(Please see the photos for this posting in a separate photos-only entry.)
The last and most extended field trip arranged by our CRWRC contacts was to the small and isolated village of Ulungu in Kitui District, located far from any main roads a third of the way from Nairobi to Mombasa. The new Athi River campus of Daystar is 40 km down the same road, so when I was asked to come to Athi River to meet the Acting Vice-Chancellor and other new Daystar faculty for tea on Thursday, a day when our only scheduled activity was travel to Ulungu, our schedule fell into place perfectly. We made an early departure from the YMCA in order to attend the 8:30 Daystar chapel service, and afterward—to my surprise—the entire Calvin group was invited for tea with the VC. As of January 1, when Godfrey Nguru stepped down, that’s James Kombo, a theologian whom I met last November who wants me to work with him on a number of curricular matters. (Unlike most Kenyans—and most Americans—he got my name right the first time I said it. He told me he studied, and greatly valued, my father’s books when studying at St. Paul’s Theological Seminary here in Nairobi.) James is a wonderfully welcoming host who made the students feel like honored guests.
Also present were Mike and Kristen Paulsen, who are living at the Athi River campus and are the only other new visiting faculty couple this semester at either campus. He’s a law professor at St. Thomas University (St. Paul), here to help launch an undergraduate law degree; she’s an architect; and their two children are with them, one doing home schooling and the other attending Daystar. Their morning walk opportunities are very different from ours: for us it’s buses and matatus belching clouds of exhaust, crowds of pedestrians, and broken sidewalks, while they can walk into the Lukenya Hills for broad vistas of grassland with giraffes and zebras grazing nearby. Still, we’re glad we are living in town, not needing to travel 35 km on one of Kenya’s most heavily traveled highways and 5 km on a rough dirt road to get to Nairobi.
Also present were Mike and Kristen Paulsen, who are living at the Athi River campus and are the only other new visiting faculty couple this semester at either campus. He’s a law professor at St. Thomas University (St. Paul), here to help launch an undergraduate law degree; she’s an architect; and their two children are with them, one doing home schooling and the other attending Daystar. Their morning walk opportunities are very different from ours: for us it’s buses and matatus belching clouds of exhaust, crowds of pedestrians, and broken sidewalks, while they can walk into the Lukenya Hills for broad vistas of grassland with giraffes and zebras grazing nearby. Still, we’re glad we are living in town, not needing to travel 35 km on one of Kenya’s most heavily traveled highways and 5 km on a rough dirt road to get to Nairobi.
From Athi River it was three more hours, much of it in heavy traffic, to the town of Kitui town in Usikamba, home to the Kamba people, and the very comfortable hostel of the Kenya Forestry Research Institute. In the morning we met Rev. Ben Motie, rector of the two Anglican church at Ulungu, in the Kitui cathedral, a modest concrete block church with a corrugated roof, and then set out for the village over 10 km of deeply rutted and sometimes almost impassable dirt roads. The Kamba sell their carvings and baskets in Nairobi craft markets, but we saw no sign of these crafts in Ulungu, perhaps because it is so isolated.
Our plan had been to work on expansion of the clinic, but since that project wasn’t quite ready for us we went to work, along with men and women from the village and some secondary school girls in their uniforms, on a new church. Piles of sand were already in place on the ground around the new building, which so far consists only of a low foundation wall, with grass and shrubs still growing where the sanctuary and classrooms and offices will be—all in all four times the size of the church now standing. First we hauled bags of cement from a shed and mixed it in with shovels; then we loaded up wheelbarrow loads of aggregate, not gravel but rough volcanic rocks the size of marshmallows, and mixed them in. Measurement was approximate: run the hose (from a nearby tank of water) until the mix is wet enough, add sand if it seems too sticky, throw in another wheelbarrow of rocks if they seem too scarce. At one point a woman to whom we had not been introduced—later we learned that she is an evangelist who works in one of the two Anglican parishes—came and stood next to Susan in the portico of the church, watching the work. Suddenly she barked out an order: too much sand! you need more rocks! and the crew immediately followed her directions.
The Calvin women in our group did all this hauling and mixing, along with men from the village, while our two male students helped the crew foreman put up the forms for the columns that we were going to create to support the roof. They used very rough and much-used planks, roughly aligned using a plumb bob, lined with black plastic with strips torn from the concrete sacks stuffed in any visible cracks. The planks were nailed together, with barbed wire wrapped around as reinforcement.
Now things really got moving: we created a bucket brigade line to carry large metal saucers of wet concrete from the spot where it was mixed over to the first column ready to be filled. From hand to hand they passed—wet, sloppy masses of concrete that spilled on hands and clothes and shoes, from an American student to a Kenyan girl in her school uniform to an American professor to a Kenyan mother with a toddler at her feet. One of our students liked the pole position, handing each hod up over her head to the crew foreman who would slosh it into the top of the form, and she didn’t leave her post til her clothes were soaked in sweat and covered with splatters of concrete. Ulungu is at a much lower elevation than Nairobi and nearer the coast, and the heat of the sun was brutal.
