Simon's Nairobi Diary - Archive 22

20 April 2006 7:14pm

The flux. It is all around. All of our vision is shaking, moving, steadying, crumbling, birthing, listening, eating, sleeping, awakening. New homes, old homesteads, old faces turned newer, my face turned older, new cousins, dying elders, an empty Toblerone box, a shelf of mchezi mix. Does nothing stand without eventually tipping? Can anything be nestled in a notch of final stability?

Today, for the first time this year, I saw it again. It has happened before: an encounter with something stable. But today, it was during communion. This originally boring liturgy of fructose and starch was transformed today into something more. An assembly, I saw, lowered to our knees in hope. Hope. It was too. Hope big as a vista and twice as steady. It was sweet solid honest blatant pure solidity I experienced, not like a twinge of emotion, but as a participant occupant. A carriage of it surrounded us all, and brought us with it.

I really have to surrender to the fact that most of it was, is, ineffable. No mixing of consonants and vowels contain capacity to express todays moment of palpable honor and love. Perhaps only this: our physical reality, if we are honest, is measurable and solid at first glance, but in truth it is wasting away. It is the unseen which at first is easily disregarded, but later is realized to be the only thing unslippable from our fingers.

How I love this faith.

19 April 2006 7:59pm

A classmate was recounting to me the tortures that upperclassmen give to the freshmen at Kenyatta University and other Kenyan colleges. They find a large hard unripe fruit and grab the nearest freshmen to tuck the fruit into their pants pocket. Each day the student will be checked to see if they have the fruit. "Do you have the fruit!?!" Unless the student wants to be subject to further social tortures, they must carry the unripe fruit for the week or two with them at all times until it ripens. Then they are given the go-ahead to eat it in front of the upperclassmen and be set free from their hazing.

18 April 2006 7:10pm

Easter was difficult, being another holiday where the fam wasn't seated around the table and I was in solitude. I kept waiting to turn the corner of a room and be greeted by a breakfast set with boiled eggs in porcelain egg cups that have spots where the light shines through. But coming back to class made up for it when an Ethiopian student was having trouble in my Greek class. To help him out my Scottish professor explained NTGreek tense by busting out his Ethiopian language of Amharic, an ancient Semitic speech with 120 consonants. Unbelievable.

17 April 2006 12:55pm

I had never seen elephantitis before. At least, this is what I assumed it was. I'm not a doctor, yet, but the legs of the woman were blown up wider than a foot across, at the ankles. I had to put a label there, on that sight, because it made me feel more secure. This sight had no borders or definition, so I quickly gave it one.

I was standing in the lobby of a hospital in west Chicago, working for the day in the childcare section where women came to learn about breast feeding and SIDS. And child abuse. Colicky FASyndrome children ran everywhere in this poor-person hospital, and poor stretched mothers are still humans with the capability to lose their tempers and kill the only thing they love. We taught them to breathe. Well, anyhow, I saw the tree trunk ankle disease again. This time it was at the ferry-crossing between Mombasa and Maweni. I saw her massive ankles, blind empty white pupils, noticed how she didn't have a state-provided motorized cart like the Chicago woman, saw her strategically placed at a sidewalk of pedestrian density. "Habari a leo mama," I asked, tentatively placing some shillingi in her rattling cup. (You call older post-childbearing women here mama, which I think it awesome) "Nzuri," she replied. Fine. She was still there, sitting on that piece of cardbard with her metal cup, when I crossed the ferry over two months later.

And my brain electricity raced frantic, ear to ear & forehead to backhead, imagining her existence. World traveler American know-it-all meets disease-filled immobile beggar, sitting (perhaps sleeping) on the same spot of concrete for the entirety of her breathing days. What are her joys? What is her gloom? Dreams? Is she even happy she was born? It can't be that bad, considering she is such a persistant worker, considering how she smiled when I greeted her.

One thing I know. When I passed by these two swollen-ankled women, in their public declarations of need, I was engulfed by how much God loves them. How precious they are to Him, how utterly precious. It's uncomfortably easy to agree with the quiet fallacy that glittering megachurch praise-leaders, with their rod'n'cone burning smiles, are the special ones, but they're not. It is the elephantitis women whom Jesus holds in His royal court. And it is them whom I stand near to, and can feel heaven sending down a cascade of care, as if its warmly raining on the front porch steps and you in the chair get that uprising soft mist on your face. This care is something I love to act upon and live for, not from guilty obligation, but because doing it is like joining into a psalm that is already being sang.

15 April 2006 12:27pm

Saturday's SKAIRD is labeled: 'The bats that live in my ceiling who fill my room with guano fumes and scream me awake at 3:30am +3GMT'.

These bats are the bane of my residential experience. I have tried "so many" things to get rid of them: flood lights in the crawlspace, mosquito smoke coils, mothballs, pounding on the particle board above my head to get them to settle down. Nothing works. The only guaranteed option is to seal the edges of the roof, which is impossible. And now the mothball fumes combo with the bat guano fumes to make some sort of rotten feta-cheese composite. Its a good thing I found the Prayer of Abandonment of Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916):

especially the African brown bats at NEGST)

I wish no more than this, O Lord.

Into your hands I commend my soul;

I offer it to you

with all the love of my heart,

for I love you, Lord,

and so need to give myself,

to surrender myself into your hands,

without reserve,

and with boundless confidence,

for you are my Father.

In other news I have discovered a Nairobi book store that sells my favorite Greek NT for cheap, and a second one that sells a similarly affordable selection of the modern day prophet Carl Hiaasen. Finally, I just finished reading Frank Herbert's Dune, the first sci-fi book I've read in a while. It was glorious.

13 April 2006 12:55pm

Thursday's SKAIRD is 'The Freaky Lizards Who Always Stare Me Suspiciously':

I have been learning a lot recently about the dualism of a person's reality, and the mistakes that can easily be made. This concept basically upholds the value of spiritual while downplaying the value of the physical. When God made man he formed him out of the dust of the earth and breathed into him the breath of life. Man=Dust + Spirit. Here is where a mistake can be made, since it is easy to assume that dust is bad and God is good. Often the body is thought of as some sort of envelope to help one soul get to heaven, while the creation loses its purpose for the promotion of life right now. But the dust we are formed from is a creation of God as well, formed by Him and declared 'good'. These things, our bodies and our earth, are made by Him and should never be seperated out of our vision. Both our facets, material and immaterial, are part of who God made us to be.

12 April 2006 12:17pm

This week will be a special "getting back to third trimester" week. Accompanying copious amounts of consumed masala chai and mandazis will be a special 'Strange Kenyan Animal In Recent Days (SKAIRD)' section of this website.

Today's SKAIRD is labeled 'Largest Spider Ever to have taken a shower with.'

You know the feeling. That nice relaxing hot water moment where all the worries of the world wash away. That moment was ruined by seeing the face-sized spider mid-shower. He was henceforth crushed by a stick and fell to the floor like a steak.