In my application for the Father Smith Fellowship I expressed my desire to experience the universal Catholic Church and the connection I have with the people of Kenya through the sacraments. I know that through our common faith I have a deep tie with all Christians and more specifically Catholics worldwide but I struggle to grasp the concept without ever meeting them.
This past sunday we visited Maseno University, a government run university about an hour away from Kisumu. We set off at seven in the morning, a treat compared to our usual five thirty in the morning wake up time, and began to dodge pot holes, sweep from one side of the road to the other and never really establish a correct side of the road. By the Grace of God and Fr. Stephen's skillful driving we finally made it to Maseno no worse for the wear. After visiting the campus ministry center on campus run by Dominicans, a modest building no bigger than a small house in the far corner of the campus and watching the campus monkeys swing from the trees and weave in and out of paths and run on roofs, much like the common campus squirrel at Providence College, we made our way over to the auditorium for mass. Mass was beautiful with traditional Kenyan music, the lyrics all in swahili but a bit long, two hours. After mass there was a beautiful procession with the blessed sacrament through the campus and the local shanty town. As I processed through the streets of Kenya with people completely different than me, I still felt a strong bond with the men and women I walked side by side with. I could not understand a word of what they were singing but the beauty of the music and the knowledge of what they were praising was more than enough for me. Through the procession I came to a greater realization of my intrinsic connection with the people of Kenya. Life in the Catholic faith can be confined to the local parish and its intimacies. We often fail to see the bigger picture and realize our bond with people with such different cultures and ways of life than our own. We all believe in Christ and his death and resurrection and that leaps all cultural, tribal and racial divides.
In the beginning I said that I desired to experience the universal Catholic Church. There have been moments over the past week or so that I have realized the connection I share with the Kenyan people. But to walk the streets in the presence of Christ, thousands of miles away from home and with my brothers and sisters in faith was the most profound moment to this point and an experience I will never forget.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Saturday, June 25, 2011
A Boy's Castle and his Flag
Two days ago I met a young boy, we will call him Antonio. Antonio is what Kenyan's call a true orphan. The distinction lies in the fact that he, unlike normal orphans, has absolutely no where to go. He is the only one in his year that stays full time at the school. Some of the administrators at the school have told me that he, only age six, has one of the roughest and saddest backgrounds at Father Tom's Kids. This at a school where students come from drought destroyed Sudan and Northern Kenya, Rwanda, where they lost parents during the Rwandan genocide, and many from Kenya who survived the horrible post election violence only by running by severed heads as men chased them with machetes.
As I wandered the grounds at OLG (Our Lady of Grace School) on Thursday evening I saw Antonio sitting in a corner by his dormitory, an elongated hut, not originally built to be a dorm. As he shifted side to side, his tongue slipping between the gap in front teeth, he fiddled with the broken end of a broom handle and what looked like a plastic bread rapper. I walked over to ask him what he was making. As I plopped down on the path next to him he gave me one of those nervous excited smile that only kids from age two to six can give. He did not answer the first time but after my third attempt with his head down and holding in giggles, he gave a very soft answer I could barely understand. I thought he said something along the lines of, "stick" but I could not be sure. He kept fiddling with the plastic bag. It looked like he wanted to tie it around the end of the broken broom handle but again I could not be sure. I was struggling to communicate with him, so I began to search to do so on his own level. I spotted a straw from a broom, reached down, picked it up and made a palm sized triangle. I gave it to him, we counted the sides and I told him that it was a triangle. He repeated what I said and counted the sides a couple of times, turned it from hand to hand and began to smile his trade mark smile, tongue peaking out the gap in his front teeth as the corners of his mouth curl to his cheeks. I had to leave him for a couple of minutes and when I came back he was no longer seated on the curb of the side walk. As I drew closer I spotted something carefully placed in the dirt by the coral end wall of his hut. Planted in the ground with rocks and dirt neatly arranged around the base was Antonio's red broom handle and plastic bag transformed into a clear flag with blue and red lettering proudly flying from a bright red flag pole. Out of his broken handle and plastic bag Antonio created his own flag, flying proud outside of his home, his castle. Maybe, because my mind worked and still functions in a similar way to Antonio's I was able to realize that he, like young me, communicated by creating the splendors of his active imagination. Flags, forts, castles, only he knows what was swirling around in his imagination at that moment.
