Virtually every memory that Sister Jean has of her childhood is suffused with an awareness of her family’s grinding poverty.  Sister Jean was born in 1982 in a village called Lirembe in the western part of Kenya near Kakamega, the county seat, the second of seven children and her parents’ first female child. She was raised in a mud hut with a thatched roof. When insects ate away at the timbers that supported the roof in another house on the compound, her father built the current permanent house on their homestead. Her father worked for the Eveready Battery Company and then for the Pioneer Insurance company, but neither job paid him a wage that allowed him to provide for his family.  When I ask Sister what her first memory was, she replies, “we were really poor. I remember times when we lacked food.”