Simon's Nairobi Diary - Archive 45

21 March 2008 7:39pm

Today was the final day of class for term 2 of year three. I've been typing like Mavis to finish before the 'Rents arrive on the 28th. Last night I was trying to fall asleep, but was still awake at 2.30am because its been that late working the past week. I was bumbled yesterday as I was finishing one of them, because I had just done another ten page piece of work and I couldn't remember anything of what I had actually done. Private embarrassment: hide it under a bushel, yes.

This is actually a problem with the whole shebang here in Nairobi. One of the greatest challenges I've had to wrestle with going to seminary in a place so different and so far away from Home is the need to remember. Each and every day holds faces, objects, smells, and lessons which I desire with all I am to sink into me. As I was first departing the Traverse City airport in 2005, and again in 2006, my Dad hugged me and said, "Soak it up Simon". What endless truth and difficulty in that statement.

I do what I can. I scrawl notes all over the room. I write entries on this website. Notes in the margin of class notes are a common occurence: jokes, anecdotes, stories I hear in class around the subject. Mementos cover my shelves of different places. Lots of stones. There's a couple pieces of obsidian glass from that time outside Ngong, this receipt from the road trip with Nick to Maryland, that beer label from the beach in the Gambia. I pasted tons of photographs on the room's baseboards when I arrived; some have been taken down as they lost significance.

I'm trying. Its not easy to soak things up, and again today somebody made a reference to a time when we did something, and I had forgotten about it.

There's a sense of murder with a record like a picture or a note. Things are left out. The photo captures poses usually, exceptions to the way it was five seconds before the shutter. The scrawled note grabs a line, but it floats in the margin completely disconnected from its situation, out of context like a bad sermon.

Yet I know this is the right way to go about things. To force the brain to reengage and take still more has, I believe, forced it to grow in what it can hold. The entire experience is pretty draining at times. Saturday we rode again on the back of motorcycle taxis into the rural Ngong hills to talk with the Maasai elders, and an iridescent green bee-eater flew overhead and into the flat vista of the Rift Valley. I was awash with wonder and begging, "Soak! Soak!". When I got home I did nothing for the remainder of the day, I was so fried from willing.

I know this struggle is right, that its 'using my talents' and not being apathetically fatalistic towards an assumed mental capacity. Its just difficult. Plus, I have no idea how I'm going to get these rocks home.

6 March 2008 8:21pm

The power fails, noiselessly of course, and the hall is swathed in darkness. The wind has been lashing the buildings all day, and this moment is particularly obvious of its presence as the air rushes through the barred slats and pushes motes of dust against my face in the darkness. Yes - its one of those nights. The window in the kitchen has a flailing orange glow as it refracts a candle from the flat next door. I push open the bathroom door without turning the handle (it doesn't click anyways) and hit the hot knob. The sunheated water is rushing in the darkness, down from the solartank on the roof and onto the mottled cement floor. I love doing this because it is so uncanny, such a boundary marker of life in this place.

The bats are chittering away because of the nighttime, and I gather what things I need for the library, glowing like a flourescent bulb in the distance with a thub-thub-thub-thub from its petrol generator. Yes, its one of those leaping nights of flight where I am mentally and socially and spiritually at balance, where the world is like being in a fast car on smooth roads in the hills, where opening doors and fetching barsoap and donning pants synthesize a tempestuous stimulus in my brain of frenetic wonder. Sometimes I have to chill and target it towards work. Sometimes - when I'm tired - I have to suffocate it. But tonight I let it spin, and I realize new things about the past couple days. I imagine new things about how to live and work and love. I get visions for a better future and a fruitful world. I get flashes of Eden.

Sometimes I regret being made this way, that I am so swarming with thought patterns that I forget to eat, and I wonder if my brain will burn its cylinders by age 30. But tonight I love being this way, because the random barrage of wonder is painting the God of the universe in my mind's eye, painting the world as he wishes it, and giving me comfort about the path I am stumbling down. It is nights like tonight where my hazy identity is lifted and inspected and found good, where I am honored to exist in this moment of human history - in this continent of life and passion - in this body of flailing limbs and crackling synapses.

