What was once clear for me, my two and a half weeks spent in Africa, is rapidly being relegated to impression and memory, I hope to effectively grasp the edges of my experience and tease out the important threads for you. You will have to be the judge as to how effective my telling is. I’m also writing this on a train.
Africa began as a smell (everyplace has a defining scent that underlies all others) that became dominated by palettes of red-browns, scrubby yellows, and sullen grey-blues. Nairobi, the capital of Kenya and our “port of call” was a jumble of dark faces and white vans; the vans and faces were, at first, difficult to differentiate. But after a time the faces began to belong to their owners and I no longer tried to get into vans that were not our own. Our group from Eagle Rock Baptist Church (ERBC) was fairly stratified in its diversity. I was the oldest of the young; there were several persons younger than me (in high school) and everyone else was over the age of fifty. We spent our first day in a bit of a haze, traveling the road to our first destination. Narok was a town typical of Kenya. It was a collection of buildings none more then three stories tall, all dirty and appearing to have been built in the seventies. Elements of the buildings had been scrounged together, everything is written in English even though Swahili is the official language. There was a permanent bazaar in the center of town that hawked cheap wares and grilled corn. Even though food and clothes were cheap, poverty hung about the buildings and had its mark laid across our neighbors. We stayed at a hotel on the outskirts of town and in an odd sorta way it came to symbolize some aspects of Kenyan culture. Everything looked well on the surface-but was defective. Some of us had toilets that didn’t flush or drains that didn’t work. The stairs were uneven but made of marble. A lot of things were like that. Africa was just like America, just more complicated.
Our first week was with the Maasai at a Hope Center (a school/ medical building/boarding house) in Olooltoto built roughly 20 years ago by ERBC. We were greeted with great enthusiasm. Because they had been coming for several decades the people in our group had old relationships with the people of Olooltoto. Some of our group had been the first to teach the school’s teachers and translators about the Bible when they were children. Since the relationships ran deep it was as if we had been reunited with family that hadn’t been seen for a long while. That was the underlying current to our week in Olooltoto. There was a great affection and a sense of parallel purpose to our time spent with them. It was a unique experience to pray, worship, and teach with Christians on the other side of the world who hadn’t been raised the same way as ourselves. The Maasai were generally a very thoughtful bunch; they listened intently and spoke with great clarity of thought. The Maasai who were Christian had overcome great obstacles in their faith. Their culture is separate from mainstream Kenyan life (much like Native Americans here). Traditionally they are polygamous and unfaithful in their polygamy, sharing wives between villages. They also practiced female circumcision (genital mutilation) and preteen marriage (10 years old girls would marry men as old as 50) until recently. The movement of the Holy Spirit among them was very apparent in the way that their culture has changed since the involvement of the ERBC and the Hope Centers. Our work there consisted mostly of a Vacation Bible School in the morning for about 400 students, afternoon Bible studies for the men and women, and building projects in the late afternoon/early evening. I was quite exhausted coming back every night; the work was hard and emotionally draining. There were such highs and lows during the course of a day. One particularly low moment was when I caught a stomach fluke and was laid out in the bathroom all night. I could have sworn that my guts were trying to bust out of abdomen and I was unable to work for a day. A missionary who had been there for fifty years, a Marilyn Newman, was a great comfort to me during this time. She was a trained nurse and sat with me for an hour as I squirmed around and was sick all over the place. It was humbling to be taken care of by a woman who had been a similar help to thousands of Africans over the course of her life. After taking some antibiotics I was back in action and I was glad to be back ministering with the preschoolers at Olooltoto. I had the most fun teaching the preschoolers. They were very affectionate and clingy (in a good way) and they helped me get over my aversion to being touched. The Maasai culture is very touchy-feely. The men would sometimes just walk up and hold my hand because that’s the cultural norm. Our first week went quickly, and it was with promises of seeing each other in another two years that we left.
If our first week went fast our second was a blur. We traveled to the cities/towns of Osegel, Kibera, and Nakuru and did more VBSs and work projects. We taught over 900 students and made 44 desks and a great many benches. My experience in Kibera, a slum within Nairobi, was particularly raw. In the 1980s there was a huge famine that caused a great many women to become homeless and turn to prostitution. They and their illegitimate offspring where the original citizens of the Kibera slums and now there is a steady influx there of the diseased and handicapped. The buildings were made of soggy cardboard scraps and rusted tin that bled red. Raw sewage ran alongside a road that was mud mixed with offal and the garbage that even the poorest of the poor refused to scrounge. It was here that children ran barefooted and slept on top of rotting refuse to stay warm. In all likelihood many had AIDs/HIV. My short time with them (only one day) had me considering a great many things. But even here, where you would think despair would have her grimy claw in them, the people were optimistic and willing to listen to the Word of God. I cried a lot on the inside that day, but it was a good to be confronted with my responsibilities as an affluent Christian.
After that final week and a half of travel and teaching our group was drawn pretty thin. Even the young people started getting tired. Still, it felt like our time had been too short. There was still a great deal of work to do. Africa is a really screwed up place. Corruption in all levels of society/religion/government is institutionalized, and life is cheap. But (there’s always a but attached when you talk about Africa) there is a great burning in the hearts of those touched by the Lord: they want to improve their lives, they want to become educated, they want to spread the Word to the other Maasai and the other tribes in the African savannah. What I saw in Africa, the depths of sorrow and joy forged together, did nothing but affirm my belief in the goodness in God. When people fell they rose, when we failed we succeed elsewhere, when we prayed with the people we shared our ancient covenant with God. The Word is alive and well in Africa, but only through the grace and support of God. Prayer sustains them: the missionaries who struggle hourly, and the Kenyans who struggle every moment of their day. Their sins are not like ours, and perhaps ours are more damning. They pray for us, for the health of our Church, and I strongly suggest that you pray for the health of the Church as well.
