Africa was not at all what I expected. As a result of a national election that was rumored to end in country-wide violence my month-long trek across the globe was cut into a brief 9-day stint. However, God being God, He accomplished everything I could have hoped for and more in my short time in Kenya. After over a week of living in near constant terror as the U.S. embassy continued to urge us to leave the country, it wasn’t until I landed safely home in Indiana that the trip went from incredibly frightening to just plain incredible.
I’ve read books, watched movies, and thought I did my leg-work, but I can now confidently say that you do not know or understand Africa or third-world countries until you’ve been to one. Still, I will do my best to give you just a glimpse of what’s out there.
After 27 hours of traveling I arrived at Nairobi International Airport with no luggage (it was lost en route), and was dropped off at 3am to a house guarded by armed men and a high gate wall lined with barbed wire fence, loudly yelling to me that I was not in Kansas anymore.
In my time in Africa I watched elephant orphans play soccer and feed themselves with the world’s largest baby bottles, was kissed by a giraffe, had monkeys scurry around my shoulders, held crocodiles, and touched ostrich eggs. I also saw fellow volunteers come home from a day in the slums with nothing after being mugged at gunpoint in broad daylight. I spent the first few nights getting little sleep and eating even less as I adjusted to the brutal altitude thickly laced with cheap diesel fumes. Another volunteer threw up gasoline after her first three days.
A few days in we were told we would not be able to go to our orphanage placements until further notice as a constitutional referendum was being voted on and was threatening to start Kenya’s first civil war. The last election, in 2007, led to two months of violence that took the lives of over 1,100 people. The country, and particularly the tourists, waited with bated breath expecting a similar outcome. Thank goodness no such thing happened this time. We scraped by with only one bombing, two riots, and enough murders to scare us American volunteers home, but not enough to make headlines. It became very clear here that death and violent killings are quite common here, and three conversations with grieving Kenyans later, I understood why God brought me and my future counseling license here to Nairobi.
Kenya is so different then America. It was heart-breaking to walk the streets filled with trash, feces, wild animals, and displaced people with nothing to do but walk. Nairobi was not easy on any of your senses.
I wanted to cry when I saw that my orphanage placement was nothing but sheet metal nailed together. These children had nothing. The orphanage was just sheet metal nailed together to make tiny 8x8 light-less shacks. The rooms had 2x4’s nailed together to make desks. For food, the boys milked goats they owned and made eggs from their pen of chickens. Every day, that was it. They didn’t have water some days, and had lunch less often. All they did all day was play soccer and do chores.
The children wore clothes more dirty and tattered than I ever could have imagined. They had holes in their shoes, and multiple adolescent boys wore women’s dresses or heels because it was all they had. Three-year-old's had rotting teeth from unclean water. Still, the orphans experienced more noticeable joy by holding our hands or being picked up and spun around by us than most Americans would experience if we were given a brand new car. We spent a few days repairing and painting desks for the children’s schools, and they thought I was magical when I mixed red and blue paint to make purple, something even the orphanage owner didn’t know was possible. When I gave the girls the simple and cheap gospel beads we hand out at Christmas Conference, they treated them like precious pearls and couldn’t believe I was willing to give away such gems.
The only place in Nairobi harder on my emotions than the orphanage was the world’s second largest slum, Kiber. Here, thousands of displaced people live on top of 10-20ft piles of trash. It looked like people literally set up camp on top of a landfill. Pigs and rats roamed around their little 4x4 shacks which held countless people dying of AIDS, cast out of the city like lepers.
I was struggling to survive my accommodations, and compared to most of the rest of the country, we lived like kings and queens. In my mind, I lived for nine long and miserable days fearing for my health and sometimes life, and my lot is nothing compared to these people. I complained about not having indoor plumbing and toilet paper, I couldn’t stand not showering, and I never got used to seeing cockroaches constantly roaming around our floor and walls.
Thankfully, while I missed every worldly comfort America has to offer; hot showers, clean water, cold drinks, good food, and friends, I had the Lord, and that was all that mattered. I asked to be pruned of everything I rely on before the Lord so that He was all I had… and boy did He deliver. Verses from Isaiah and near constant prayer were the only things that gave me peace and helped me to feel safe. That and my assurance of salvation gave me hope, knowing that if it was God’s time for me I knew where I was going.
And, because my thoughts and words are failing to adequately express what I want to, I’ll leave it to another’s words. Beth Moore’s daughter wrote this upon returning home from a week in Calcutta, India.
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“Oh, what a deep imprint [the children] have made on this heart of mine. And not just them, but all the people, so deeply loved by God, in Calcutta and India at large who must fight for their survival each and every day. I could never have prepared myself for all that I saw last week. For example, during one of my visits to a devastating slum, a half-clothed, poverty-stricken crippled man with his back hunched over at a ninety-degree angle limped slowly over to me. He had purchased a coconut for me with whatever small amount of money he did have and then proceeded to slice the top open for me to drink so that I could be protected from the heat. And mind you, I was the one going back to the air-conditioned hotel. Not him. What was I supposed to do with that? And that is just one of about several hundred stories I could tell.
Because we each had experiences like this and because I’m sure our eyes were about to glaze over, the leaders of our group called for a debriefing in lieu of a corporate lobotomy. During this debriefing they gave us a safe place to talk about what some of us were feeling and thinking. It was great, but we really needed another entire week to hash it all out. I’ll never forget the [question one leader posed] before we left the debriefing.
‘Now what will you do?’ He continued by saying, ‘You’ve spend your words lavishly on sharing your stories; now it’s time to spend your lives.’ Talk about messing me up. And so it was to this tune that our reentry began.
Have you ever seen The Return of the King? Do you remember the last scene when Frodo unexpectedly boards the ship to sail to the Grey Havens? Throughout their life-threatening journey to Mordor, Frodo and Sam kept dreaming about such things like the taste of the strawberries on the Shire, but when Frodo actually does get back to the Shire, for some reason, it is like he can’t fully enjoy the normal comforts that the Shire has to offer. I’ve always speculated about why exactly Frodo has to sail to the Grey Havens. I think that Frodo has just been through too much. His scars run too deep. After years of being back at the Shire they still haven’t healed. In the movie he asks the rhetorical questions: ‘How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back?’ And then he explains, ‘There are some things time cannot mend. Some hurts go too deep… that have taken hold.’
But I’m not a hobbit. And this is real life.
I don’t get to sail off and escape from the white shores into a far green country under a swift sunrise with Gandalf.
Ironically, my life just happens to be deep in the heart of excessive American culture. And I’d be lying to you if I said I don’t enjoy it. The honest truth is that I know myself. I know that normal life will quickly pick back up and the temptation will be to forget all I have seen. To move forward without any change. While others around me may wish for me to hurry up and acclimate to normal life again, my fear is that I will too quickly move ahead. That I will forget all I have seen, heard, touched, smelled, and felt.
I know myself. I’m just an all-American twenty-six-year-old girl, consumed with comfort, security, vanity, wealth, and materialism like the ‘best’ of them. In light of who I know I am, I feel compelled to ask that the Lord would perform a miracle on my behalf—that He would keep the emotional wounds that were carved during the past few weeks from healing. Now I know you may think I’m a bit morbid, eccentric, or even just plain weird. But that’s okay, because I’ve been called for worse, I’m sure of it. So this is my prayer today: that the time won’t have its typical way with me. That the sharp edge of the sting I feel deep in my soul won’t ever be dulled or alleviated.”
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And, scripture, because God says it better than both of us:
Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?
Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.
They you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I. If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail. -Isaiah 58:6-11
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