Loss of friends to HIV/AIDS inspires Kenyan to offer aid
Ministry: Olivet counseling center’s director helps locally and back home
BY CARLA HINTON - Religion Editor
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Published: October 24, 2009
A Kenyan has teamed up with a church to offer counseling to people with HIV/AIDS.
John Wambugu is the director of Olivet Baptist Church’s
HIV Counseling Center that opened this month at 1209 NW Park Place, adjacent to the church.
The Rev. Steve Kern, 53, the church’s senior pastor, said the center is a way to reach out to people in the community.
"We’re not here to condemn them. We are here to help people who want to be helped,” Kern said.
Wambugu, 52, said the center will offer confidential HIV testing along with pretest and post-test counseling.
Wambugu said the center is the fruition of his longstanding dream to help HIV sufferers.
He said he was born in
Kenya,
Africa, and became a Christian in 1968 in
Uganda and eventually went back to his homeland. He said he was shocked and saddened to learn that many of his childhood friends in Kenya had died of AIDS.
"I went back, and none of them survived. I learned that the boys and girls in my age group, that I had played with, all of them died from HIV/AIDS.”
Wambugu said he felt an urgent need to help as the AIDS epidemic ravaged the country.
He said he became a clinical officer of lung and skin diseases in Kenya, then in 1992 received training in the HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted disease management program offered by the
U.S. Agency for International Development in
Zambia. In America, he received a graduate certificate of ministry from the
Eastern Mennonite Seminary in
Harrisonburg, Va., and a master’s of ministry from
Southwestern Christian University in Bethany.
Wambugu said he has been trained by the
Oklahoma Department of Health to conduct HIV/AIDS testing and counseling.
"It was like a call when I went for my first class,” Wambugu said. "I saw myself as a representative of Jesus.”
The center has been promoted through signage in front of the church and a recent story in the Baptist Messenger, the official news journal of the
Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma. Kern said it is important to note the center is for counseling and is not a clinic with medicines.
Wambugu said the Olivet Baptist congregation has become heavily involved in the HIV/AIDS ministry field. He said he ran a HIV/AIDS clinic in Kenya until he came to the
United States. He said his wife, Grace, now runs the Kenyan clinic, and Olivet Baptist helps support it. He said the church also has been providing money for a new orphanage in Kenya that will house children whose parents died of AIDS. He said the long-term goal is to help Kenyan families accept people who have HIV/AIDS and to train them to help one other.
"What is pushing us to work with people is love,” he said.
"I want to see someone’s life changed.”
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