This Is What It's About

Today was a tough day. Beautiful and painful; exhilarating and disturbing; heartwarming and heartbreaking.

One of the main reasons Dave and I came to stay with the Apostles of Jesus is because Fr. Kamanzi has been wanting to organize an Alternative Break (read: Service) trip for years, almost as long as I've known him. We are here to personally visit the various ministries of the AJs and see what kind of service experience students would have there. Today's visits took us into Rift Valley, the neighboring province to Nairobi.

Our first stop was at the Ogatu Rongai Christian Women Charity Works Center in the heart of the Quarry slum in the town of Ogatu Rongai. The truck dipped and bounced and tossed us about as we plunged in and out of pot holes, swerving to avoid goats, donkeys & carts, garbage fires, dogs, and people. The streets were lined with makeshift stands where people sold used clothing and shoes from America to passers-by. Dozens of unemployed men sat in rows on benches just off the street, waiting for work to come their way, and women walked with impossible loads balanced on their heads, usually with a child lashed to their back. When we reached our destination, I was amazed at the amount of peace that could be achieved in such a boisterous place. The Center is a community organization with many ministries, including VCT (Volunteer Counseling and Testing for HIV/AIDS) and programs for senior citizens, but their largest ministry is their day care. They keep track of over 270 children from the surrounding slum, many of whom come to the center 5 days a week for pre-school, help with homework, meals, and, most importantly, attention. Some of the children are HIV positive. The people at the center not only minister to the children, but also to their guardians in order to help them take better care of the children. Mary, the director of the Center, explained to me that while some people think that all children without parents should be sent to orphanages, she feels it is very important for them to have a connection to their neighborhood and know how to live in a home. When a child is in an orphanage, for 18 years they are fed, washed, looked after, etc, and then they are turned out and expected to return to their neighborhoods, but they are not equipped to exist as responsible adults. At the Center, Mary and her staff work with guardians, be they aunts, uncles, or grandparents, to help them raise the children in the neighborhood so that they can grow up to be contributive community members.

Quite an impressive undertaking.

While we were there, we had a blast seeing the kids in their classrooms! It turns out that children are the same everywhere you go. As the clowned and waved and hammed it up for the camera, I was reminded of the groups of children in Las Delicias and Las Grenadias, El Salvador. Thanks to a very generous friend back home, we have soccer balls with us to hand out to the children. We gave the first one to the children at the Center and they went wild! The reach of the World Cup knows no limits, my friends.

After taking countless pictures and giving seemingly hundreds of high-fives, we got back underway, back through the slum, and on to our next stop: St. Paul's Children's Home.

I was vain. I thought that, since I have been to a third world country before, I wouldn't be (as) surprised by what I would see here. St. Paul's put me right back in my place, I can tell you. The children were all at school; maybe it would have been more cheerful if they had been home. However, the home was one of the most dismal places I have ever beheld. Please don't misunderstand me: Margaret, the founder and director, does miracles for the children she helps, and does it with impossibly meager financial contributions. St. Paul's is home to 58 orphans, most of them having been brought there by the police after having been abandoned, or beaten, or otherwise abused. Many of them are HIV positive. Every surface of the yard and buildings was strewn with clothing, laying out to dry. There was a pile of burning garbage in the middle of the courtyard. The children sleep in barracks fashioned out of corrugated sheet metal, bunk beds and cribs filling every inch. Chickens and scraggly looking dogs are everywhere. Margaret talked to us while holding three of the youngest residents, none of them old enough to walk yet, one of them still an infant wrapped in a blanket. She told us about the children being at school, except for two, who stayed home because they are HIV positive and are feeling very ill today. She told us with enthusiasm about the classroom they are building in the yard so that the children don't need to go out to go to school. She spoke with boundless optimism about everything, sitting in the dank, dirt-floored metal hut. A truly remarkable woman.

From there, we journeyed to Fatima Nursery School, operated by the Evangelizing Sisters of Mary, the sister order to the Apostles of Jesus. This school was everything St. Paul's wasn't. They had a nice, clean, open school yard, surrounded on three sides by the cinder block classrooms. There was color and joy everywhere you looked, and the sisters greeted us like honored guests. The entire student body (135 in all) gathered in the hall and each classroom performed a song for us. They clapped and cheered when we introduced ourselves, and laughed at our attempts at speaking Kiswahili. Fr. Kamanzi threw a soccer ball to the crowd, and every one of them chased after it, laughing and screaming and loving life. When we said goodbye in the schoolyard, we gave out even more high-fives than before. We waved to them, crying "Asante! Kwa heri!" "Thank you! Goodbye!"

Three very different places. Three incredible ministries. One unbelievable day.