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| Visiting the Mennonite Church of Kenya |
At the beginning of May, we dipped our feet into the new chapter
of our work with MCC. May 1 was a public holiday and the beginning of a long
holiday weekend in Ethiopia, celebrating Orthodox Easter, Fasika. It was the
perfect opportunity to take a few days away from our normal work to do our
official handover visit with Scott and Anne Marie Stoner-Eby in Kenya. It was
also convenient because this week coincided with the end of our resident IDs,
so we needed to leave the country anyway.
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| David with a creature friend at the JKIA airport |
After a full day of helping our church move on Wednesday, we
had a few hours to resolve things back at home and the office and then we
headed to the airport for a night flight to Nairobi. Everything went smoothly
with our travel and we found our way to the guesthouse, but I have to say that
staying up until 3 am isn’t great when you’re over 50. Fortunately, we had a
chance to sleep in a little.
Over the next 6 days, we had to keep up a rigorous schedule. On our first day in Nairobi, we walked over to the MCC Kenya Office in the morning to officially meet the team we will start to lead in August. The longer-term staff (whom we met in the past) were away that day, but they have hired three women and a man in the last two years. The team seems incredibly strong and capable, with Program Coordinators in Food Security, Health and Education, Peace, and Exchange Programs, and Finance. We really enjoyed our time to sit and get to know them and then to go out for lunch together at a walking distance restaurant.
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| Visit to the Stoner-Eby flat |
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| Living room of the house we will rent |
We had a free morning on Saturday and so we went to visit the Unger family in another suburb of Nairobi. David and I had met them during our visit back in February; they have a boy in Grade 9, like David, and the two kids really hit it off when they hung out after church that one day. Since then, we had learned that Carla’s parents have been living in a house next door, but that they are moving in August. Their house was coming open for rent, and it seemed interesting to go take a look. First, we really enjoyed having an hour of good conversation with Carla and Kurt, learning about a lot of points of commonality: they served with MCC in Tanzania, have some Mennonite background, are 3rd culture kids who have lived in East Africa most of their lives, have an older son who just went to college, etc.
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| Porch of the house |
The available home was quirky but really nice, and has good potential for hosting friends and family who might visit. Apparently, the original owner was a Kikuyu woman. When her son came of age, according to cultural norms, he couldn’t stay under her roof any longer, so she built him an attached annex with a separate kitchen, sitting room, bathroom, bedroom, and back porch. Like many older homes in Nairobi, the floors are wood parquet, and the house is surrounded by green space within the walls, and then an even larger green space next door. Also interesting was the small cottage between the two houses, which Carla rents out as guest space – another option for people coming to visit us.
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| Garden space outside the house |
Everything was very, very wet, and the power was out that day, but that was just an inconvenience compared to many people. In fact, Nairobi had been hit with 3 straight weeks of unseasonably heavy rain and terrible flooding. Lots of people were affected, but especially those living in informal settlements and slums next to the rivers. As the week went on, we heard story after story of people nearly drowning, losing everything, being displaced. Many lives were lost. In one MCC-supported Maternal health project, about 350 of the 700 participants had been displaced and may not be able to return home or to the project. It was a hard time for Nairobi generally.
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| Scott with his amazing bird camera |
We left the Unger’s place very curious but had to go do our essential shopping trip at a nearby mall. We still needed 2 months’ worth of cheese and butter, and had been commissioned to supply a special church event the next week. After dropping our shopping back at the guesthouse, we jumped in the car and headed to the airport for a quick, one day trip to Kisumu.
Located on the shores of Lake Victoria, Kisumu is a larger
city than I had thought. The Mennonite Church of Kenya has its head office in a
village nearby, and we wanted to take the opportunity to greet key church
leaders and partner staff during this transition visit. So we arrived Saturday
evening, and were pleasantly surprised to find an excellent Indian restaurant
near the simple hotel where we stayed.
On Sunday morning, we had a plan to attend the English service at the Mennonite Church in a village 20 minutes out of town. But before that, Scott and I went out on a special bird-watching mission. Scott is a very serious birder, and he was working on seeing and photographing at least 500 birds in East Africa (actually he passed 500 last year and is currently up to 563 or something). Several rare birds are endemic to the lake around Kisumu, and so he seized the opportunity to hire a guide and go out at 6 am to find the papyrus gonolek.
