Marysville — Marysville residents Steve Bishop and his wife Betty Bishop are on a mission to save more than the souls of a group of young African boys.

The trip to Kenya is the latest in a series of missionary endeavors the couple have undertaken through Agape Children’s Ministry — an international organization which rescues and helps educate Kenyan children.

The Bishops will live in Kisumi, a capital city in one of the newly formed counties in Kenya. The couple are administrators at a vocational school beside Lake Victoria.

Their students are boys ages 15 to 18.

Most were orphaned after their parents died of HIV-related illnesses. Many have been abused and are homeless.

“These are street boys,” Steve Bishop said. “They sleep on the streets. They live on the streets basically. They’ve been thrown away. Everyone throws them away. We go out and find the boys. Some of them don’t want to be rescued. Some of them are scared to death. We give them a chance to come off the street and we give them a safe, clean place where there’s supervision constantly. They have food, a safe bed and education.”

It’s difficult for most Americans to imagine the cultural, social and economic conditions in the country.

The children the Bishops teach would likely not a have a chance at education without the Christian school.

“The schools are expensive,” Steve Bishop said. “There’s no public school. Our kids go through the twelfth grade. We teach the boys as long as they can and are willing to learn.”

The Bishops have been working in Africa for nearly 20 years.

“We went over there our first time in 1995,” Steve Bishop said. “We’ve been 18 times. We would go over there to do work projects — building projects, mostly. We would go when they’d be building classrooms, dormitories, dining halls, that sort of thing. We got an email from a guy we’ve known since 1971 saying the administrator for the Agape school had resigned and they were looking for a replacement and would we be interested in spending some time there. We were invited to come and spend a semester and help at the vocational school. We looked at each other and said, ‘Why not?’”

The Bishop’s life in Kenya is fairly unadorned.

They have a snug little home near the school but no air-conditioning or running water.

“We live out in the bush,” Steve Bishop said. “ There is no electricity. Our water we take out of Lake Victoria and we use it to bathe and wash clothes and filter it through a sand filter that Franklin Graham (founder of the Samaritans Purse organization) distributes. We use that for our drinking water.”

Boys at the vocational school can learn three trades — auto mechanics, masonry and carpentry.

“These are good skills for the area,” Steve Bishop said. “ These are things the boys can really use.”

The students have an excellent course completion record, he said.

“In the time that we have had the school in the area, all of our boys have graduated with a certificate from the government,” he noted. “They have to take an exam to prove they have the skills to do the job they were trained for. “

The couple’s grandsons Gideon McPeek and Dalton McPeek have accompanied the couple on some of their trips.

“We took our 13-year-old grandson who turned 14 while he was there,” Steve Bishop said. “ He was home-schooled so we were able to teach him and go through his school work with him.”

The Bishops said they believe the school changes the boys’ perspectives.

“We focus primarily on the spiritual aspect for the boys,” Steve Bishop said, adding, “We saw 12 boys receive Jesus and the second trip we had 16 that were water baptized and they become little evangelists for the neighborhoods.

On one of their trips, their grandson, Dalton used a unicycle to reach out to local people.

“Our youngest grandson could ride a unicycle and one of the missionaries had brought a unicycle so we took it over to the vocational school and taught the boys how to ride it,” Steve Bishop said. “We quickly discovered that a unicycle would draw a crowd and once the boys were Baptized they wanted to start interpreting for Betty, clean the church and do all kinds of work. We would have 200 to 300 come to see the unicycle and hear the testimony.”

Besides teaching and mentoring their young students, the Bishops also helped secure funding for facility improvements at the vocational school.

“One of the things we noticed was they didn’t have a dining hall and the kitchen was outdated,” Betty Bishop said. “ We came back last time and took up some money and we were able to build a foundation and walls. The boys actually did the work. All we needed was funding for the material. So that’s right now where we are. The boys are using their skills to build a dining hall.”

Building materials are difficult to come by in Kenya.

Cement blocks are not purchased. They’re made by hand — one compact block at a time.

Construction techniques are also a little different, Steve Bishop said.

