Like many other Divine Word missionaries, Brother Karl was first attracted by the idea of becoming a missionary through reading one of our magazines. In his case it was our German general-interest family monthly Stadt Gottes (City of God), over a century old and still going strong. He became a promoter of it while at school. One of a family of ten – six boys and four girls – he was born near Speyer in southern Germany 64 years ago.

After qualifying as a carpenter, he became a Divine Word missionary at 18 and went to work in the Philippines in 1971. Twelve years later he was transferred to a new mission we had just started in Kenya – though we have been working in other parts of Africa since the 19th century. (We have missions today in 16 countries in north, south, east, west and central Africa, as well as in some 60 other countries worldwide.)

He first spent 11 years in Garba Tulla, a semi-desert area about 350 km northeast from Nairobi, where we work among the Boranas, a mostly Muslim tribe. There he designed and built churches, schools, mission houses and a convent. He also trained many boys and young men to be carpenters, as he does wherever he works.

In 1996 he was transferred to a new mission we started in Dol Dol, south-western Kenya, where we work among the Maasai, one of Africa’s most famous tribal people. As usual Brother Karl built chapels, schools and mission houses in areas where they have settled in large numbers.

The Maasai emigrated south from the Nile Valley in the 18th century. About 100 years ago the British evicted them from many parts of Kenya to make room for white British settlers. Some one million Maasai live today in the Great Rift Valley, about 450,000 in Kenya and around 430,000 in northern Tanzania. Many have become Christians and a lesser number are Muslims.

“The Maasai are a semi-nomadic people who live under a communal system,” Karl explains. “In recent years some have abandoned their nomadic lifestyle for a commercial and urban one. But most are still herdsmen who also do some farming. Cattle are their main source of food and money, and many Maasai men have herds of about 50 cattle as well as goats and sheep.”

“They live in kraals, temporary huts built by the women,” he continues. “These are made of timber poles and small branches, plastered over with a mixture of mud, sticks, grass and cow-dung. In them they cook, eat, sleep and store food. Some kraals are occupied by one family, others are shared by an extended family. The kraals are arranged in a circular fashion and are enclosed by a fence made from acacia, whose thorns prevent lions from attacking their cattle. For it is in this enclosure that their cattle and sheep are kept for safety at night.”

“Their staple diet consists of cows’ milk, maize meal, porridge and sometimes meat. Recently many have also become dependent on food like rice, potatoes and cabbage. On special occasions and when sick they also drink cows’ blood.”

During his many years working with the Boranas and Maasai, Karl built them more than 100 wells, 30 meters deep for hand pumps. Nomadic himself, like the Maasai, he was taken away from them after about four years and transferred yet again, this time to work in our parishes in the shantytowns or slums of Nairobi, where he has been for the last nine years. Here again he has designed and built clinics, schools, chapels, mission houses and community centres.

In response to the AIDS epidemic in Kenya and especially in Nairobi, Bro Karl also built special clinics for AIDS victims in the Divine Word slum parishes. Cardinal Njue, Archbishop of Nairobi, was so impressed by them that he asked him to build many more in the capital. Karl had started doing so when the recent ethnic violence and killings, triggered by fraudulent elections, broke out in the city and many other urban areas of the country last December. The cause of the problem was the attempt by the ruling Government party of President Mwai Kibaki to hold on to power for his Kikuyu tribe as it has done for most of the 45 years since Kenya’s independence.

Nairobi was founded in 1899 on the site of a Maasai water hole as a camp for workers building the Mombasa to Uganda railway. It has since grown in population from 350,000 in 1963 to about three million today, of whom some one million live in its slums, with their mazes of shacks and open sewers, where crime and drugs are widespread.

The four million Kenyans suffering from AIDS are a huge problem for the country and its capital. Many of the thousands of Nairobi’s street children, among whom Karl also finds time to work, are orphans of the 700 AIDS victims who die every day. He helps other Divine Word missionaries to care for them and give them a primary education.

But he will soon be on the move again. A new seminary in Arusha in neighbouring Tanzania, where we also work, is the next item on the agenda for Brother Karl the nomadic builder.



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