In Kenya, hundreds of thousands are crammed into Africa’s largest slum. Known as Kibera, it’s a world where hope is often in short supply. In this darkness, however, a miracle is unfolding as a Texas-based ministry goes door-to-door, bringing God’s love and life-changing water filters.
Infamous for its gritty reputation, where crime and violence lurk at nearly every corner, Kibera faces extreme poverty and gang violence, while lacking basic necessities like clean water and sanitation, earning its reputation as one of the “darkest, filthiest, and most hopeless places in the world.”
Kibera is Africa’s largest slum, and a typical house here measures only eight by eight feet, and it’s built with mud walls, a corrugated tin roof, and either a dirt or concrete floor. There’s not a bathroom in the home. There’s no kitchen area in the home. It’s basically for sitting and sleeping only.
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Chris Beth, founder of The Bucket Ministry, first stepped into Kibera in 2017. What he saw shook him to his core.
“There wasn’t one home that had access to clean, safe drinking water,” he told CBN News on a recent trip to Kibera.
Water here isn’t a blessing — it’s a curse.
It’s a common scene here for folks to line up with jerry cans just to get water. The original source of this water is typically clean and safe to drink. But it must then travel through an intricate spiderweb-like system of pipes. The problem is that many of those pipes are broken, and contaminated water ends up getting into those pipes.
The Bucket Ministry has shown through their research that once the water gets to a certain point, the water is still very contaminated.
“So what you see is these snaked water lines all over this place that are on the surface, and most of them are illegally connected, they’re scabbed on to each other, and all of them leak,” Beth described while standing near one of those pipes carrying water. “Those leaks will actually start to suck sewage water into the pipes and contaminate the entire system with E coli, maybe dysentery, typhoid, cholera.”
Endless piles of trash are scattered throughout Kibera. The absence of proper sewage leaves human waste on the streets, which then ends up in the water.
The official statistics say there are 78 latrines in all Kibera serving over 400,000 people.
Beth recognized the urgent need for clean water and sent a team of 60 to canvass the slum.
“And all they did for four months was knock on every single one of the doors in this place and we found out that there were 81,077 homes,” said Beth. “We found out that there’s about 408,000 people created in God’s image that are sequestered to live in this place.”
In 2000, The Bucket Ministry began a groundbreaking effort—distributing life-saving water filters to each home here.
“When The Bucket Ministry came in, and they recruited the missionaries, going and supplying the filters and the buckets, people started accepting the gospel,” said Dihanda, who pastors Grace Revival Church in Kibera. “And we can see now the great harvest is coming in the Kingdom of God.”
More than 22,000 people gave their lives to Christ and the miracles keep going.
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Reprinted with permission from cbn.com. Copyright © 2025 The Christian Broadcasting Network Inc. All rights reserved.
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