29 February 2008 8:20pm

I was buying tomato paste and wondering what all these people were doing crowded around the speakers of the storefront. They were focused, bent, and taking it in, but I didn't stay to find out, just went home instead. But at home the news reports showed the streets flooded with people, and then I knew the truth: peace agreements and a brokered power sharing arrangement for the nation of Kenya. I quickly sent happy text messages to my family, emails to friends, because I was so happy. The computer lab, usually a placid vault of soft plastic clicks, was instead flowing with discussion and volume. People, tilting back slightly, took turns laughing with each other's funny and sarcastic comments. "Luos are taking the world!" was one (laughter), because Odinga is being appointed to prime minister and Barack Obama might become president of the US -- and both are Luos. "These are truly the end times!" (laughter) was a response to something like this.

The new peace was real, but it only became joy when it was shared, and I am awakened at such times to how relationship is elemental to circumstance being worth anything at all. To see the news alone would have provoked relief, but to see it with others took relief and made it magnificent. Only a month ago my friend's cousin was shot by police, all those displaced troubled people I met in Kibera and Mathare, and that list goes endlessly on. A thousand people killed in three weeks -- all of these broken hearts, the days of palpable fear, and frustration. There is a lot of work to be done. Reconciliation is a slow process to allow neighborhood acceptance towards certain people, and hundreds of folks will never return to where they were. But if the multiple tribes here at the school can reverberate a blanched computer lab with their unified praise then I see people coming together elsewhere too. Perhaps these returns will awaken neighbors to what they were harboring beneath their skin.

Life is so difficult.

But we were created on a world with one thing which allows us to endure: intimate relationships. I am convinced that relationship, not fun or productivity or money or titles or possessions or confidence or ambition or busyness, but only relationship is alongside food water and shelter as non-negotiable for survival. To take it away is the same as taking away food: dysfunction. The body begins to die, slowly, until nothing remains.

Give me God by my side, adjoined to my hip, his radiant face in full view. Give my heart the means to pour torrents of praise towards heaven and depth to let love flow over earth, and I will only be like Adam. I will be bent gaunt beneath the song of God.

But put a good friend at my side, only this touch more, nothing less, and I will be complete; it will sound more than relief.

23 February 2008 3:01pm

The headlines, the radio, the rumors: an agreement is near? Somehow Kofi Annan (and friends) has nearly brokered a government for the next year (before new elections) which shares power between two parties who swore they would never give an inch. I don't want to get too prehyped, but if at some moment my friends in Michigan are in a backyard making a snowman and they stab-plunk the nose carrot and in the Southeast horizon is heard a distant cheer, it will be all of us here, tired from being tired, rush-welled with hope.

18 February 2008 6:44pm

Mathare slum is worse than Kibera, though it is smaller. This is because it is newer. It doesn't have the infrastructure, the economy, the security, or the organization of an old slum like Kibera. And when the terror and violence took the nation in its grip and squeezed, people in Mathare fled the place empty.

I have no idea where they could have gone. I suppose many have various connections around the city that aren't positioned in such a severe place. And it was truly so severe. The roads, two days after the large rioting, were hemmed and hampered with roadblocks. Huge round storage tanks had been brought in or rolled in from wherever, painted with anti-PNU graphiti, and made to stop the police from entering Mathare and controlling it. Gas stations were burned to ashes, the cars that had been filling up were still in their same spots, but were windowless and bare, their paint and upholstery flamed and melted until only metal backings were left where there had been a seat. Little round square chunks of auto glass were spread along the entire road, stopping for ten or twenty feet and then starting again. And at times the road was covered in spools and spools of wire. I didn't know what it was until I saw the blackened ground around the spools and knew it was tire wire, planted in the rubber to add strength, and solely unburnable. The spools of wire were all that remained of burning road blocks the day before. I was slack jawed, staring, wordless, numbing more, because I felt around and around the feeling of terror, pain, and death.

