Henry J. Koren, Spiritan East African Memorial, 1994.  After finishing his classical studies at the college of Mesnieres, he entered Chrevilly for his higher studies, was ordained a priest and made his first vows on August 15,1893. Assigned to the Zanguebar vicariate, he sailed on. September 12 of the same year. He did hls apprenticeship in Bura, Kenya, and then became bursar of the Mhonda mission and'director of its Christian villages and its orphanages''. ln 1901 we find him again in Bura. Three years later, he was asked to be the founder of a new station at Mitumi among the Kikuyu in Kenya. When this area was taken over by the Consolata Fathers in t906, he opened a small station at Mwanda, half a day's loumey from Bura, and then took over the Bura mission as its chief and pastor. World War one forced him into an intemment camp as an enemy alien, but, being an Alsatian, he was released in 1916. 

Retuming to Bura, he found his mission in disrepair: plantations plundered or

neglected, schools empty, converts gone, all three Precious Blood sisters of the

holpital dead, and his beloved Wataita people still uninterested in Christianity. 

Undeterred, he went to work again; he spoke their language perfectly and

learned all about their customs and way of thinking. Slowly he began to gain

ground in their esteem and by the time his work among them came to an end in

1925, he had high hopes that these proud and aloof mountaineers would soon

follow the example of their neighbors and become Christian. Exhausted by his labors, he became ill early in 1926 and had to retum to Europe for a rest. But he was so sick that, on landing in Marseille, he was rushed to the hospital and died there three days later.