Kibera

Journal Entry June 13, 2007
We visited Kibera, the largest slum in Kenya, second largest in Africa- 2 million people. We didn't go to Mathare Valley like we were scheduled to because a cult (Mongeki) has been violent recently.
I don't know how to accurately describe Kibera- I'm not quite sure I really know what I saw. As Janelle [team member] said, it was all very surreal, like I was walking through someone's worst nightmare. I should have been crying, but I wasn't. I should have felt either angry or sad, but I didn't. It was like walking through a movie set. How could anyone actually live in a place like that, where sewage spills out, and ten people live in a house smaller than some American closets? I found myself feeling distanced, glazed, even numb to the injustice staring me in the face. We walked through Kibera as though we owned it, and my only instance of it feeling real was stepping into the house.
The other big feeling in me was anger. It was the British colonizers who started the Kibera slum in 1901. They wanted to have a place to keep their Sudanese soldiers in case they had need of them. Once again, colonialism is the big source of problems.
But one of the things I have loved about Kenyan Christians is that so far, taking care of the poor doesn't seem to be an option. It's a part of their culture as Christians and lovers of Jesus. Forget my recent thoughts about heaven and hell- these Kenyan pastors [in Kibera] love the Lord and are willing to give the Gospel to the poor. Sure, I don't know exactly what that Gospel is, if it's the colonial leftovers about health and wealth, or is it something deeper and truer. I guess I'll find out.
Some interesting America influences- A man in the Kibera slum was wearing a nice suit and on his lapel was an American Flag pin. That was so sad. The other sad thing was pulling up to the slum and hearing "Hips Don't Lie" by Shakira.
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There's a reality of poverty in Kenya that most Americans will never experience. I can't claim to be an expert or that I have some sort of moral high ground because I've been to a slum. I was only there a few hours, and even though we visited a couple other slums on the trip, I don't know Kibera, I don't know Mathare. We saw Kibera for a couple hours during the day, when life is tolerable. People doing laundry, children in school. What we didn't see was the night. We didn't see the crime and the child prostitution, we didn't see the mothers abandoning babies in the sewage gutters because they cannot afford to take care of them. I wish I could say that I saw past the poverty and saw their spiritual richness, but I think that even saying that would show my true colors as a rich white Westerner. Saying that I didn't really see their poverty is like putting on blinders. I do believe that people in such places must have great faith and that God must give them a special measure of grace in all things (Jesus does say that the poor are blessed afterall), but in only a few hours, my job was not to assess their spiritual wealth. I had to be hit with the evil and the sin of poverty there. But I wasn't, at least not right away. I don't know if it's because of movies or pictures I've seen, but Kibera didn't knock me over at first and it should have.

I think all Americans should wrestle with guilt when they encounter poverty, especially on that scale. I don't think that it's healthy to feel guilty forever, but rather to wrestle through feelings of guilt over our unnecessary possessions, our needless consumption and our overbearing wealth. Working through these issues, I think, allows us to come through to a better option than guilt or passivity. It lets us love.

One of the profound points that Dostoevsky makes in The Brother's Karamozov is that each person is responsible for every other person's sins. The point of this is not to feel guilty over other people's actions, but rather to remind us daily that we are all connected. Humanity is not an archipelago- a large group of individual islands- but rather it is a living breathing organism. Like MLK (I think) says, my humanity is bound up in yours. The people of Kibera and slums all over the world (including the US-and yes I believe it is fair to call some places in the US slums, even though they're on a different scale) need us to want to take responsibility for the existence of poverty. "It's not my fault" is not a valid response to the question of economic injustice, or any type of injustice.


I will return to the "It's not my fault" problem at a later post about our trip to visit the Missionary organization. In the meantime, Lala Salama (sleep peacefully).

Shalom

Re-Entry

I am home from 50 days in the most beautiful place I've ever been. The Kenya Global Project was out of my frame of reference; it was so different than anything I've ever done in my life that it has no comparison. It was completely different than Gateway (the Philly Urban Project) in many respects which was good, because it kept me from constantly comparing the two projects. I'm going to post some of my journal entries from the summer on this blog as well as some thoughts integrating some of the observations I made throughout the summer.

A quick overview of the trip: 40 Americans from many different states and schools, as well as a family of 5, left for Kenya on June 10, arriving in Nairobi on the 11th. We spent our first 10 days next to a little town outside of Nairobi, called Ngong which is right on the edge of the Ngong Hills. Here we did our orientation week, getting to know each other and our leaders, learn a bit of Kiswahili, and learn about Kenyan culture. We also go to know and begin to love 4 students from Kenya- Joy, Charity, Paul, and Odira. From the 21st of June through the 11th of July we were dispersed in teams of 2 or 3 throughout the country on assignments ranging from teaching to working in hospitals to preaching to working with refugees. My assignment was to Ol Kalou in the Central Province, not far from the Great Rift Valley. After 3 weeks, we returned to Nairobi, staying in Kasarani which is just on the edge of the city. Ten days later, we headed for the coast via train to Mombasa and spent 6 days right next to the magnificent Indian Ocean.

Over the course of the next few weeks and months I'll post thoughts from my journal and do some synthesizing of my experiences. I'll say now that this summer was not at all what I expected when I signed up for the trip. I wrestled through issues that I did not wish for, and surprisingly did not feel as challenged with some parts of the trip that I expected to be challenged with.

Here are the books that I read this summer (All of them I recommend): N.T. Wright's Evil and the Justice of God, Paula Harris and Doug Schaupp's Being White, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King edited by Clayborne Carson, and most influentially The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Happy reading and thanks for reading my blog. Let me know what you think.