Chazon
Children's Centre

They gave up
everything.

Samuel Kimathi and Lucy Njenga spent 20 years building something together. A hotel. A restaurant. A business that worked, in a region — Molo, Kenya — where HIV/AIDS, poverty, and periodic ethnic violence had left a landscape of orphaned and street children. Children hungry, without school, without anyone to turn to. Samuel and Lucy could not stop seeing them.

In 2007, they made the decision that defines Chazon. They sold the hotel. They sold the restaurant. They sold everything they had built over two decades, and they opened a children's centre in a rented farmhouse with 23 students in the first week. Not a grant. Not a donation. Their entire life's work, redirected.

From 23 to 400

Today, Chazon serves 400+ pupils. Twelve teachers. Three cooks. A social worker. A security guard. A real kitchen. An orphanage within the centre for the most vulnerable children, the ones with nowhere else to go. Every child who comes to Chazon gets lunch and porridge twice a day — not because it's a nice extra, but because for many of them it is the nutritional foundation of their entire week.

The centre sits at the intersection of Kenya's most painful realities: the long shadow of HIV/AIDS, which has orphaned a generation; the persistent poverty that pushes children out of education and onto the streets; and the tribal tensions that periodically fracture communities. Chazon stands against all of it, stubbornly, daily, with 12 teachers and three cooks and Samuel and Lucy, who still show up every morning.

Basic dignity. Real change.

Our contribution to Chazon was structural but intimate: we financed the construction of all external toilet facilities at the orphanage. That sounds small. It is not small. Before, the children had inadequate sanitation — a daily indignity that affects health, dignity, and the ability of girls in particular to remain in education. We built the toilets. Basic dignity arrived. And when basic dignity arrives, other things become possible.