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| The place where we spotted our bird |
I’ve put my birding on hold in Ethiopia, since binoculars became illegal here. But it was thrilling to get up early and go out on a quest like this – I’ve never had serious goals in birdwatching before. The roads around the lake were really flooded, so luckily we didn’t have to drive into the park area, but just stayed on the quiet paved road as the sun rose and we began to see birds in the papyrus wetlands on both sides. The guide heard the gonolek but didn’t spot it. We waited, watched several weavers, kingfishers and even the papyrus canary. It was like a stakeout. But the suspect never appeared. We were running out of time before church started, but the guide urged us to hoof it to another location where he’d seen the gonolek the day before. Halfway, we caught a bajaj to save some time and then picked our way across flooded stepping stones to a ramshackle boardwalk next to more papyrus reeds.
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| Papyrus Gonolek, Photo by Scott Stoner-Eby |
Within a few minutes, the guide heard our target bird, and then it floated over the boardwalk and concealed itself in the papyrus. We were doing all kinds of gymnastics to get a decent photo, and it kept moving, and the clock was ticking, but we just couldn’t give up. And then suddenly another gonolek flew in and posed beautifully for us. We couldn’t tear ourselves away for another 10 minutes, getting better and better shots of the gorgeous birds, 3 in the end. They are thrush-sized and heavy with black bodies, a red chest and belly, and a golden crown. It was a thrilling experience, heightened by our urgency to not disappoint our hosts by being late to church! In the end, we got there right after the first song, so our lateness wasn’t too terrible.
During the rest of the day, we met a variety of church leaders, some from the spiritual wing and others who are part of the new Mennonite Development Services NGO. The Mennonite Church in Kenya is concentrated in the west on the border of Tanzania and was actually planted in the 1960s by Tanzanian believers and missionaries. Currently, it has about 11,000 members, so it’s considerably smaller than the Ethiopian Anabaptist denomination we have been working with in Ethiopia. In the areas where they have congregations, they are doing some very good maternal/child health projects and peace-building work in the community.
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| GDI, a peacebuilding NGO in Kisumu |
Some of the leaders were delayed in reaching the head office because of the bad flooding that extended into Western Kenya. One church leader ended up wading across a bridge – we felt really bad that he had to do such a risky thing to come see us! But, after good visits and conversations with 3 different groups, along with wonderful meals, we squeezed into one station wagon and got a ride back to the airport and on to Nairobi.
On Monday and Tuesday, we spent most of the day meeting partners in Nairobi, 3 on each day. We were also really glad to see several young adult volunteers in Kenya whom we had met back in December at the Renew conference. In total, we met 9 partner organizations with their staff over 3 days. It was just a bit overwhelming!
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| A school MCC supports in a slum area |
We had to just keep moving, and all along the way the evidence of flooding was everywhere, directly impacting participants in at least 2 projects. We will write more about all those partners and what they do when we are finally in place in Kenya later in the year. And from the last partner visit, we rushed through town (not easy in Nairobi) and got to the airport just in time to catch our flight back to Addis Ababa.
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| Farewell to Eyerus and Moses |
I don’t even know where to start with all the catch up we needed to do once we were back at our desks. One major event was definitively saying goodbye to Eyerusalem as she and her husband and toddler headed to Canada. We’ve hired a new accountant and he will start in the beginning of June. But we will really miss Eyerusalem – she is a special person, very correct and very caring at the same time.
Our housekeeper Yeshi has also needed some care. Her injured knee is still not very well, and so I took her back to the doctor to try to understand why she has so much pain after surgery. She’s getting treatment, but I’m worried that she may have a chronic problem. On the good side, we were able to visit her condominium as a whole team and do an assessment.
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| Yeshi at her Condo |
There was just some small work remaining to get it to the point where it can be rented and so I am very happy to report that this work has been done as of this writing, including hooking up to the water meter. The one remaining task is to put a door on the bathroom. That should be do-able by next week. Many thanks to any of you who pitched in to help Yeshi, as a widow, get to this point of having some security in her life.
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| Youth group cookout, with Paul and Paul on grills |
On the social side, we hosted one final big youth group cookout at our compound. It’s almost impossible to buy sausage in Ethiopia and so it was a special treat when we were able to bring back over 120 sausages plus hot dogs, along with tasty chips, and ingredients for s’mores – oh and also mustard and BBQ sauce! Which I may have mentioned costs an arm and a leg here. All very affordable in Kenya. A family who left last year was able to help contribute for this special youth group event. What a joy it was to see almost all the youth present at one time – 25 kids total, including a few younger siblings. Lots of parents joined in the party as well.
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| Free play |
Kids played and played – outdoor sports in the daylight and then midnight mafia after dark. The parents chatted and lightly supervised, but these are such great kids and nothing is really needed to help them enjoy themselves. It was one of those evenings that we will savor for years to come – such a wonderful community to be a part of, along with the gratitude of having a compound where hosting is easy. It strengthened our resolve to find a way to rent a house with some garden in Nairobi because that’s the kind of family we want to be going forward.