Antonio struggles to express his vibrant imagination in traditional ways. But, as I found, that does not mean he cannot create. Today I saw him bouncing along holding race car fashioned out of a box, the size of a shoe box, with no top, two sticks poking out the back and front sides and four disks at the ends of the sticks. The wheels of Antonio's mind are always turning and churning out new imaginative creations. Although he rarely speaks to anyone but his five class mates, who he speaks to in Kiswahili, his mind teems with life and beauty. I found him one more time on thursday afternoon and talked to him about his flag. This time I made him a square out of another stray broom straw. Once again we counted the sides, he fidgeted and smiled and said square, only interrupted by his hiccups which jumped out instead of a one, two, three or four. He is an incredibly inventive boy with a live imagination that expresses itself in non traditional ways. I am not sure if his creations and imagination serve as a shelter or a mental block from all of the trauma he has been through but regardless of why, hope and light are bound up within his imagination. God has ways of showing us beauty in darkest corners and the most unsuspecting characters.
As I wandered the grounds at OLG (Our Lady of Grace School) on Thursday evening I saw Antonio sitting in a corner by his dormitory, an elongated hut, not originally built to be a dorm. As he shifted side to side, his tongue slipping between the gap in front teeth, he fiddled with the broken end of a broom handle and what looked like a plastic bread rapper. I walked over to ask him what he was making. As I plopped down on the path next to him he gave me one of those nervous excited smile that only kids from age two to six can give. He did not answer the first time but after my third attempt with his head down and holding in giggles, he gave a very soft answer I could barely understand. I thought he said something along the lines of, "stick" but I could not be sure. He kept fiddling with the plastic bag. It looked like he wanted to tie it around the end of the broken broom handle but again I could not be sure. I was struggling to communicate with him, so I began to search to do so on his own level. I spotted a straw from a broom, reached down, picked it up and made a palm sized triangle. I gave it to him, we counted the sides and I told him that it was a triangle. He repeated what I said and counted the sides a couple of times, turned it from hand to hand and began to smile his trade mark smile, tongue peaking out the gap in his front teeth as the corners of his mouth curl to his cheeks. I had to leave him for a couple of minutes and when I came back he was no longer seated on the curb of the side walk. As I drew closer I spotted something carefully placed in the dirt by the coral end wall of his hut. Planted in the ground with rocks and dirt neatly arranged around the base was Antonio's red broom handle and plastic bag transformed into a clear flag with blue and red lettering proudly flying from a bright red flag pole. Out of his broken handle and plastic bag Antonio created his own flag, flying proud outside of his home, his castle. Maybe, because my mind worked and still functions in a similar way to Antonio's I was able to realize that he, like young me, communicated by creating the splendors of his active imagination. Flags, forts, castles, only he knows what was swirling around in his imagination at that moment.
Antonio struggles to express his vibrant imagination in traditional ways. But, as I found, that does not mean he cannot create. Today I saw him bouncing along holding race car fashioned out of a box, the size of a shoe box, with no top, two sticks poking out the back and front sides and four disks at the ends of the sticks. The wheels of Antonio's mind are always turning and churning out new imaginative creations. Although he rarely speaks to anyone but his five class mates, who he speaks to in Kiswahili, his mind teems with life and beauty. I found him one more time on thursday afternoon and talked to him about his flag. This time I made him a square out of another stray broom straw. Once again we counted the sides, he fidgeted and smiled and said square, only interrupted by his hiccups which jumped out instead of a one, two, three or four. He is an incredibly inventive boy with a live imagination that expresses itself in non traditional ways. I am not sure if his creations and imagination serve as a shelter or a mental block from all of the trauma he has been through but regardless of why, hope and light are bound up within his imagination. God has ways of showing us beauty in darkest corners and the most unsuspecting characters.
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Without Hope we have nothing
I find it hard to believe that I am nearing the end of my first full week in Kenya and am at the end of my second day at Our Lady of Grace school. Our hike up Mt. Kenya was one of the most challenging and humbling experiences of my life. We lost ourselves in the beautiful and harsh landscape of the mountain. The human will is a powerful force. I really do not know how I was able to push myself to the summit, 14,900 feet, to see the sun rise. I looked down on the sun for the first time that morning as it crested the hills in the morning haze. Its blood red and vibrant orange dye slowly seeping into the slate blue dawn skye. I cannot express how overwhelmed I was by my insignificance. There I stood, after a four day hike through the rain forest, hilly shrub land and rocky valley ridges dotted by odd looking stumpy trees, an accomplishment that, I thought would make me feel larger than life, left me crouching on a rock, my heart pounding in my ears, thinking, "Dear God I am so small."Although I am proud that I made it to the summit, I will never forget how the mountain's enormity swallowed me, how her wind and rain drove through my skin, how her bitter cold cut me to the bone, her seemingly impossible incline stopped me in my tracks, heart pounding in my ears and mussels shaking. She beat me. And, how only God knows, she still brought me to her summit and showed me the world.
