One of my hosts has said several times in the last couple of days that Kenya is a land of many contrasts. That proves itself true over and over in countless ways. I'm staying in a lovely home outside of Nairobi in the midst of lush green tea plantations. My hosts, Maggie and Charles, could not possibly be more gracious and hospitable. They have shared their lives and their ministries with me in deep and profound ways that actually embody those contrasts. I can't possibly tell it all, but let me start with a couple of the highlights from these past few days.
Yesterday we went into town (Nairobi) to visit one of the ministries started by their church, Mamlaka Hill Chapel. We had visited the church two nights before after Charles picked me up at the airport, and we stopped to pick Maggie up following a meeting of the leaders of their various women's ministries. Mamlaka is a non-denominational evangelical church, situated in the heart of Nairobi, and just across the parkway from All Saints Anglican Cathedral, the mother church of the Anglican Church of Kenya. I went to All Saints last time I was in Nairobi. Now I'm across the street, and ironically feeling quite a bit less, well... conspicuous -- as a priest from the Episcopal Church in the US. I had to fly under the radar there. There is no radar here. Mamlaka is evangelical in the best sense of the word - missional, engaged in transformational ministries, welcoming, full of vitality, and overflowing with young people in their twenties, situated as it is on the campus of the University of Nairobi. We had to fight our way through the crowds of university students gathered at the church for various events on a Wednesday evening at about 9:00 pm.
But yesterday, Charles and Maggie took me to visit Full Circle - a ministry to prostitutes. Just a few years ago shortly after they went to Mamlaka, the congregation made a strategic decision to focus on a one kilometer radius around their location, and begin to ask what God might be calling them to do in the city. Just shy of one kilometer from them is Nairobi's red light district. They figured there was probably some ministry to do there. They started by going and befriending the "girls" on the street. (They drove me through the area after dark last night, and there are plenty of them around.) What has evolved over the past three years is a ministry to help commercial sex workers who want to leave the trade do so. The place we visited yesterday was a very nice house in what I would call a suburban neighborhood of Nairobi, where Full Circle goes about its work. We pulled in through the gate to be welcomed by Eunice Likoko, a 30ish woman with a big smile and a warm "Karibu" (welcome). I immediately recognized her as someone I had met at the Amahoro Gathering the past two years, first in Rwanda and then last year in South Africa. I hadn't really gotten to know her, so hadn't put the name and the face together. Eunice is the Executive Director of Full Circle, bringing her deep faith and her background as a social worker to this ministry. It became clear to me over the next hour that this was truly a calling for her.
We went inside and were introduced to several other people, including two young interns from Mamlaka, as well as another Amahoro friend, Caroline, a South African from Cape Town who had also just arrived and was making the rounds to various ministries to see "what God was up to" here in Nairobi. She, too, is headed for next week's Amahoro Gathering in Mombasa. About 12 of us sat around in the circle for introductions. Several women in the group introduced themselves simply as a "member of Full Circle." Charles, Eunice and I then went off for a meeting together while the women continued with one of the training sessions that regularly takes place here. Meanwhile, Eunice spent the next hour or so helping me understand how the ministry works and what they have learned over the past few years. They are there to assist those who desire help to get it in an environment of love, respect, and care. They deal with the issues of emotional, physical and sexual abuse and trauma, deeply spiritual issues of identity and worth, and the social and economic factors that led to their situation. The "members" face many challenges as they try to reintegrate into society, rejoin their families, and overcome the underlying issues of domestic stress and poverty that initially sent them to the streets. Eunice told us stories of women on this journey and how their lives are being transformed by the experience at Full Circle. We reentered the group to see Becky, one of the interns, leading a session on active listening, and showing herself not only to be good at that, but being an incredibly effective trainer in general. Twenty-five women have been through the year-long program, including one who was "rescued" the night before she was to spend her first night on the street. Eunice reports that nearly all of the women accept Christ into their lives during the program, though that is not an expectation or requirement for their being there. They leave the program with a new sense of dignity and purpose in life, and the determination and skills to live life more fully. I left Full Circle deeply grateful for people like Eunice and Becky and the others who have answered the call to this ministry.
And then there was today. A very different day. Charles had left early this morning to take care of some business in town. About 10 am I went by taxi to meet him in Karen, Nairobi's posh suburb named for Karen Blixen of Out of Africa fame. Once I finally caught up with him, he was waiting along with two Masai men to go off together to their village a little over an hour away. We drove through the Ngong hills, over bumpy roads, through several bustling, often chaotic towns along the way, until we emerged from the mountain tops onto the vast panorama of Masailand laid out before us below. Traveling down into what is the lowest point in East Africa, and into a markedly different ecosystem and climate zone, we came eventually to a point where we left the paved (well, potholed) road onto a dirt road, a couple of miles back to a small Masai village. We parked the car under an acacia tree and got out to the smiles of the waiting members of the family. We were immediately surrounded by young children, and the brightly colored traditional dresses and jewelry laden, stretched ear loops of the Masai women. The two men, Immanuel and Paul, introduced me to everyone. Charles has known these guys for many years and been here often. Mamlaka, together with partner churches from Germany, are preparing to put in a bore hole for the community in the near future. Over the next few hours, I played with the children, walked around the small village of 30 or so people, met all the women and some of the men, sat quietly with Immanuel and his goats as he shared his life and the culture of his people with me. We were invited into his mother's manyatta -- her hut -- made of sticks covered with cow dung, standing barely six feet high and covered with a grass roof reinforced with plastic to protect from the rains. I had to duck to go through the doorway, and still had to duck just to be inside. It was pitch black until my eyes adjusted. There were three tiny "rooms" including a kitchen, a bedroom (just big enough for a platform that was the bed, covered with animal skins they called a mattress), and a small sitting room where Immanuel's mother seemed to spend her time when she wasn't in the kitchen or outside. Immanuel, Charles and I sat on a small wooden bench they had brought inside for us in a little hallway area between the kitchen and sitting room.
