“I didn’t expect my life would look like this. I now have hope and dreams.”

Kyle Jaster writes about his experience of travelling to the north-east coast of Kenya and seeing the value of compassion played-out in the life of Charles.

Travelling in on the road from Malindi to Barani, I could see women sat at the roadside, chipping away at rocks in the heat of the sun. These women work to fill buckets full of fine gravel and in doing so typically earn the equivalent of about £1 a day.

This tends to be representative of most adult laborers in the town.

Those who are able to find work earn on average the equivalent of just £15 per month. Unemployment is a serious challenge in Barani and is contributing to high levels of malnutrition, Malaria, and HIV and AIDS.

KE-623 is a project located in Barani, a small village of 50,000 residents set two kilometers west of Malindi, on the north-east coast of Kenya. The project is run by Compassion and operates through ACK St Andrew’s Barani Child Development Centre in the heart of a community where deep-seated and desperate poverty is prevalent.

As we drove up to St Andrew’s School, masses of young children in their school uniforms ran up alongside our vehicle. We were taken into a small office space where we were greeted by the principle, the chaplain and project director, and a number of others including Charles, who was quietly sat in the corner. At the age of fourteen, Charles has an extraordinary story to tell of the impact that being sponsored by Compassion has had on his life – but, as I spent more of the day with him, it was his depth of character that struck me and captured my attention.

Charles lives, by African standards, a short twenty-minute walk away from the child development center in a small home with his mum, aunt, and five siblings. With his father no longer around, caring for Charles and his siblings had become increasingly challenging for Charles’ mum.

Seeing the need of this family, Charles was accepted into the Compassion program. Through sponsorship Charles has had the opportunity to receive health care, mosquito nets, Bible teaching, life skills training, counselling and tuition for school. And through special one-time gifts from Charles’ sponsor, his family has also been able to build their home with the support they have received from Compassion.

With this opportunity, Charles has excelled. Now head boy of his school, Charles’ impact has spread beyond his own peers and community having been invited to speak and present at different events and engagements throughout the country.

But it was in the little, day-to-day things that I feel I really got to see the ongoing impact sponsorship had on Charles’ life.

After meeting Charles at his school we went back to his house to meet his mum and the rest of his family. As he showed me around his family home I discovered a bit more of the character and faith that lay beneath the surfaced accomplishments. He showed me the bedroom that he shares with his younger brother – it was a small, dim room with one tiny window and no electricity. There was one bed that took up most of the space and a small mat on the floor that was clearly being used as a makeshift bed. I asked Charles about it and he explained that it gets quite hot at night with the two of them in the same bed so Charles often sleeps on the mat on the floor so that his little brother can get a good night’s sleep.

I asked Charles and his brother to sit side-by-side on the bed so that I could film them interacting with one another for a film I was making with Compassion. I wanted it to look natural so I encouraged them to think about what they would normally do if it was just the two of them.

Charles responded by saying, ‘Well, my brother doesn’t have the same opportunities that I do to learn so I often teach him the things that I’m learning about in school. We also pray together and read the Bible. So maybe we could just do that?’ He then got out his Bible and prayed with his little brother.

“I have become a leader and have the confidence to teach.”

Over the last couple of years, Alpha and Compassion have created a partnership that allows youth to do Alpha as part of their Compassion programme. So far, more than 28,000 sponsored children have had the opportunity to try Alpha.

Charles was one of the first to try Alpha and he said, ‘Before I was sponsored by Compassion I was a timid boy. I understood very little of the potential I had hidden deep inside. But, I thank God I was among the first people in our project to try Alpha. Alpha asks some of the most important questions in a young person’s life. From the first topics it helped me to understand who God is. Through Alpha, I have gained confidence. I have become a leader and have the confidence to teach.’

To finish off the day we returned back to the school where some of the other boys were playing soccer in the school field. Charles’ natural disposition was still quiet and reserved, but there was also a clear sense of confidence in him.

I was curious about what the dynamic would be like between him and the other kids, especially knowing that he was head boy. Seeing the other boys playing soccer I asked him if he wanted to join in. Charles assuredly approached the other boys and was met by what seemed like a deep sense of respect as they listened to him. They stopped what they were doing, Charles took the lead rearranging them into teams and they kicked off the game.