A long drive and a short flight later I landed in Kisumu Kenya, my home for the next five weeks. While I am here I will be working at Our Lady of Grace school. The school began in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 post election violence that tore apart the country. The Dominicans, and those running Father Tom's Kids, a sponsorship program for poverty stricken students to attend school, decided that they could no longer safely send students out all around the country, or even in the local area to different schools. It has come a long way since its first days when the students received their first lessons under the trees on the Dominican compound. OLG, founded in 2008, now has an upper and lower school. The school, still in the early fazes of development, faces underfunding, understaffing, a lack of quality facilities for the students and little to no frame work from which to plan for the future. The school now has 200 some odd students who come from varying degrees of broken homes, beyond our own comprehension. Almost all of the students at Our Lady of Grace school come from traumatizing backgrounds, which sometimes manifest themselves in dishonest and sometimes criminal behavior. The staff at OLG has taken on the task of inculcating a character of discipline, independence, responsibility and hard work in the students.
Although the students come from a culture shattered and scattered by years of oppression and crippling poverty, I see in them a desire to better themselves and their country. A lot of them are stuck in a cycle of dependence, lack of self worth and a twisted sense of how to get the things they need. Many rely on their ability to beg and swindle to get what they want. Despite the harsh reality of the environment in which they live, I cannot help but see goodness, joy and above all hope in their eyes. In my first two days here I have grown to love and cherish hope. With a situation like the one OLG faces, if we do not have hope we have nothing. I cannot stress enough the beauty, resilience and faith of these people. "There is hope" they always say, "We must have hope." Hope drives the staff and volunteers in all they do. Through hope, I have begun, barely begun to see beyond the anger that foams at the surface of many students and see their hopes and dreams for a better future. The motto of the school, "Sow a character reap a future"cannot be more appropriate for the task at hand and what OLG seeks to accomplish. We have an empty field that needs some weeding, a firm but gentile hand to sow and tend to the crop which, by the Grace of God, will flourish and bare fruit. The people of Kenya face a chaotic barrage from internal and external forces trying to rip her to pieces. But her people, especially those at Our Lady of Grace, will fight for the beautiful Kenya they love and, if we have hope, can see in the eyes of her young men and women.
A long drive and a short flight later I landed in Kisumu Kenya, my home for the next five weeks. While I am here I will be working at Our Lady of Grace school. The school began in the aftermath of the 2007-2008 post election violence that tore apart the country. The Dominicans, and those running Father Tom's Kids, a sponsorship program for poverty stricken students to attend school, decided that they could no longer safely send students out all around the country, or even in the local area to different schools. It has come a long way since its first days when the students received their first lessons under the trees on the Dominican compound. OLG, founded in 2008, now has an upper and lower school. The school, still in the early fazes of development, faces underfunding, understaffing, a lack of quality facilities for the students and little to no frame work from which to plan for the future. The school now has 200 some odd students who come from varying degrees of broken homes, beyond our own comprehension. Almost all of the students at Our Lady of Grace school come from traumatizing backgrounds, which sometimes manifest themselves in dishonest and sometimes criminal behavior. The staff at OLG has taken on the task of inculcating a character of discipline, independence, responsibility and hard work in the students.Although the students come from a culture shattered and scattered by years of oppression and crippling poverty, I see in them a desire to better themselves and their country. A lot of them are stuck in a cycle of dependence, lack of self worth and a twisted sense of how to get the things they need. Many rely on their ability to beg and swindle to get what they want. Despite the harsh reality of the environment in which they live, I cannot help but see goodness, joy and above all hope in their eyes. In my first two days here I have grown to love and cherish hope. With a situation like the one OLG faces, if we do not have hope we have nothing. I cannot stress enough the beauty, resilience and faith of these people. "There is hope" they always say, "We must have hope." Hope drives the staff and volunteers in all they do. Through hope, I have begun, barely begun to see beyond the anger that foams at the surface of many students and see their hopes and dreams for a better future. The motto of the school, "Sow a character reap a future"cannot be more appropriate for the task at hand and what OLG seeks to accomplish. We have an empty field that needs some weeding, a firm but gentile hand to sow and tend to the crop which, by the Grace of God, will flourish and bare fruit. The people of Kenya face a chaotic barrage from internal and external forces trying to rip her to pieces. But her people, especially those at Our Lady of Grace, will fight for the beautiful Kenya they love and, if we have hope, can see in the eyes of her young men and women.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
The Journey Begins
After two days of traveling, little sleep, three countries and a smelly plane ride, we have finally arrived in Kenya! We have one more day to get over our jet lag before we start on the first big leg of our adventure. Tomorrow we start our trek up Mt. Kenya. The four of us will be hiking up the third largest peak of of Mt. Kenya, which is the second highest mountain in Africa. We will leave Nairobi early tomorrow morning to begin the first day of our four day hike.
