During his first-ever trip to the United States, Trinity Jewelry Crafts founder Joseph Muchina made a visit to our corporate office in Akron, Pennsylvania.  He remarked about the clean streets, open spaces and beautiful countryside.  Those of us that work here might often overlook the pleasant, pastoral beauty of our surroundings, but it’s a far cry from the environment where Joseph Muchina was raised.  

Muchina grew up in the Nairobi slum of Mathare Valley in the 1960s.  “It was a world of its own,” Muchina recalls, “that the government didn’t bother with.” There were no public services— sanitation, running water, or proper roads. Houses were cramped together, with roofs made of paper and plastic.  Fires were common, and devastating.  

Men held property rights, so when Muchina’s parents separated when he was ten, his mother was left with nothing.   She raised Muchina and his two siblings on the money she earned brewing and selling illegal alcohol.  He remembers playing outside his home, serving as a lookout, singing songs as a signal for his mother’s customers to scatter when police approached.

Without a consistent (or legitimate) source of income, Muchina’s mother struggled to pay school fees, and Muchina was in and out of school during much of his youth. When he did go to school, he often went hungry. “Breakfast was a luxury,” he says. Because he walked a long distance to school, he couldn’t go home for lunch —though there was nothing to eat there anyway, he says— so he slept in the fields during breaks.  When he came home in the afternoon, his mother, who he remembers as polite, friendly and kind, was often intoxicated, passed out, or arrested.  

“It was a hard life, a very hard life,” Muchina remembers.  Worse, “there was no hope.”  

There was no one to assist them, to show them how they could help themselves and their families, until the National Christian Council of Kenya (NCCK) took notice.  NCCK sent social workers to study the hardships in the slums.  The organization began paying school fees, distributing food and clothing once a week and opened a clinic.

But, Muchina explains, after a few years, NCCK determined that “giving handouts” wasn’t the best way to help the people of Mathare Valley.  It shifted its goal toward empowering people by giving them skills that could help them the rest of their lives.

In 1970, just as Muchina was finishing his schooling, NCCK built training units to teach toymaking, weaving, jewelry making and other trades, and to help participants initiate their own businesses that would eventually employ other program graduates.  Muchina was among the first assigned to the jewelry unit, where he received a living allowance while learning the trade.   He spent two years training, then another twelve instructing new students in the craft.  

In 1984, he and two others formed Trinity Jewelry Crafts, a nod to its three founders, and to NCCK, the Christian organization that ultimately made the venture possible

Through purchase of thousands of bracelets, earrings and necklaces over the past 23 years, Ten Thousand Villages has proudly partnered with Trinity in its efforts to address poverty through employment and economic opportunity.