When one column was full our line moved over to another—unless the forms had sprung a leak, which happened several times. Then several village men would spring forward with torn-up cement bags and narrow pieces of wood to stuff the cracks and more barbed wire to wrap around, all with bare hands, til the concrete stopped oozing out onto the ground.
And so all our talk of about development as “coming alongside,” our readings about “doing with” and not “doing for” a community, our reflections on why development goals must come from those most affected—all these abstract notions suddenly became concrete. (Did you really think I could resist that one?)
In midmorning we had a tea break in the shade, and in early afternoon we were served lunch by the women of the village. We did a little more work in the afternoon, but we needed to wait a day so the forms could be removed and rebuilt to make additional columns. At the clinic next door, we heard the remarkable story of its HIV/AIDS work, strongly supported by the church. Voluntary testing is done right there, with results in just 15 minutes. Those who test positive are given counseling, and they receive ARV drugs free of charge through a government program. Some of the students wrote in their journals that they sat in the waiting room and tried to imagine what it would be like to wait there for your test results. The head of the clinic said that nearly all adults in the village have now been tested—a heartening sign of success in facing up to the disease. (Background facts: HIV/AIDS incidence in Kenya was estimated at 6.7% in 2003, and declining; in 1997-98 it had been twice as high. That’s much higher than in West Africa but much lower than in southern parts of the continent. In Kenya and across Africa, unlike other regions, the incidence is twice as high among women.)
There is a group of mostly women who are “living positively with AIDS” in the village, we were told. On our second day in Ulungu we met several of them, first on a morning walk that some of us took from hut to hut near the village, where one of the women in the group introduced us to her children and to her 96-year-old mother, who is a traditional healer—but who did a little dance of praise to Jesus, for the pastor’s sake, to show that she is a Christian. (Unfortunately she never comes to church, he said.) In the afternoon, Edith came to tell her story to the whole group. Ten years ago, when she was in her late 30s and already a widow caring for several children, a test confirmed that the reason for her declining health was HIV/AIDS. After the test result her family shunned her, and other women in the village wanted nothing to do with her. But she began taking ARVs and eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, and gradually her health returned. She decided to speak publicly about her status, along with other women in the village. Today she is healthy and strong again, farming her shamba and taking an active role in the community. God has given me so many blessings, she said: although I know I will die from this disease, my life like everyone’s is in God’s hands.
There is no government school in Ulungu, with a population of several thousand. But the community has organized a nursery school, which children attend up to the age of 8. Then they walk to a primary school 5 km away. For secondary school there are no options nearer than Kitui town; but adjoining the nursery school in the village is a vocational school that trains girls in sewing and clothing design. The students there greeted us with songs in Kamba and then insisted that we sing some songs for them. (Our Calvin group is outstanding nearly every way, but choral performance is not its strong suit. We managed a verse of “Amazing Grace.”) The school also has a garden plot, which we visited. Part of it is shaded by a huge mango tree. Up went some of our students and some of the villagers, high into the tree to shake down the ripe fruit. Evidently that’s the usual method of harvesting.
These were small fruit, oblong and about four inches long, green turning to dusty red as they ripen. Other varieties in the markets right now include the larger ones we see in supermarkets in the US, about 6-7 inches, also rounded and also red when ripe, and several other varieties in different colors and shapes. All of them are dripping with juice and sweet beyond words, and the stringiness of their flesh seems to dissolve as they ripen. Each time we cut one up at home (which is several times each day), I decide once again that heaven will be eternally living in the tropics at the height of mango season. (I think there’s something about this in the book of Hezekiah.)
Our workload the second day was light, with just a few more columns to pour. After a second lunch—a delicious and generous serving of rice, lamb stew, and greens—we organized a football match (soccer, for Americans), with one Kenyan and one American as captains picking players, 10 or so on a side. The game was great fun, with barefoot Kenyan 10-year-olds often showing up the American university students with their ball handling skills. The game looked like so much fun, though, that soon all the young boys who had been watching moved onto the field, not much caring which side they were assisting. When there were 40 players on a field one-fourth the size of a regulation pitch, halftime was declared, and the second half proceeded with reduced forces. Meanwhile some of the Calvin women students sat down with village girls to play “Duck Duck Goose” but ended up learning a very similar Kamba game in which the “duck” and the “goose” must run in opposite directions. Lots of chaos and gales of laughter accompanied their attempts to learn the new rules.
