Newsletter 1

The sun set yesterday a little before 7. Just like the night before. Everyone knew it would be completely dark very shortly. No extended twilight here—the sun's angle gets pretty low a bit before 5, but it stays light until, sneakily, the sun leaves and all is dark. Someday I would like to see a good sunrise here, the sun of this world burning bright mere minutes after its heralds invade a dark world.
The past three months have seen orientation to Kenya and then orientation to our placements. One day we were living in a roomy but windy wing of a house in upscale Lavington, the next we moved out and moved in to our respective situations. As the sun rose on our real lives for this year, we began to feed ourselves, to have neighbors, and to begin our work with the students. Josh Orem and I are set up in an apartment that has two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a large living room, neighbors to other teachers and staff who live right on the school compound. Thrown into classes after observing one Kenyan math class (Josh doesn't even teach math), we have found the students at Icaciri Secondary respectful, hard-working, and fun.
The area is very rural, but much more thickly settled than American farm country. Agriculture here begins at the home, not at the industrial farm machine. So the Deputy Principal has 200 chicks in a little canvas lean-to behind her house. Our neighbor to the north sells us milk—every day since the rains started we get a half liter in our entryway. One of the men who works in the kitchen grows sugar cane for sale, and we buy our eggs from someone about 20 minutes’ walk away. In that 20 minutes of walking, we do not see just one crop growing for miles, waiting for a cultivator. Rather, many crops greet us, maize mixed in with the beans, bananas everywhere in little pits, nduma-arrow root-down between the ridges near water, all growing in what I would call people's yards. Grass is an exception to this rule—many people have begun growing swaths of grass to feed the growing number of cows, which are quickly becoming the most profitable use of land.
In Nairobi, the cows of the Maasai (to whom, if you did not realize, belong all the world's cows) roamed the street with us, sometimes causing traffic jams (Why did the cow cross the road?). When we did some gardening, even in our fancy neighborhood, we walked for two minutes to a place where the cows often slept to buy boleo ya ng'ombe (cow manure) from the man who lived there in the manure pit with the cows and his son.
The poor are separate here, but not too separate. Areas that began as British homes or Indian businesses are still rich, but no longer ethnically uniform. The poor are always with us. Every rich area of Nairobi has a poor area right next door. Kangemi is right down the road from where I am now, and Kibera is right by where we did some big shopping during orientation. The change is sudden. When we were on the border of Kibera, a primary school at the end of a market marked the beginning of the slum. And everybody knows it's there (except for the foreigners, of course). It's black and white, day and night—obviously, a white person is out of place in the slum but not in Village Market, an imperialist palace with mini golf, electronics, high hawker prices, and fancy landscaping. There is no twilit transition from rich to poor neighborhoods, just someone’s fence or a building on the border.
The ethnic diversity here is amazing. Most Kenyans seem to be very steeped in the traditions of their ethnic group, and I've heard from two different tribes that their tribe is the "backbone of Kenya." Big cities are mixed, but most rural areas are very uniform in ethnic composition. At our school the first day, a Form 2 (sophomore) told me with very serious eyes that he wished to be called by his Christian name; this after being introduced to me as "Maasai." There was something suddenly different about him in my mind—I had categorized him, accepting his classmates' view, which, with all my American history of racial tension, made me a bit ashamed. He's not actually Maasai, I discovered months later, but he is tall and runs fast. Obviously Maasai.
Most of the ethnic trouble comes when politics happens and a President does good for his people and no one else's. But this is changing, too, on the ground level. The tremendous loyalty I saw last month as the Harambee Stars lost to the Nigerian footballers, three goals to two, I had assumed carried over to political loyalty. But then a Kikuyu a few weeks ago, whose Member of Parliament is Uhuru Kenyatta (son of Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, first President of Kenya), from Kenyatta's hometown even, listed the son as a primary suspect in the 2007 post-election violence. I cannot speak to the allegations, but it was a surprise to hear his countryman calling him out. The winner-takes-all style of elections may be losing favor as Kenyans, seeking a new constitution, are sick of corruption. One evening, long after the sunset (at a little before 7), and then the next morning in worship, the boarders at Icaciri had changed the words of the Michael Jackson song in Free Willy.
"Father, your people are dying,
They're dying of corruption,
And they need your help...mmm."
Josh and I went to Gatundu Presbyterian one Sunday, to a sparsely attended English service. We then visited a friend in the hospital, returning some time later to bring greetings also to the worshippers at the next service. We could not have pushed into the back of the church for the press of people, all praying and singing in their mother tongue. But we went around to a side entrance and were ushered to the front. The matron of our school, who had invited us, encouraged us to present a song when we introduced ourselves. We went up, following a skilled choir, silently coming to the center and introducing ourselves. Our English was likely understood by all but the oldest and youngest among them, for we were brief. And we sang the same song we had sung with the full complement of YAVs at Meru town, "They will know we are Christians by our love." Two foreigners up front, singing in a language whose service draws no one, choosing a pitch too low for both our ranges, enunciating like Americans, difficult to understand, gave what they knew to a church they did not know. And God gave something, too. For the rest of the service, Mercy, the matron, kept telling us how they were repeating to each other "We are one in the Spirit, we are one in the Lord," the opening lines of the song. There we stood, visitors unable to even participate intellectually in the goings on, singing about being one. And somehow we were. We knew with the churchgoers that even if there is a sharp, sudden distinction between our skins, between our country's GDPs, between our descent, or between our language, the day is ours together. The same Spirit draws us to our mutual redemption, into one body for the glory of God.