Mama Florence: A Hero and a Godsend to Orongo Village

At 83, Mama Florence has spent more than three decades doing what most would call

impossible. From family land on the edge of Lake Victoria in Orongo Village, Kenya, she

has built a lifeline for orphans, widows, and families with nowhere else to turn.

Before this began, she was a primary school teacher. When she retired in 1989, her

husband — the minister of their local church — gave her a piece of family land to start

something new. That gift became the Orongo Village of Orphans and Widows, and it's been her calling ever since.

Mama Florence had ten children. She lost three to HIV/AIDS — a grief no parent should

carry, let alone three times over. It was the height of the epidemic in the late 1980s and

early '90s, when stigma ran so deep many wouldn't even visit the sick, believing

HIV/AIDS was a curse.

Mama Florence did the opposite — visiting the sick, taking in the

children left behind, and training families to host and raise them, a system volunteers

still monitor today.

That work has grown into a school where 46 children are now fully supported — meals,

uniforms, books, and an education they might otherwise never have had. They attend

their own school house, while a separate building, "The Center" doubles as the church

and home to artisans and skill-training programs.

Her reach extends far beyond the children. She has built more than two dozen homes

with water-resistant iron sheeting to withstand flooding that hits twice a year. When

storms come, 30 to 40 people crowd into her house, sometimes for months. As her son

Charles puts it, "people fill any space they can find until they can resume their normal

lives." Floods bring another danger too: venomous cobras move into abandoned homes

seeking dry ground, with venom that can blind — one more reason the village badly

needs water wheelbarrows and small bridges, so elderly women can navigate the

terrain safely.

She has also become a source of support for women blamed or abandoned after

miscarriage or infertility — teaching them tailoring, cookery, salon work, and handicrafts

to build a business of their own.

That's the story of Mama Florence in a sentence: she has almost nothing, and she has

given all of it.

Her tireless work has pulled family after family out of a poverty that repeats itself for

generations. Her dream now is full solar electricity, and a real solution to sanitation.

Most families still rely on pit latrines that overflow two or three times a year, spreading

disease as flood victims wade through contaminated water. We're working with local

Kenyan companies to bring in handicap-accessible, self-sustaining biodigester

bathrooms that won't wash away in the next storm.

Mama Florence is exactly who this work exists to support. She is a hero, and to the

families of Orongo Village, nothing short of a godsend. As Charles says, "The Lord is

the anchor of all" — and for thirty-plus years, Mama Florence has been the hands

carrying that anchor forward.