the Repparts and volunteers from their Nairobi church have rescued 34 homeless boys from the city streets. That may not sound like very many, compared to the quarter of a million still roaming, starving, pillaging city-wide. But for these 34 boys the Christian compassion of people like the Repparts means food and school and toothpaste and Bible study and, most important of all, somebody who knows and loves them.

“Jesus loves the little children,” Laura sings. “All the children of the world.” And that means all of them, she insists. “Troubled, smelly and dirty, abused, emotionally damaged, unwanted, homeless.” Don’t leave any of them out, Laura pleads. “All are precious in His sight.” Are they precious in ours?

On the other side of the world Laura Reppart is busy loving kids nobody else seems to love. What are you and I doing about kids like that where we live?