“Buildings don’t have full walls because of the temperature there,” he said. “ The walls just go about three feet and the rest is screens.”

The dining hall project required about 2,000 of the handmade blocks.

“It’s a very slow process,” Betty Bishop said. “It took three months to build the foundation.”

There’s a different mindset at work within the tribal communities.

“Africa will teach you patience,” Steve Bishop said. “To the people that work in Africa, a job is not something to be finished. A job is something to take a lifetime. It’s a different perspective. It really is different. It can be very frustrating for an American whose got a goal to finish things. We’re very aggressive.”

Besides the dining hall, Steve Bishop said he initiated efforts to build a fresh water pond for tilapia.

The students are already harvesting the farm-raised fish to supplement their diets, he said.

Safety is also a concern, but the couple said they don’t plan their lives around potential problems.

“What is safe?,” Betty Bishop said. “Safety is not guaranteed anywhere.”

Steve Bishop agreed.

“We’re convinced that being safe is being right where God wants us to be and that’s where we feel like we are. We feel like we’re accomplishing his goals for our life.”

The couple’s home — on the school campus — is always open to visitors.

“We have an open door policy,” Steve Bishop said. “ We were told to watch out when we went there but we looked around and said, ‘What do we have that we can’t afford to lose?’ We’re here to love the boys. We’re not here to guard our stuff.”

In many ways, the students become like members of a family with Steve Bishop and Betty Bishop as surrogate parents.

Steve Bishop also teaches the teenagers something less tangible than job skills. He said he helps them learn “how to be men” — to look others in the eye, to give a firm, confident handshake, to live up to one’s promises.

In addition, Steve compiled resumes for his graduating students to help the young men find employment.

“I put together a resume of the classes they’d taken, where they were from and the work they had done,” he said. “ I included pictures of the projects they had completed — full-colored colored pictures with each resume. It also included a letter a recommendation from their teachers and I put it in a little notebook.”

The Bishops home is often filled with visiting students. The boys do art projects. They watch videos.

“I’m taking notebook paper, colored pencils, story books, games,” Betty Bishop said of her preparations for the couple’s next trip to Africa. “I take all kinds of things that they’re not used to getting.”

Saturday afternoons are sometimes spent watching DVDs on Steve’s laptop.

“We had a gospel video that they absolutely loved,” Steve Bishop said. “ It’s called ‘The Miracle of Hope’ from the Brooklyn Singers. It was (filmed) in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. They didn’t want to stop watching it.”

The kids were also fascinated when the Bishops set up a makeshift hair salon under a tree near their home.

“We even let one of the boys cut Betty’s hair,” Steve Bishop said.

An outdoor birthday party for one of the Bishop’s grandsons gave the students a chance to eat chocolate cake.

The cake was such a hit, Betty Bishop said her supplies for the next trip will include 12 boxes of cake mixes — enough mix to serve the students and other facility members three times.

Like most international missionaries, the Bishops temper their evangelical outreach with respect for indigenous beliefs.

“The Africans are very spiritual people,” Steve Bishop said “They mix tradition. They may believe in Jesus but they also keep their traditional beliefs as well because nobody’s taught them that they don’t have to depend on those things anymore. Fear and ancestry is really, really deep in their culture.”

Steve Bishop said a student named Winstone is fairly typical of this dichotomy.

“Winstone came to me with a teacher one day and explained that every night he was awakened by nightmares,” Steve Bishop said.  “He was being chased by witches and other unsavory characters.  This was a problem because he would awaken the entire dorm with his screams of terror.  I shared the freedom that comes when Jesus comes into our lives.  He prayed and asked Jesus to set him free.  The next day and every day until we left this was his way of greeting me.  He would say, ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you’ because he was free of the tormenting dreams.”

Betty Bishop said she and her husband grow close to each group of students. Leaving the young men at the end of the school term can be heartbreaking.

The students likely feel the same.

“One of the little guys looked up at ‘Momma Betty’ and said, ‘I wish you were my momma,’” Steve Bishop said.

For information visit agapechildren.org or call (888) 572-4273.