As reported in nz.news.yahoo.com on July 5, 2009

Thirty years after Peter Gitau escaped life in the slums of Kenya, he is trying to track down the New Zealanders who rescued him.

Mr Gitau is searching for members of a Wellington-based group, Khandallah Young Anglicans, whose sponsorship in the 1980s saved his life, he said.

In 1978, when he was four, Mr Gitau was faced with a bleak existence after his parents divorced. His mother and her eight children were forced to leave their home.

While six of them were sent to stay with other family members, Mr Gitau and his two-year-old brother Nelson remained with her in a city slum house with mud and sticks for walls, and a piece of corrugated iron for a roof.

"If you think of all the bad things that people can do when they're poor, it was that all the time," said Mr Gitau.

"Constant fighting. Our slum probably supplied half the crime in the whole city. Drunkards, everybody was drunk. I remember one or two suicides, wife beating, abusing of children."

"There was no electricity, no running water. No showers, no toilets. There was a huge outbreak of cholera and other diseases."

His mother provided for her children by selling food for farmers at markets, but in 1980 Mr Gitau was taken in by Starehe Boys' Centre and the Khandallah group sponsored his clothes, food and education through Save the Children.

He described life at the centre as fantastic. Living in a dormitory with 40 boys his age, he was able to play soccer and read books, and to have three meals a day.

"We had two women -- they were called house mothers -- who took care of us. They were very, very strict and would occasionally pinch us or slap us, but, coming from the slums, it was nothing to complain about."

In 1983, his brother was also taken in by the school.

"I missed my Mum in a sense. I wished she would come and live with us at the school, but I also knew it was easier for her now we were away," Mr Gitau said.

He left the school in 1991, and attended a teacher training college, earning teaching qualifications in English, English literature and Swahili.

He went on to university, graduating with honours in a Bachelor of Philosophy in Education in 2002.

In 2006, while teaching at a school in Tanzania, Mr Gitau met Angela Wilton, another teacher.

"We started seeing each other and on our first date, when I told her about my connection with New Zealand through the Save the Children, she said, `Hey, I come from New Zealand'."

It was a stroke of luck that Ms Wilton was still at the school when he arrived, Mr Gitau said, because she had actually resigned months earlier.

The pair discovered both had been offered jobs at another African school, St Constantine's, the previous year.

"It's like we were just meant to meet," he said.

After travelling together, the pair arrived in New Zealand in 2007.

"When I was in Kenya, I always knew my sponsors came from a place called Khandallah Ngaio," he said.

"When we came here, we were driving into Wellington and I saw Khandallah. I said to my wife, `Stop! Khandallah. I remember that name. These are the people who sponsored me!"'

During the following months, Mr Gitau set about trying to locate his sponsors.

After travelling back to his school in Kenya and obtaining his records, he found he had been sponsored by a church group, Khandallah Young Anglicans.

"I went to Save the Children to see if they knew where Khandallah Young Anglicans were and found that they were no longer there," he said.

"So, that was a bit of a snag, but they're still working on it."

Without sponsorship, Mr Gitau said he would probably be dead now. He feels he owes the group a huge debt of gratitude -- literally for saving his life.

"Two of the friends I grew up with were shot. One of them climbed on to the roof to try to see what was going on and he was just shot. He was about 13."

Police often shot young children in those days, he said.

All the children he had grown up with in the slum were now dead.

"Other people have a place they can go and find childhood friends. I can't. They're all gone," he said.

"It was very, very hard. When I came to New Zealand and was told what people considered slums here, I thought, `These people must be crazy'."

Mr Gitau, now 34, and Ms Wilton, 37, married last October. Ironically, the ceremony took place in Wilton, a suburb close to Khandallah.

They expect their first child in September.

The search for the group that saved his life goes on, Mr Gitau said.

"I thought how nice it would be if I walked into an office and said, `You once helped a boy called Peter in Africa back in the 80s. That's me'," he said.

"I think people just give money; they don't give much thought. Maybe after 10 or 15 years, they forget about it. They don't put a modern face into what they did. They don't know how big it was, what a huge difference they made."

Save the Children New Zealand acting executive director Philip Abraham said stories like Mr Gitau's showed the impact sponsorship programmes could have.

"This is a fantastic case and point where a young boy in difficult circumstances has now flourished to become a leader," Mr Abraham said.

"Stories of individuals trying to track the individuals or organisations that helped them are great because it means these people recognise the generosity of the donors and want to make contact."

story also on:  http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/top-stories/5703305/desperately-seeking-slum-saviour/