Just before Alvan Gatitu hit the limelight as a contestant in the first edition of Tusker Project Fame years ago, he had seen the good, the bad and the ugly of the world.
He was brought up in church and loved the word of God, little did he know that his love for the gospel would take him to the Netherlands and have time in the red-light street.
Alvan recently spoke of his life before fame and it is interesting.
After schooling in Menengai High School, Nakuru County, Alvan moved from Nakuru to Nairobi for his degree in Music and Communication at Daystar University.
He told Jesee Junction that it is after this that he found himself in several churches as a worship leader before landing a job with a non-governmental organization.
His job was to work with other team members to bring the lost souls back to Christ. He loved this given his Christian background. All Alvan wanted was to have the commercial sex workers out of the streets.
A few months into the job, he was posted to The Netherlands for a gospel mission that involved preaching the word of God in the red light district. This was his ultimate calling, or so he thought.
“I ended up in an NGO that was based in The Netherlands as a rehab counsellor. So red-light street in Holland, helping the commercial sex workers get off the streets – you get in there and you bump into people naked and those are the people you are supposed to talk to, show them the cross and follow it,” he told MC Jessy.
Unknown to him, he was yet to see the reality of the dark world until one day when walking to the red light street that he bumped into “Church of Satan” standing at the entry of the long and winding street.
“Our first day to go for ministry, into the red light district, you walk into this street and I remember seeing this very distinctly; there was an old building that looked like a church. The Kibao imeandikwa pale in very definite terms ‘Church of Satan’”, he recalls.
He was with other Kenyans on the mission but the first feeling he got was insecurity and feeling like he would die in the Netherlands. He never saw anyone come in or out of this building that ‘traumatized’ him.
