Several adults and more than twenty children received Orthodox Baptism in Kenya on August 29, 2021. The sacrament was performed by Fr. Agapius Omukuba, director of St. Tabitha Orphanage in Malava, reports pravoslavie.ru.
In total, 29 people were baptized in the waters of the local river. Nine more children from the orphanage became Orthodox Christians in early spring.
According to Fr. Agapius Omukuba, most of the newly baptized people belong to the Pokot people – one of more than 40 Kenyan tribal groups living in the northwest of the country. In Kenya with 46 million population, specialists say there are about 783,000 representatives of this ethnic group.
Father Agapius and his wife Dora find future residents of the orphanage mainly in the slums of the Kenyan capital – Nairobi. In the orphanage, they are provided with basic necessities, including shelter, clothing, daily food, education and medical care. Most children are orphans, and the Orthodox orphanage in Malawa is often the only way for them to escape poverty and sometimes death.
Now Father Agapius and Dora are hard at work building a new house, school, hospital and church. They acquired the land for these objects thanks to the generosity of benefactors and with the blessing of Bishop Athanasius (Akunda) of Kisum and West Kenya of blessed memory, who died in 2019.
The Orthodox Church in Kenya is part of the Alexandrian Patriarchate. Fr. Agapius Omukuba is one of the authors of an open letter from the clergy of the Alexandrian Orthodox Church, published at the end of 2019, who disagreed with the decision of Patriarch Theodore II of Alexandria to recognize the so-called “Orthodox Church of Ukraine”.
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