How Debbie Oxford is Growing Faith, Water, and Hope in Rural Kenya

Tasha: [00:00:00] Good morning. Can you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your nonprofit origin story?

Debbie: Oh, okay. I’m Debbie Oxford. I run Grow Our Faith. The story of my nonprofit when I was 10 years old, I knew I was called to be a missionary in Africa. Okay. I didn’t know very much about the different countries in Africa. I just knew I was supposed to be loving on the children in Africa. Okay.

And as time went on I grew up. And every time a missionary came to church, I would wonder if I’m supposed to go without this missionary or what I’m supposed to do. And I never got the opportunity to be a missionary. My children grew up, my grandchildren grew up, and I still had not gotten the opportunity to go.

But one day God told me to accept every friend request that came across my Facebook page. I met a man who turned out to be a [00:01:00] pastor in Elder at Kenya, and by November of 2019 I had come to stay with him for a month and go around and meet people in Kenya and minister to them.

And as soon as. I, my foot touched Kenyan soil. I knew I was at home and this was the first time in my life I had felt that way. So it was just really amazing. At that time in my life, I had been married quite a long time but my husband was terminally ill and we knew that. So we made plans for what I would do after he passed away.

And together we decided that. I would move to Kenya and when he passed away in December of 22, I did what we had planned. I sold everything March 5th, 2023. I landed in Kenya, so I’ve been here over two years now. I absolutely love it here. [00:02:00] Absolutely love my missionary life.

Tasha: That’s amazing. And so what are some of the, what some of the work that Grow Our Faith is doing out in the community?

Debbie: Great. In the community of Endow that’s in Bingo County and Kenya, it’s very dry and there’s over 3000 families that live there. There’s only three boreholes in the whole community that’s enough to provide water for about 1500 people.

But and there’s over 3000 families. Wow. So there’s not enough water. We’re working on raising money to put a special type of borehole in that will last for hundreds of years. Most borehole last 15 to 20 years, and we’re working on bringing in our Harvest Garden program to help them grow vegetables and things because the only thing they’ve been able to grow in the past is millet there.

So they don’t have greens and [00:03:00] they don’t have fruits and vegetables like most of Kenya does. So it’s really a way of, of giving them some nutrition. We also have put a small, what we call an impact center there, which means we brought wifi in, we brought some laptops, we brought a printer, we brought a manager in to run the center, and now they have the same access to all of the education that’s available online for free.

As the rest of the world. Of course we’re still trying to teach them that it’s there because they don’t even know it’s there in general until we come and educate them. And yet most of the world that has. Free access to so much education, so much business information in starting their own business that these guys don’t have.

And these guys are in such a vulnerable [00:04:00] state that. They’re the ones that really need it. One of the things that they do there is they do what they call burning charcoal, and that’s simply burning trees to make charcoal out of, and then they sell the charcoal. Yeah. I talked to one of the elders in the village.

This was his job. This is the job of almost everybody in the village. There is no industry there, and he can sell. He says he, if he has a really good week, he could sell a whole bag of charcoal. For 600 shillings, that’s equivalent to a little under $5. Wow. So in a month, if this guy has a great month, he might make $20.

Tasha: Yeah, absolutely. Hey, it’s a to totally different world. I through meeting so many members. Through the nonprofit hive. Like you get the real, shared experience for sure. And starting your own nonprofit. What would you say has been your favorite thing so far about the work?

Debbie: Hugging the [00:05:00] kids. Having them sit on my lap. Yeah. Having, yeah.

Tasha: Yeah, absolutely. And so just, I think that’s the common thread that I see when I do these interviews is that people, it’s the people is the reason why many of us are in this work.

Debbie: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Tasha: I love that. And challenges of the work.

What would you say has been some of the biggest challenges in being in nonprofit?

Debbie: Understanding the cultural differences because the culture for business in America works one way, but Kenyans work differently. And I’ve had to learn how to run a business Kenyan style as opposed to American style because all of my team here are Kenyans and.

I have to get them to understand how my directions and how to go the direction I [00:06:00] want them to go. In fact, I have I have to usually give my instructions to another team member and then have them translate it, even though everybody on my team speaks good English. Amazing. It’s not the language itself that’s the problem.

It’s the cultural understanding of what the language means.

Tasha: Yeah, absolutely. Cultural part. I think actually our next LinkedIn live, we had one that was in, in this space about addressing, culture and those pieces of the north south relationship. But then we’re going into what does it look like when you have funders from the north supporting the global south, and.

Those power dynamic, not only are the power dynamics in play, but then you add into it on top of it like a deep cultural difference. That is totally understandable. And if we take the time to learn it, it’s clear. And but, and it also occurs in both directions. Oh [00:07:00] yeah. I’ve definitely seen this in the nonprofit hive conversations where at the beginning there’s often a little bit of I understand that you may be paired my Canadian hi Uhhuh. You may be paired. A lovely member from Uganda. Yeah, time is a different construct in these two places a little bit, so please be generous with the fact that someone may be five minutes late. And on the opposite end, my members in Uganda, the vers in Uganda, I am educating them to go, listen, I.

