school fees,” Wasike says. “It was like, ‘OK, I’m going home, yes, but are there school fees at home?’” For Wasike, that meant poverty was not only within her family
but rather spread throughout the community where she grew up and even later when she started working. The brokenness in the system didn’t bring her fulfillment in her work as a teacher because she couldn’t help the children she had come to love so dearly. “I would always hide my feelings to tell them, go home and look
for school fees,” Wasike says. When her husband was offered a scholarship to study in the United
States, Wasike quit her teaching job and moved her family abroad. When they moved back to Kenya, Wasike found Buckner. The ministry was seeking a volunteer to begin a program in Busia, one of the rural centers of Kenya near the Ugandan border. She started as a mentor, but later began working as a social worker, recruiting children into the program and giving them an opportunity to go to school. She was influential in starting Buckner programs in Busia. Wasike loved her work with Buckner and found it a natural fit for
her skills and passion. Two years later, she moved to Kitale, a slightly larger area in Kenya, where she continued her work with vulnerable children and impoverished families and established a foster care/ kinship care program for Buckner. In 2012, Buckner Country Director Dickson Masidano asked Wasike
if she was interested in moving to the U.S. to attend Baylor Univer- sity in Waco, Texas, to study social work and earn a master’s degree. Among other requirements, the candidate needed to have worked for Buckner for more than five years and be committed to working with children and families in poverty. Dickson knew Wasike fit the bill perfectly. “We knew Rose had the commitment to complete the program,”
Dickson says. “One of the warnings is that Baylor is very rigorous; you need to be very hard-working. We knew Rose is hard-working when she commits to something. She gives it all.” “I was very excited when I found out I was accepted,” Wasike says.
“I went down on my knees and told God, ‘Thank you that you’ve remembered me. The reason why you’ve chosen me, I don’t know but
Spring 2016 • BUCKNER TODAY 39
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