Nairobi, like any other city around lunch time, is buzzing with activity. As I sit in our hotel room and look out the window on to a world totally new to me, I find myself itching to get out and meet the Kenyan people and experience life in Kenya. Though we will not have the opportunity to explore Nairobi I know that we will get our chance to immerse ourselves in the Kenyan Culture as soon as we get to Kisumu. Keep us all in your prayers over the next few days as we set out on the first leg of our adventure, to go beyond the clouds and into the past, to the roof of Kenya.
Nairobi, like any other city around lunch time, is buzzing with activity. As I sit in our hotel room and look out the window on to a world totally new to me, I find myself itching to get out and meet the Kenyan people and experience life in Kenya. Though we will not have the opportunity to explore Nairobi I know that we will get our chance to immerse ourselves in the Kenyan Culture as soon as we get to Kisumu. Keep us all in your prayers over the next few days as we set out on the first leg of our adventure, to go beyond the clouds and into the past, to the roof of Kenya.
Thursday, June 9, 2011
My Unexpected Journey
"This is the Story of how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself doing and saying things altogether unexpected. He may have lost the neighbors' respect, but he gained--well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end."
J.R Tolkin, The Hobbit
When I told my parents that I was going to apply for a fellowship to serve with the Dominicans in Kisumu, Kenya I was met with a queer stare, a cocktail of confusion, surprise and skepticism. I have to admit that this declaration was a tad random and I in no way prepared them for what was about to say. Due to my lack of a good filter, that all important mechanism that prevents most people from casually saying whatever pops in their head the moment the thought occurs, unexpected and out of place statements are not abnormal for me. But this one was especially unexpected. Despite the concern of my parents and some friends, sometime in early September of last year I started planning my adventure.
For the next six weeks, starting June 14th, 2011 I will be searching for a story. The stories of the students at Our Lady of Grace School and the Dominican brothers, sisters and lay people who are such an integral part of the community. Over the course of my five weeks at Our Lady of Grace School I will be interviewing the students and compiling videos of their stories. My goal is to use the stories of the students and the Dominicans to show the Providence College community what the Dominicans do outside of the walls of PC. I also hope to experience the Universal Catholic Church and its role and dynamic outside of he western world. Most of us only experience the Church through our local Parishes and forget its universality. How it connects us to our brothers and sisters in Christ in Africa and throughout the world.
I am not traveling halfway across the world because I believe I have a wealth of knowledge to bestow on the people of Kenya. I know I cannot solve their problems and I am not going to pretend I know what is right for them. I am going because I want to learn. I want to grow in communion with my brothers and sisters in Kenya. Mother Theresa once said that the materially rich are spiritually poor, where as the poor, though they have very little, are spiritually rich. I have much to learn from the orphaned and abandon children that live at Our Lady of Grace School. I hope that, through the grace of God, I can share a fraction of what I learn from the people of Kenya with all of you.
So this is my story. It is about a young man, who wishes he was a Hobbit, who is about to have an adventure, and is finding himself doing and saying things altogether more unexpected than usual. Some of his family may now consider him a bit crazy, but he hopes and prays that in the end, by the grace of God, he will have gained something.
Love the poor and your life will be filled with sunlight and you will not be firghtend at the hour of death.
St. Vincent de Paul
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