Simon's Nairobi Diary - Archive 30

5 October 2006 10:11pm

I was in the commerce area of Karen. Lining the streets are people. Some are trying to get work (crowds of taxi drivers), some are working (grilling maize on the cob), some are supine. Almost all are not in motion. Always when I walk by the taxi driver line, endless people say, "Ride boss?" "Taxi?" "My friend!" This time a driver broke into a run from the crowd and vigorously shook my hand. "Simon!" he said, "its me Moses!". I apologetically told him I didn't remember him. He explained he gave me a ride last April. "Do you need a ride back to NEGST," he asked me?

I truly did not need a ride back to the school. A matatu could, like normal, drop me off at the gate for 20ksh (around 40 cents). His taxi would cost 3$. But here was a person doing his absolute hardest to make a living in one of the few precious jobs this country has, and so I took a taxi back. Approaching the car, he basically tore his driver door off its hinges he was so excited.

I think I would not have done it, but earlier the Masai vendors basically ran me over when they saw me examining their leather weavings. The necklaces, mirrors, clubs, bracelets could not be thrust towards me fast enough. Here!Here!Look!Here! They got very quiet very fast, though, when I did not purchase one. I walked away thinking, would have been so bad to buy a necklace?

All this supply and no demand gets me down.

4 October 2006 3:40pm

A woman stepped to the platform and began to introduce herself in pure Swahili, so the student council chairman rose up to translate. She introduced herself, said the amount of children she had, and that she was born again (three very typical pieces of introductions here). I recognized her, but before I could finish the thought she ran into thick sentences of Swa, each tipping over each other to the point of passion and difficulty for her translator to keep up. What she said was this: her and her husband were very successful business people in Mombasa. They had a great house, great kids, great lives, and then her husband was convicted to go to this bible school that was starting in Nairobi. The entire family picked up and came to NEGST, where her husband joined the very first class of students in 1983. Here they lived poorer than they ever had. Not soon after arriving, her husband took violently ill, and on his death bed she wept over him, "Why are you leaving me? How can you leave me without any way of support and with three children?" "I am not leaving you alone," her husband said. "God is with you." Knowing full well the insufficiency that women have to provide for a family here in Kenya, she submitted herself to her Creator while her husband died before her eyes.

Today she stood with palpable strength and said that twenty years had passed since they arrived, and through it all her family has been cared for. "Live and work for him, if it is easy or hard," she spoke, surrounded by light. "Nothing compares. Bwana sefiwe." (praise the lord)

I remembered then where I had seen her before. I see her every day mopping the library.

3 October 2006 9:41pm

Coming back late to school is turning out to be more difficult than I had imagined. Specifically in Hebrew class. I'm trying to understand the scriptures as they were written, not as they are assumed to be written, and this is turning into a really big job. I think it would go faster if the script wasn't all boxes, lines, and dots. At the end of all of this, I think it will be worth it, apparent since learning Biblical Greek. The scriptures come alive, in their earthy original written form, and the pictures cease being facts and start being story. Real story, like the kind I'm in right now. Like the kind where I look at my friend in chapel and see him praising God, and know its genuine because I know his story, that God provided him food when he was hungry. God is a god of story.

30 September 2006 1:10pm

The commandments can never be kept while there is a strife to keep them: the man is overwhelmed in the weight of their broken pieces. It needs a clean heart to have pure hands, all the power of a live soul to keep the law - a power of life, not of struggle; the strength of love, not the effort of duty.

George MacDonald speaks to what I feel is the greatest lesson for anybody seeking to understand Jesus. Instead of theological rules and theories, I think we are really called to understand love and life. And this is exactly what I find in abundance in Kenya.

27 September 2006 8:29pm

I thought I was going to dislike systematic (systemic?) theology. After all, is there anything systematic about God and the way he moves in people? I thought systematic theology was simply going to be a bunch of people sitting around for hours of the day having long winded hyped convo about topics that have about .00001% relevance for our lives, and it probably will be that sometimes, but today our Ghanaian teacher discussed the use of metaphor. Discussing metaphor is cool, since there are these carbon based lifeforms who cannot really understand infinity, and somehow they have to have a relation or understanding towards the infinite creator of the universe. So pictures and images are placed over God so as to get our minds understanding something, so faith feels like something set and we can sleep. Jesus is the 'lamb of God', the 'lion of Judah', the 'prince of peace', and so on. And then I begin to wonder if the word 'god' itself is a metaphor. If the letters g, o, and d come together to give me a picture or understanding of what is beyond comprehension, and would I have a better wonder and love of God if I understood 'Him' without words at all? And then comes on such a babbling stew of mind frenzy that I have to go buy a mango.

24 September 2006 8:04pm

There is something wonderful about having a Hebrew professor who hails from Eritrea. For one, we can discuss Ethiopian cuisine to help with pronounciation. Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Israel all use semitic scripts with this wonderful explosion within them, formed by taking a consonent like t and breathing hard to pop it from the mouth. Dr. Ladtu was explaining the pronounciation of the Hebrew letter sadeh and I asked him "Like qey wat (an Ethiopian sauce)? He laughed and said yes. Nothing else needed to be said, so we moved on to qop.

My sleep schedule is reeling right now. Its like Chariots of fire when Eric Little gets knocked down in the big final race and he does that slow mo wuhhhh but gets back up and finishes. Right now I'm that guy, on the ground going wuhhhh. I haven't gotten up yet, indeed I'm still crashing. But everything is going to be fine, since this stuff is more fascinating than anything before it, and studying has become an act of worship.

23 September 2006 5:15pm

I hadn't said the word fungua in two months, but there it went. Slept out of my teeth without warning, and the taxi driver opened the trunk. "Ninaenda Karen tafadali". And the car moved. Hha? Apparently I've been in this country before, and picked up some of the language.

Its a bit violent, the edge positioned between Michigan and here. They don't zipper or anything. Its a rig job. I'm overwhelmed. I'm sobered. What a priviledge to study Jesus in such a place. I had forgot the residential energy, the enthusiasm. The humility of my friend, a pride busting battering ram.

I entered the room for the first time in a while, Tebele followed. "Yes!" he greeted me with vigor. I had not forgotten the yes-greetings! "How is the economy," he jested? That shine-eyed mustached Ethiopian is always jesting.