Immanuel is a modern Masai man twenty-five years of age. He has graduated from secondary school, already breaking the mold of traditional Masai society. Consequently, he missed his opportunity for an arranged marriage at roughly 15-17 years of age (for the girls it is usually 13). He is now faced with finding himself a wife, most likely a Masai girl who also went to school and has waited on marriage. He is also unique in that he is a member of a traditional Masai dance group that performs for the outside world. So, in addition to tending his cows and goats, and working as a guard in the money economy of Karen, he travels all over the world dancing and representing his culture to the rest of the world. He has been to Europe three times and to South Korea and Japan. He will be going to South Africa this summer during the World Cup. Immanuel walks gracefully in many worlds. He performed for the pope at the Vatican one day, and was herding his goats and cattle the next. He was scheduled to go to America once, to North Carolina. They made all the arrangements, got six-month visas from the US Embassy, and were prepared to leave when they discovered there was a problem. The hosts who had invited them had not planned on paying their airfares for their American tour. Slight misunderstanding there, apparently. They did not make the trip. He still hopes to do so someday.
The best part of the day was the children. They ran circles around me, hanging on me, touching my white skin, tracing the veins in my hands and pulling the stretchy skin on the backs of my elbows. They sang for me and danced, and loved having their pictures taken. When I showed them the pictures and videos on my digital camera, they laughed and wanted me to take more. I will treasure these pictures forever.
We walked around the small village composed of a few huts and the karals for the cattle, goats and sheep. The enclosures for the livestock are made of sticks tightly woven into a web strong and high enough to keep lions out. The animals are kept here every night. I asked Immanuel if they ever hear lions around here. "Oh yes," he said, "every night." Lions and leopards roam the area. He and the other men of the village are prepared, if necessary, to kill a lion with their weapons - spears and arrows. That's it. He has done it with a group of men before. He said that when men go out to hunt lions as Masai men do, there is a fifty-fifty chance that they will come back. Sometimes the people win. Sometimes the lions win. Just part of life.
After some time sitting out under the trees talking and visiting, we were invited back to Immanuel's mother's manyatta for some lunch. He had just finished telling me about the Masai diet. They eat three things: meat (mostly goat), milk (from the goats) and blood drained from the necks of their animals. They are herders and they do not farm, so their diet does not include fruit and vegetables or any non-animal products. I eagerly, but suspiciously, anticipated the culinary experience waiting for me in his mother's hut. I eat just about anything set before me. I also am aware that I have a pretty strong gag reflex, so I have to mentally prepare myself sometimes for certain things. I know from having eaten lots of meat in Africa that I should expect larger amounts of fat and gristle than I would normally eat at home. I also knew that the last thing I wanted to do was to offend my hosts by not eating what they offered me. I would do my best.
We resumed our seats on the bench, eyes adjusting to the dark, faint scent of smoke from the fire in the air, as two young women emerged from the kitchen behind us with bowls of goat stew. It smelled wonderful. And to my great surprise (and delight), it included potatoes and peas. It had nice small chunks of goat meat. So far so good. It also, I realized, as I moved my spoon around in it and took a first bite, had several large balls of pure fat. A couple of tentative chews, a deep breath, and a great big swallow, and down she slid. Not too bad. I can do this. The stew was really, really, delicious, and minus the big balls of fat could have been served on our table in Andover to the ooohs and aaahs of our guests - as long as we didn't let them know it was goat meat!
The goat milk (really more of a warm, slightly fermented yoghurt) never appeared. And the blood -- mercifully -- never appeared either. The milk would have been fine, I'm sure. The blood -- ewwww. I really do not know what I would have done.
Being with these lovely people, in this remarkably traditional community, is a profound experience. It calls into question so many deeply held assumptions about what it means to be human -- what it means to be made in the image of God -- and what that image really looks like. Most of the people I met today, I'm sure, would find our culture as strange and confusing and even frightening as we might find theirs. But God made the Masai, and the Pokot, and the Samburu, and the Turkana, the Kikuyu and the Kalenjian and the Luhya and Luo, and all of Kenya's many other tribes -- just as surely as God made the English and the Scots and the Germans and Flemish that make up the most recent few centuries of my own ancestral DNA. These distinctions ultimately have little to do with what it means to be human, except in some derived sense. What I experienced today was a beautiful expression of humanity, with its own blessings and its own unique challenges. We all have them. I experienced love today, a whole lot of joy, and a very deep peace.
The image of God, indeed. Nairobi streetwalkers. Goat-herding, blood-drinking Masai. And perhaps even in the rest of us.
Feel free to post your reactions and your thoughts.
