Heather Bellamy spoke with Becky Murray, Co-founder of One by One.

Becky and Matthew Murray

Becky Murray is Co-founder of One by One with her husband Matthew. They travel extensively throughout the UK and the USA representing the charity and inspiring others to mission, as well as being mother and father to One by One's 150 plus children at King's Children's Home in Kenya. Heather Bellamy spent time with her and heard about the many children whose lives have been transformed and how their Dignity Project, supplying sanitary items to young girls, is helping to tackle trafficking.

Heather: What is One by One?

Becky: One by One is a missions organisation. We look after a home and school in Kenya and also a widows' feeding programme in Sri Lanka.

The reason we called it One by One is that we're very passionate about stopping for the one. Every single one of us can stop for the one person in front of us and meet their point of need, showing that person love. If each time we stop for the one in front of us, then we'll see whole nations and villages completely transformed.

Heather: Why did you start One By One?

Becky: As an 18 year old, I believed in my heart I was to one day run a children's home. I had no idea what to do with that. I was on a short term missions trip at the time in Romania and I remember coming home and saying to my mum and dad, I'm not going to do law any more, I'm going to go and open a children's home.

I didn't really know what to do with it then and year after year passed by and I'm still waiting for this children's home. I'm thinking, when's the right time and when's the right place?

During that time I was doing short term missions trips with my local church and it was during one of those missions trips out in Sierra Leone doing a feeding programme, that I met a little girl called Felicity. Felicity was nine years old at the time and she didn't have any shoes. So I took her to the market place and bought her these pretty little pink flip-flops. That evening she came back to the hotel. We were just heading out to do a big gospel campaign in the middle of the city and she came up and said, "Should I wait in the hotel for you?" I said, "No honey, we're just going out for the gospel campaign. Come with us." And she said, "Yes, but shouldn't I wait in the hotel room for you?" Now, if she had said that to my husband, I would have immediately known what she was saying, but here was a nine year old girl looking at another girl asking if she should stay in her bedroom. So for a third time I asked her and sure enough this little girl thought I had spent sixty pence on a pair of flip-flops, so that I could have her body.

I remember in that moment just being scarred. I'd read about children selling their bodies for bottles of coke and crazy things like that, but nothing can prepare you for the moment a child looks you in the eye and thinks that you've spent 60 pence and that means that you deserve their body. I remember being so angry, not at the little girl, but that she'd gone through so much abuse in her nine little short years, that she would presume that for a sixty pence gift.

So right there in that moment I determined in my heart I had to do something. I didn't know how that would work out, or what it would look like, but I just had to do something.

Heather: And how old were you at this point?

Becky: I was in my early twenties at the time.

Heather: Has your time and energy gone into One by One from that point?

Becky: It has in terms of my passions, but in terms of my time, I still had to have a job, so I trained to be a nurse after that. I was a paediatric nurse for several years up at the Sheffield Children's Hospital and just learning a trade that I thought would be useful for the mission field, whilst praying through the whens and the hows of life.