We were working in a refugee camp that had formed outside the airforce base, though I doubt Kenya has any fighter planes. All around were people, and this second time we were there the people had swelled in number. Word gets around about these bastions of stability, and the crowds grow in size.

I remember reading in High School the book 'The Things They Carried'. It was a book about soldiers in war, and how they each carried equipment and possessions that revealed their identity and purpose. The big soldier carried a big gun and this other guy carried this photograph and so on. What made an impression on me at the airforce base in Mathare was everybody's possessions.

Families had fled quickly, I could see. There was not much order to the place aside from things being in piles. People sat on or around their piles, and the piles were almost the same. There was sometimes a mattress or two, a chair and a lantern. There were always yellow jugs (originally used to sell Bahari Fry cooking oil) filled with water. There were always metal pots for making stew and githiri and ugali. And there was no individual identity in these things. People simply did not have possessions that were unique to themselves or their household. Perhaps there were tucked photographs, but definitely nothing more.

A Christian author once observed that individual salvation doesn't work as well in rural Kenya, because the village has to accept the gospel together or not at all. I was standing among people in that area, wilting from the heat and from the cloud of fear and instability, and seeing how bound up people are in each other. They carry the same things, and yet they are different faces and of different tribes. They sat together to go back into Mathare (2 weeks they said), and I began to see these folks as something blurred: a common destiny, a common waiting. What I did not see was anybody sitting alone.

12 February 2008 9:12pm

I sashay the guitar in the kitchen, and am singing at the top of my voice this Lyle Lovett song which has this great swing. I'm pounding the floor with my toe, and Tom is tipped forward over the ugali pot, and he's never heard it before but it doesn't matter. He feels the swing because he knows swing anywhere, and he's raising his voice to a pitch that matches and is Wheeeooo-ing along with the lyrics. The knife in his hands is tilted back and its handle is thunked against the countertop, and I'm tapping my feet and razing those wires and he's thunking the handle and Wheeeeooo-ing and I'm singing about saying Goodbye to Carolina and the moment has taken over. Each of us is right where we are, and Vincent comes from down the hall to clap as well. The world fashions into a clearer land, like an iris has waned, and its all celebration, simple-thunderous, and its like life itself has been picked up and slung-traded around the room like a foxtail.

"Awe is an intuition for the dignity of all things, a realization that things not only are what they are but also stand, however remotely, for something supreme. Awe is a sense for the transcendence, for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things. It enables us to perceive in the world imitations of the divine, ... to sense the ultimate in the common and simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal. What we cannot comprehend by analysis, we become aware of in awe." - A.J. Heschel

8 February 2008 3:26pm

There’s a really special thing that happens at night sometimes at NEGST, like the last two nights. The air is that night air sort, where the landscape and houses are crisp and stilled. All the nearby windows are darkened for such a length to know most are in bed, gathering again strength that will form the school's daily environmental vibrancy. The special thing is that sometimes there is weather. Two nights ago had silent waterless sporadic lightning that gave brief illumination to the distance.

I try during these times to focus on the spirit of the resident God, as he coaxes and tends a static peace around everything. I try to still myself in preparation for bed, but also in fixation upon this intimate spirit, because it is within such stillness that I know God loves me, and that he holds and cares about the swath of stilled world out my window. At some point there is a light brush into petition, praying for what needs healing and maintenance and praying against what needs to end and be destroyed. The lightning two nights ago was almost His listening response:

“mm hm. mm hm. uh huh.”

Last night it was consistent light rain for hours, long after I fell asleep. The metal roof over my head leaks, but I have a tea flask to catch the major one. The ambience is a delicately contemplative white noise. Last night I was there and was thinking about Elly living in Dagoreti, totally at odds with his community, though he has done them only good and remains at odds only through tribe. The resonating thoughts of chaos, so loud throughout the day, seemed to subside or be drowned out by that rain.

Some understandably doubt, at times of such tragedy or harrowing emptiness, the providence of God - at whether or not something greater is seeing all this through. But I find comfort in such times by listening and feeling the raindrops on the roof, taking in the deliberate hands of the Almighty saying:

“here. here. here.”