Four-year-old Hadrienne Kathleen Mendonsa, named after a Chattanooga teenager who died in 2005, stands next to a photo of the late teen in a window of the Kenyan widows center which bears her name.
Andy Mendonsa leads a prayer and Bible study meeting for the Widow’s Harvest Ministries.
The Hadrienne Kathleen Mendonsa Widows Prayer Center in Kenya.It’s a two-hour drive from the airport in Nairobi, Kenya, to the school for orphans in Miwani. The trip takes you past parent-less street kids who gaze from haunted eyes crisscrossed by spidery, bloodshot veins. In their hands are crinkled paper bags they clutch tightly, trapping the chemical fumes inside that they “huff” into their lungs, numbing the pangs of their hungry bellies.
As you drive, the heat of the day becomes a reminder that you that you are, in fact, in Africa.
As you get closer to the Ugandan border, you pass hand-molded mud huts, soggy rice paddies and endless rows of sugar cane until finally you see a stand of willowy trees lining the path to the tropically colored building with the carefully written banner – the Hadrienne Kathleen Mendonsa Widow’s Harvest Center.
Look closer at the windows and inside a corner pane is tucked a photo of a young, golden-haired woman with an unforced smile. Her words are written below the photo: “We are to love no matter the recognition we get. We are to go the extra mile to show love.”
Even as the words seem fitting in this village of too many orphans with too little love, finding the girl’s photo in the window is a jolt. Knowing the words found their way from Chattanooga to a windowpane in eastern Africa is a testament to the faith-defying and faith-inspiring odyssey that began with Hadrienne Kathleen Mendonsa’s birth in Chattanooga in 1985.