Every person’s home page has its little quirks, yes? The home page on my MacBook is set to IGoogle, which allows you to set up your own little front page of sorts. So I have news feeds from the BBC and CNN, as well as the Daily Nation, one of Nairobi’s daily newspapers. In keeping with the 21st century obsession about weather, I have mini-weather reports, too, from all the places I call home: New York, where I live; Chicago, where I was born and where my mom and sister and one brother still live; Madison, North Carolina, where my in-laws live and where I spend a week or two each year “on the hill”; and now, Nairobi, Kenya, where it is currently a bit after midnight on Saturday morning and the temperature is 61 degrees.
Yes, I’m back in Kenya longing mode. There isn’t a day now that I don’t check on what’s happening in Kenya, not a day when I don’t recall my new friends, or wonder about what happened when Parliament convened yesterday. I think a lot about the Unitarian Universalist congregations in Kisii, in Tena, outside of Nairobi, about the posho mill
owned by the congregation meant to grind maize and other grains, transported from Kisii to Kitengela for protection and now in storage there with no maize to grind, at least for now.
We all think we know how difficult life is for the rest of the world, but we really don’t have any idea unless we see it for ourselves. There is no substitute for being in the midst of amazing poverty and amazing endurance and amazing faith, as I was for three weeks, and experiencing what life is like on the other side of the globe. One of the challenges of these recent trips is how I might translate what I have seen and heard and felt about Kenya, about our sisters and brothers in faith there, about the incredible discrepancies in resources that I experienced while I was there. The recent troubles there have compounded their challenges by tripling costs for everything from fuel to food to clothing; all this in a country where 70 percent of the people live on less than one US dollar a day. I keep trying to wrap my head around that–living on what I spend for a cup of coffee (at least when I don’t go to Starbucks!)
One of the unintended consequences of my visit was to return to my life in New York City with new and critical eyes. I took a look around our apartment and realized that our family has entirely too much of nearly everything–clothes we don’t wear anymore; books we don’t read anymore; videos we don’t watch anymore. I keep thinking about what my friends J. and C. and their three little boys would think. They all live in a room the size of my bedroom, with no running water and no bathroom. And yet they care for the few things they have in a way that my children never think of, and that I rarely think of myself. It is astonishing to me that all of us around the world have gotten used to the idea that people live the way J. and C. do, and don’t think much of it. How did we get so cold, so jaded and unaware that it seems ok for people to live in a way that we would find offensive if animals were being treated that way?
This is the spiritual practice that so many of us need to embrace–thinking about Kenya and its slums, about Brazil and its favelas, about the thousands of cities and towns in the world where people are barely surviving and whose very resilience is a rebuke, not to our lives, but to the heedlessness we have about our lives.
