Do I need the kafka package to ingest kafka messages with this project ?

I have been successfully able to deploy this project with kind and trigger actions. My goal was to get a kafka feed setup to trigger an action via a rule but no matter what I do it seems like my kafka feed does not pick up the messages. It appears as if it successfully creates the trigger and a response is recevied it looks like from the logs but messages don't propagate.
Is it possible I am missing stuff from here :
https://github.com/apache/openwhisk-package-kafka