'Ruth, this is Kenya'

Friday afternoon I sit in the 12x12 home of Mary and five of her six children in a row of dwellings resembling the cheapest motel built in the US in the ’50’s. My Kenyan friend Monica, Mary, her 20-year-old daughter Emmah and I are crowded around a small coffee table sitting on stools, drinking hot Fanta orange pop, struggling to make conversation in a place devoid of food, books, electricity, water, comfort or beauty of any kind. 

Mary is recovering from surgery – performed by a visiting doctor from the US – removing a goiter that would have chocked her to death in time. Her eyes do not leave my face, searching for the answers she seeks in every person who enters with help, however small. I grasp for things to say that do not seem trivial and condescending. Monica, who has been silent, passes her eyes around the room, pauses at Mary’s place in the center, then consciously turns to me and says, “Ruth, this is Kenya.”

An hour later I sit knee to knee with Anne, a woman obviously wasting away with disease, and listen to her story of losing her husband and finding out days later that he had died of AIDS and had passed it to her without verbal communication, without consideration for their children still in primary school. She shares her hope that the drugs she is taking will extend her life long enough to see her children finish high school, if she can beg the bus fare to travel to the hospital to collect her monthly dosage. 

Anne points with pride to her son, George, called to the headmaster’s office to meet the white woman here to spend the day at Grace School. Then she asks his teacher for 100 shillings – that is, $1.25 – for food and walks determinedly down the hill and along the road infested with muddy plastic bags of many colors. As I watch her leave I think to myself, “Ruth, this is Kenya.”

At lunchtime I join the children and teachers sitting on benches under several stunted acacia trees and eat the beans and maize that have been boiling all morning in the makeshift shed behind the school. One eight-year-old boy sits a little apart from the others, dressed in orange and blue, surrounded by a sea of gray and white uniforms. I ask and discover that he is new to Grace School, an orphan whose mother died in December, being raised now by an uncle who tends the school garden and makes too little money to afford more than food and a shelter much like Mary’s. There are dozens of orphans among a population of less than 100 students.  “This too is Kenya, Ruth.”

These are the images of only one day in the life I have experienced over the last eight weeks. Certainly there are other more cheerful sights and sounds – baboons along the roadside, endangered giraffes courting the tourists at a reserve devoted to them, beautiful baskets and rosewood figures displayed for sale at the Village market in the UN part of town, three-hour church services with singing and dancing to satisfy the packed house for the Swahili-speaking congregation, tasty pastry delicacies shared with colleagues at tea time, and the reassuring barking of dogs in the night on a campus once unsafe and vulnerable to thieves and thugs. There are modern shopping centers where mostly white patrons congregate and a few restaurants where the menu resembles Appleby’s or Ruby’s with better coffee. There are gated homes in the suburbs and grocery stores with almost all the conveniences of home, except maybe hairspray and shaving cream and Betty Crocker cake mixes.

But the images that populate my dreams and lodge themselves in my mind’s eye as I walk the sidewalks and the stairwells of my adopted campus are the faces and eyes of the needy and the hopeless whose lives are often judged – by the world at large – to be expendable. They are the human beings for whom Christ came to earth, the “least of these” He pointed out in scripture as a creative way for us to minister to Him in absentia. The landscape of their lives drags me far out of my comfort zone. But they are a large part of the Kenya I came on purpose to KNOW. They are my wake-up call, tools used by a loving God to expand my vision and stretch my heart. I give Him praise for the prophecy of Monica’s words:  “Ruth, this is Kenya!”