We returned to Ulungu once more on Sunday, after eight of us made a stop at Nzambani Rock, a gigantic and isolated outcropping between Kitui and Ulungu that is probably the core of an ancient volcano. It’s a strenuous climb, first on a rough path and then on a metal staircase that rises straight up into the air. The Calvin women were all dressed for church, but that didn’t faze them. It’s the first hiking expedition I’ve ever led with most of the participants wearing long dresses. Gorgeous views from the top, although the haze was too heavy to see the ocean in the distance.
After our climb we made a rendezvous with our second van and divided into equal groups to attend the two Anglican churches in the village. At Rev. Ben’s church, the Calvin students were asked not just to stand and introduce themselves but to sing something, then to dance with the congregation for some of the hymns. At our church, the smaller of the two, a deacon named Nicholas approached me when we arrived and asked whether there was a minister in our group. No, I said, unfortunately not—thinking, rashly, that I was off the hook. No way. Five minutes later he returned to say, “It is an honor for us to invite our guest to deliver the word of God this morning. Will you please do so?” There was no way out of it this time!
The deacon found me an English Bible (I bought a small one this week so I will never without one when attending church in the future!), but his lectionary was from last year. So I selected my own lesson (the calling of Samuel—I gave a chapel talk on it once) and began jotting down some notes. After the rest of the group was ushered into the church, I was invited to process behind the two priests or catechists assigned to this parish and a large group of children who sang a lively introit. Their status wasn’t clear: Rev. Ben is the priest assigned to the village, but I’m sure one of these two would have given the sermon if the Lord had not sent an unexpected substitute. The service, conducted entirely in Kikomba except for my part, was a very loose adaptation of Morning Prayer, so no one celebrated the Eucharist.
Seated by the altar, I caught sight of a 2010 lectionary and found the day’s readings. But it was fortunate that I had already chosen my own text, because in the end only one of the lectionary passages was read. I kept jotting down more notes when I could, and when it was time for the sermon I had my thoughts pretty well organized: Samuel was an answer to the prayers of a childless wife and dedicated to God’s service, but he did not recognize God’s voice; Eli was a priest who served God but could not hear God calling to Samuel; yet he was able to tune Samuel’s ear. Where do we hear God’s voice today? From the young? From the old? How can we prepare our ears to hear? I spoke of what we have learned from Kenyan church and community leaders about what it means to listen and to serve. And Jane, a woman from the parish, quickly and fluently translated everything I said into Kikomba.
I kept trying to think of what my father might have said about the passage! The students and Susan thought it went really well, and the audience responded with affirming noises now and then. But I’m sure my delivery was far too dull—all I did was stand and talk. Rev. Ben, reported the students, did the announcements in his normal voice, and then kicked it into high gear to preach, shouting and gesturing and moving all around the church.
Two offerings were collected in a basket at the front of the church. Most brought coins, a few brought bills (meaning they gave a dollar or more), others brought mangos, an egg, or a soda bottle filled with fresh milk. At the end of the service Nicholas went up and down the aisles selling these items—auctioning them, really, because he usually waited for a second or third offer—to convert them to cash. Some of the mangos and two of the eggs didn’t go, so he placed those at the feet of one of the catechists; and then he in turn offered them to me. I declined the eggs, which seemed unlikely to travel well (one was actually cracked already) but was happy to accept the fruit.
Monica, the woman who directed the concrete workers on Friday, orchestrated much of the service, keeping the children in line and reading one of the lessons. She also made certain that it started and ended right on time, since she knew we needed to depart by 1:00 to be sure of getting back to Nairobi in daylight. So she kept the opening song service brief, and made signs to the leaders to end the service right after my sermon and the second offering. Then she sat us down on benches in the sacristy (just a bare room adjacent to the sanctuary), and within a few minutes we were being served another delicious lunch: rice, chicken stew, greens, and a Komba specialty, mixed boiled beans and maize.
Another woman came in to ask whether we had a bag with us, and Susan gave her a nylon shopping bag she carries in her purse. Not big enough, she said, but we will see what we can do. As we boarded the bus, Nicholas came hurrying out with Susan’s bag, stuffed full of ripe mangos, and a cardboard carton full of mangos and a papaya. There must have been 20 kilos of fruit there—the most unusual speaker’s honorarium I’ve ever received. We gave some to each driver, to Chikka, to the students, to our neighbor, and to our housekeeper. And still—a week later—we have plenty more for snacks every day.
The drive home was very long and very hot (no AC in any of our vehicles here), but this was a wonderful way to wind up our field trips. Only one day remained for the students before their departure, a day when CRWRC staff gave us a very thorough and informative overview of their work, highlighting environmental issues that are of particular concern in East Africa. It was the first time the students met others beside Chikka from the office here—Fred Witteveen, country director, and Stephen Lutz-Zents, who oversees environmental programs. Susan and I look forward to seeing more of all of them in the coming months.