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| Redeemer worship team |
Our church passed through a momentous month as well. On May 12, our congregation held a joint worship service with the Amharic-speaking Lideta congregation – it was our farewell to the building and a time to share worship and bless each other. Honestly, this was a HUGE deal historically and relationally for both of our churches. Apparently, this was the very first joint worship service that has ever taken place – occasioned by Redeemer’s departure. There is always a lot of potential awkwardness around sharing service between congregations with different languages, worship styles, and even theological understandings. Yet this was absolutely worth doing, and such a deeply moving experience of the Holy Spirit at work.
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| Holy Communion |
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| sitting at table together with Lideta leaders |
And then the next thing we did was to share the Lord’s supper, as reconciled people, with ministers from both of our churches serving. There must have been 600-800 people gathered that morning, and I found the experience overwhelming: how does Jesus have that much love, for each individual human being, pouring himself out over and over for the young and old, the European and the Ethiopian, giving us strength and love to go on? There was nothing to do but weep during the rest of the service.
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| Redeemer and Lideta leaders |
The service was followed by a time of sharing food and taking photos together. And then the Lideta congregation followed up with one more invitation: they invited us to join them for a special dinner the following evening at a downtown hotel. It was one more thing in a busy week, but we had 10 of us who met 10 of them. And what a special and generous invitation it was. We had more quiet time between the leaders to share words of encouragement and to imagine how we might manage to meet again for joint worship as the years go by, perhaps annually.
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| At Entoto Park |
After all that, between May 1 and May 16, Paul and I felt like we had been working non-stop and even our weekends were full of work and church activity. We finally found two days where we could catch up and take some rest together. Since our home is at the office, we had to leave and spend an overnight at a hotel in town. Our first stop was the pool for a nice long leisurely swim. At the hotel, we were able to have time to talk and to take naps, to make some calls to family, and to enjoy being in a quiet and private setting. The geothermal pool was wonderful on a cool night, and the well-equipped gym was a pleasure to use in the morning, followed by a great breakfast buffet.
Finally, we planned to take a long walk at Entoto Park
in the hills on the edge of town. A nice, paved walking path follows the ridge of the mountain for about 7 km and we intended to walk the whole path and then return. The path feels peacefully isolated in the middle of the forest, the attraction of taking that walk. But just before we reached halfway, we came across some other walkers returning to the main gate. They had been robbed by a man with a big knife, who took all their things and tore a hole in the T-shirt of one. Normally, police are on guard duty along that route (there have been problems in the past months). But the thief hit while the police were all on lunch break, all at the same time. It was disconcerting so we turned back and drove to another more populated part of the park where we could still do more walking but have more people around us. As we drove, we saw new settlements of informal houses and shacks, probably people who had been pushed out of the city center with all the current construction going on. It seems to be a lesson somehow, that you need to take care of the basic needs of your population before you can expect public spaces to be safe.
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| Rebecca H and friends |
And more social occasions:
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A gathering with our friend Rebecca Heidkamp from
Baltimore, who first connected us with some of our best friends here in Addis,
back when we were trying to figure out if we could move here. She’s a great
friend and excellent people befriend her. We are thankful for her role in
helping us find community here.
- A farewell high tea with another departing missionary -- very fancy, at the Hyatt with a lovely selection of deserts.
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High tea
A Minecraft Finale with David’s friends, and a
nice time for parents to hang out on the porch.
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A farewell evening for another dear departing
the family, the Polks
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And David’s friend Nathan coming over for moments
to frantically try to finish the model he got for his birthday before he leaves
for the US on Sunday.
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One last Wednesday playdate, this one a special occasion featuring a slip n slide. You know you live in Addis when you are reluctant to host a slip n slide party unless it is the day of the week when the city water flows in. Happily, that was Wednesday. People, do not take fresh running water for granted! It’s a luxury! And a luxury to play with, when so many people in our neighborhood can barely get enough to survive the week. But it was delightful to watch the 5 boys playing and enjoying themselves so much, and to sit next to my friend Lori for a few hours watching them.
That’s enough. Paul just got back from a field visit in the
south and he will have more to write about work in the next blog.
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| School in Nairobi |
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| Game time with the Chege family |
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| Teen guys dinner after Mentos Diet Coke challenge play date |
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| Ethiopian Easter Kircha -- shared meat at the compound |
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| Minecraft Finale |
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| A new building going up behind our compound |
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| Farewell for Eyerus |
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| Sausages for youth group |
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| Youth group |
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| Midnight mafia |
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| Slip and slide |
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| Modeling |
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| In Yeshi's condo |
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| worship team at church |
