POWER POINTS: GOD AT WORK THROUGH WOMEN LEADERS YESTERDAY AND TODAY

Jackie Odhiambo

BY LEECY BARNETT

WE HAVE BECOME FATHERLESS, OUR MOTHERS ARE WIDOWS. (Lamentations 5:3 NIV)

This lament became Jackie Odhiambo’s reality at age 11 when her father died. Growing up with a widowed mother, widowed grandmother, and widowed aunt shaped the whole trajectory of Jackie’s life. Life in a rural village outside Kisumu, Kenya, is a struggle for many, but when a woman is raising her children on her own, her troubles are multiplied 100-fold. For example, the family’s funds were so tight that Jackie had to delay entering high school because her mother labored to come up with the 50 dollars for the required fees. Food insecurity was a daily experience: the Odhiambos usually had one meal a day, and Jackie sometimes got 10 cents to buy a snack at lunchtime. On top of this, Jackie could see how her mother’s grief weighed on her, but she refused to burden her children with her sadness.

Faith was the one constant that Jackie’s mom and grandmother counted on. Jackie attended church regularly and, as a teenager, began to understand who Jesus was and what He had done for her. God was looking out for Jackie when He connected her to The Zawadi Africa Education Fund, a program designed to provide scholarships to academically gifted girls from disadvantaged backgrounds to pursue higher education. With Zawadi’s help, Jackie was awarded a full scholarship to Williams College in the USA. (Williams even paid for a trip back home to Kenya annually for Jackie!)

At Williams, Jackie’s faith became truly alive through the college Christian fellowship. Jackie loved being a part of the worship team and made lifelong friends with believing students. As a part of her pre-med training, Jackie did an internship shadowing doctors in a Kenyan hospital. This experience shifted her pathway from surgery to public health. When she returned to Williams, she realized that because of her education, her future was secure. No longer hungry, she had hundreds of foods to choose from. But she remembered that children in her village and thousands like it have no such opportunities. Her group of college friends helped start the first school in Jackie’s village. They also helped to drill a community well that serves over 3000 households and the school.

Through working on these projects, Jackie learned about the dire situation of widows throughout Kenya. Many Kenyan widows inherit debt, not wealth, from their deceased husbands! In some cultures, everything a man has at his death reverts to his family of origin, so his brothers will come and take the land to farm for themselves. Usually, the widow and her children can stay in the house, but it is not unheard of for the husband’s family to reclaim the house and leave the widow homeless. It is often assumed, based on no evidence whatsoever, that the wife, in some mysterious way, caused the death of her husband. Remarriage is out of the question because if the widow remarries outside her husband’s family, her children could be taken away; they belong to the family, not to the woman. Often, the widows’ voices are unheard in their community; no one takes their ideas seriously.

After receiving her master’s degree in public health and working in that field for several years, Jackie returned to Kisumu, Kenya, to begin Nyanam International, a ministry to widows. In their local language, “Nyanam” means “daughter of the lake” and is used as a term of endearment for women from the Lake Victoria region. Experiencing the truth that Father to the fatherless, defender of widows—this is God, whose dwelling is holy. (Psalm 68:5 NLT), Jackie chose this name so widows would know that they are loved and that God is on their side.

After its beginning in 2019, 560 widows became connected to Nyanam by the end of 2022. Perhaps this rapid growth can be attributed to the fact that the Nyanam loves and respects widows and treats them as leaders. Another factor is their focus on God; they have centralized the Word of God in their meetings. For example, they are spending all of 2023 studying the story of the widow who, with the help of Elisha, was able to pay off her debts (2 Kings 4:1-7). Future ministry plans include having a public health physician available to meet the widows’ health needs, a community center as a gathering place for widows and their children, and expanding Nyanam throughout Kenya and, eventually, into the rest of Africa.

Jackie’s life and ministry remind us that religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress (James 1:27 NIV).

To find out more about Nyanam see www.nyanam.org or contact them at info@nyanam.org