Bread and Roses

All across Kenya, camps have been established to deal with the post-election humanitarian crisis. The camps came into being after the political fallout here took on ethnic dimensions, and thousands of women, children and men were forced out of communities where they had lived in peace for a generation. These internally displaced people (IDPs) now live in tents far from home, line up for inadequate food, and wait for help that seems a long time away.

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day, even in the IDP camp at Mathare, a Nairobi neighborhood with slums of its own that preceded what folks here call “the skirmishes.” When my friend S., along with her cousin, P., suggested that we visit the Mathare IDP camp, I was hesitant. Curious as I was about how bad things might be, I was just as worried about being a tourist on the Africa misery circuit. But P., a local grassroots leader who had failed in her recent bid for a seat in Kenya’s Parliament, felt differently: “When you visit these places, you are showing your concern.”

There is a lot to be concerned about. In the blazing afternoon sun, hundreds of people are sleeping in minuscule plastic tents from UNICEF that can only keep them from getting wet, but do nothing to keep them from near-suffocation. People are boiling porridge in the open air; old men and women drink water from plastic cups. At one end of the camp, an evangelical prayer service is under way, with dozens of women singing and dancing praises to God. One song was familiar—a Kikuyu praise song that one of the new Kenyan UU groups had used in a recent service. In a comfortable guest house or in the fetid desperation of a makeshift camp, the words spoke of the same loving God who would sustain them in every situation.

It is a theology I have experienced for most of my own life, even when I have been dancing on the edge of doubt or despair. But this afternoon, amid my aching, outraged sadness here in Mathare, I found myself asking the same question we used to ask ourselves in clinical pastoral education, as we worked with the sick and the dying: Where is God in all this?

For today, the answer was: God is in the roses. All over this camp, the people living here are carrying a red rose, even several. They were donated by Concerned Kenyans for Peace on Valentine’s Day morning, and by afternoon they are everywhere. A man who has lost the use of his legs is dragging himself across the compound, clutching his red rose. Children are chasing each other, laughing, tapping each other with red blossoms, or holding by the stems to sweep the ground. Here and there, you can see red rosebuds adorning the very top of a UNICEF tent, adding sporadic signs of beauty amid the terrible disruption.  

On our way home, P., S., and I talked about those roses for a long time. Wouldn’t it have been better to sell the roses and give the money to get those people out of there? Shouldn’t they have been giving food instead of flowers? But I found myself remembering the old trade union song, with its words of struggle and hope sometimes sung in our worship services: “Give us bread, and roses, too.”