I feel that Compassion’s slogan is an appropriate summary for this story – Releasing children from poverty in Jesus’ name – because I believe that Charles’ life is marked by both his and his family’s continued journey out of poverty through the help of Compassion. But it’s also clear that the faith he has found and is sharing with his family has a significant role to play in the success of that journey out of poverty, not to mention the impact he is having on the community around him.

Find out more about Compassion and our partnership.

“Your benchmark for what really scares you changes.”

Alpha Team

Paul ‘Mungo’ Mungeam is no stranger to taking risks. He’s been a cameraman for over twenty years and his career has taken him all over the world – from traveling the world by land and sea with Charley Boorman, to performing extreme stunts with Bear Grylls on Man vs. Wild.

We caught up with Mungo to discuss his career, adventures and what his Christian faith means to him:

Early in my career I found that I suited adventure and adventure suited me. I’ve always been a risk-taker. The idea of living life on the edge was what got me out of bed in the morning.

But with adventure – like adrenaline – your benchmark for what really scares you changes. Now I spend my whole time hanging out of helicopters with Bear. It doesn’t scare me in the slightest but I still enjoy it. My levels of extreme have to go way beyond and in the end it just gets stupid because you’re being very dangerous.

But then the older you get the less brave you become because you realise you have more to lose. I always used to be disposable in my eyes, and that played to favour in my career. I was a cameraman with years of experience and I was able to go away at the drop of a hat for three weeks or even three months.

Now I’m older. I’m married with a kid and have responsibilities. Suddenly your life changes. Fatherhood is a whole different adventure!

I originally fell in love with Cambodia and South-East Asia. Cambodia was the first place I filmed a TV documentary in my own right. I loved it. I was a bit out of my depth, but I rose to the challenge. We were the first non-news crew to film there since the fall of Khmer Rouge in Kampuchea, so we had a lot of access to areas that you couldn’t usually go to because they wanted it to be filmed and the story to be told.

Other than that experience, it’s really difficult to name one place in particular that stands out from my travels – the Arctic is so different to desert, the jungle is so different to mountains. You can’t really compare them.

During my career I’ve been on a massive rollercoaster ride with my faith. Sometimes I’ve had a massive amount of faith, sometimes I’ve wanted to give it all up. But you do find your way through – eventually you do find God in it.

When I was in Rwanda I visited a church that was the infamous site of a massacre during the Genocide of 1994. I stood there quietly and I said to God, ‘What was all this about?’ – I was looking for answers.

I didn’t feel like he gave me any answers but I felt he stood with me, looked at it and was equally as sad. And that was the answer I needed. It wasn’t a case of him going, ‘Well, it was this or that…’ and making sense of it. It was a sense that he understood the pain, and he felt that pain too.

So, you learn different things – but that’s the big adventure. It’s life, it’s trying to weigh it all up.

The conclusion I’ve come to is that I’m not a religious man but I have got a lot of faith. My God is the God that I see and feel and love when I’m out the back of the surf pinching myself because there’s a twenty-foot wave about to crash down. Or I’m up a mountain and the blizzard comes in and I feel really out of my depth. That’s my God. He’s massive – he’s awesome and can’t be put in a box.

For me, working alongside Christians is incredibly rare. To be with somebody like Bear, who is in an incredibly influential position whether in the media or among TV crews – he’s just so open about it his faith, I found it really challenging and incredibly encouraging.

Quite often when we are standing at the start of the shoot, helicopter propellers roaring, waiting for the OK to jump aboard from the pilot, Bear will pray. He’ll say, ‘Lord keep us safe, give us a good time and ultimately it’s all about you.’ Then I’ll say ‘Amen’ and we are off and away.

We work with a sound guy called Jimmy who isn’t a Christian and one time we were so caught up in what we were doing that Bear didn’t pray. Jimmy’s reaction was ‘Hang on a minute! Bear hasn’t prayed! We’ve got to pray before we start.’ So the influence is massive.

I think that’s how you can make the biggest impression, really; being the best friend you can be, being there for people, be Jesus to them. It’s about being in the community. People won’t come to us; we need to go to them. If someone comes to Alpha looking to find out more about faith, then you’re halfway there because they are asking questions. The rest of it is being out there and simply being a friend.