I’d love to put you in this conversation with a Canadian understand that if you’re 20 minutes late, they will a hundred percent be gone. And you can’t be upset about that because that’s just the reality. And and so it’s so interesting. I never imagined having to bridge, I. All the cultures that have now joined the nonprofit hive.

Debbie: Yeah. When we have our international meetings, we have up to 11 hours difference in time. My son in or [00:08:00] in Oregon is one of those international board members, and so we have our board meetings at eight o’clock at night, but for him it might be nine o’clock in the morning. Yeah. And then throw daylight savings time into the mix.

Oh, it’s a

Tasha: whole, oh, daylight savings messes us up here at the nonprofit hive every time it happens. Yeah, it’s a problem. Me too. It messes everybody up. Because lots of places don’t do daylight savings. And

Debbie: Of course Kenya doesn’t.

Tasha: Exactly. And that’s a real piece.

And I think there is, even for our group, it’s been interesting because we’re really, this community is an add-on right to people’s lives. This is not your job, this is not right. Something that you’re being told you have to do. This is not a work initiative. This is yes, it’s professional, but it’s also personal.

And so everybody has different often comes to it, looking at it differently. And so you’ve been a member for quite a while. What have you gotten out of doing these hive chats?

Debbie: I have met [00:09:00] so many different people through these chats. I can’t think of any of their names, Morgan And oh, of course I met Pius

Yeah. I can’t say his name properly. I met Pius is lovely Uganda. Yes. And one of the, one of the big takeaways I have is. They don’t know what they’re doing really any better than I do necessarily. There are experts out there, like Morgan is an expert who specialize in a certain field and they know more about their field than I do, but they don’t know more about my organization and the needs of my organization than I do

Tasha: Yeah.

Debbie: In Kenya for grow our faith. I’m the expert.

Tasha: Yeah. Absolutely. I think it is some, one of the things you can get out of these conversations is discovering you are in your own zone of genius, right? There are things you won’t know how to do, but there are things like [00:10:00] you said, that are gonna be unique to your community that you’re gonna be fantastic at.

Debbie: Yeah. Yeah.

Tasha: That’s great. So what are some of your dreams for Grow Our Faith What are you hoping to do in, in the rest of 2025 and into the future?

Debbie: We’re starting to we’re getting ready to raise funds to build our first family impact center, which is gonna be a little different than our impact centers.

Our impact centers are more like a cyber center and people come there and they learn and stuff. But the dream for the impact centers is we want to affect, especially single mothers. There’s such a problem of young single mothers here that. Get pregnant for reasons that we don’t like to talk about because either they’ve gotten raped or they’ve had to be out of school or they’ve sold their bodies to pay for sanitary products and things like that, and ended up pregnant.

[00:11:00] Those girls. Most of the time get kicked out of their home because they’ve dishonor the family by becoming pregnant, even if they were raped. And so here we have maybe a 16-year-old just gotten kicked out of the house. She is maybe six months pregnant or so, and she doesn’t have enough education to know what to do with her future.

Where does she go? Yeah, there’s no resources for her, especially in the really small, what we call interior villages that. Don’t. One of my interior villages doesn’t even have electricity. What’s a girl in that village going to do? Yeah. So we want to build this family impact center that not only will provide the internet for her, but there will be teachers there.

There will be a sewing machine if she wants to learn. To be as Taylor so that she could make a living. If she wants to learn to be to do [00:12:00] hair and be a loist, we could teach her those things. And so the building is getting bigger because now we have not just the impact center, but on it, we have a, like a business incubator and.

Once she, once we allow them to come back to the, to that building and continue to sew and make their product, and then we’ve created a marketplace behind the building so that, because of course this is going to be the center of. Activity for that community. And so we’ve got a little marketplace there where she could sell her products and we are not gonna charge her anything to do that.

And so we have in the business incubator, we have somebody who can follow her for a year and make sure she knows about saving back part of her income. To buy more material or whatever it is that she needs to keep doing her business. And and just make sure that she’s doing good before we turn her [00:13:00] out on her own.

Tasha: I love it. Hey, there’s a piece where. The teaching financial literacy and the teaching of what it means to be a business owner. Stumbling along, learning many of those things myself right now with them, a mentor, so I think that’s such a blessing and such an opportunity for like you just your community and in general.

So how can people follow along with your journey and what’s the best way to get in touch, Debbie?

Debbie: We, our website is grow our faith.org, so you can look for me there. We’re also on all over Facebook, we’re on Instagram and TikTok and LinkedIn, of course. Okay. And find me anywhere there.

Look for grow Our Faith Ministries, or just Debbie Oxford. And you should find me.

Tasha: That’s amazing. Thank you so much for doing this with me, Debbie, and thank you for being a longtime member of this community. I love what you bring to the table with your unique global, north and south [00:14:00] perspective.

Debbie: Thank you, Tasha. Thank you for having me on there. I am so appreciative of the nonprofit hive. You guys have taught me so much. I’ve come a long way from the, I feel like a, I was a little girl when we first met. I know. I. Not a little girl at all, but I really feel like I’ve come a long way.

Tasha: Hey, that’s amazing.

I love it. All right. Thanks so much.

Debbie: Thank you. Bye-Bye.