A life as a chef aboard international cruise ships was what senior Dusty Breeding imagined as his destined path after graduating high school.
However in the summer of 2006 he embarked on a journey into Africa that took his life off “cruise control” and set him on a more charitable course. Now a religion major at Pepperdine he returns several times a year to the birthplace of not only his company Lifebread but of his newfound life’s pursuit. Lifebread is a food-based ministry in Uganda and Kenya and expanding.
Q: How did Lifebread get started?
A: Lifebread was born out of my first experience in Africa. A friend and I spent 10 weeks there five in Uganda and five in Kenya doing missionary work. You can’t deny the immense poverty there. When you are meeting the people holding the babies and shaking the hands of the starving it’s much more powerful and real. Going there changes you in a way that makes you much more conscious of what is going on in the world. We had gone to a Christian youth camp during our trip and saw that all the kids were getting to eat was rice and beans. So I was joking around with one of the counselors when I told him that if he built me an oven I would come back and cook for them.
Q: What happened after you came back to America?
A: Soon after I got back they called me and told me that they had built a couple ovens and wanted me to bake. When I got there I realized that the ovens were on top of a dormant volcano. They were on top of this beautiful location on the border of the Congo and Uganda and I just baked bread. It was then that I realized the practicality of a food-based ministry.
Q: What do you mean by a food-based min-_istry?
A: Well that idea actually began while I was in Kenya. When I was there I worked for a ministry called Made in the Streets. They work in the slums of Nairobi which itself is home to more than 30000 orphans. They take these or__phans off the streets and educate them. I worked there making food and teaching them how to develop their menu and make it more marketable. So with those two experiences baking in Uganda and working on the streets of Kenya I saw the need for a food-based ministry. Some of the children have been starving for so long that they sniff a mixture of rubber cement and gasoline to get high. They try to stay high all day because it helps to curb their hunger pains. If you have ever been around someone who is on drugs you know that it is very difficult to convey your message to them. So I realized that it wasn’t practical to do [get my message across] unless their physical needs were first met. Because of my culinary background and my heart for the people of Africa there was a connection between the spiritual and the physical. That’s how I created Lifebread over two years ago.
Q: Where are you at right now with Lifebread?
A: We have three ovens in Uganda and one in Nairobi which I just built over Christmas break. This summer I have a team of 10 Pepperdine students coming with me to a small village outside Nairobi called Kamulu to continue our work.
Q: Has there been anyone who has inspired you?
A: I don’t really have any big – name heroes. The people I see as my personal heroes are people who are actively influencing their communities with love. It’s the people who are friendly to the guy at Jack in the Box who smile to the people who are having a bad day. Those are the ones I admire. My parents told me that it’s the little things that you do that change your community which changes the world. There is a lady who lives in Uganda Pruzi I met her through the church there and she is a grandma who had two daughters die of AIDS and she now has one grandson who has HIV. There happened to be seven other children in her village orphaned by AIDS and so she took them into her ten-foot by ten-foot house. She feeds them and pays for their schooling by making beads and she’s saving lives. She saw the need in her community and did what she had to do to help. So to me its people like that who are heroes.
Learn more about Lifebread at www.lifebread.org.
