My past week in Kisumu

I came primarily to see the kids here, and that’s primarily what I’ve been doing. They are smarter, larger, with longer legs and stronger arms. I've been working with some doing math and reading in the mornings, and then working with them with the drama in the afternoon.

It’s a wonderful moment when, as the director, you announce who gets what part each person is going to play. “You Stephen, you are the king Ulysses who comes back to avenge his family!” Their faces change from being just simple bare footed boys in dirty shirts, to being kings and warriors. “You Mustafa, you are the cow.” The giggles and laughter ripple through the room as they look at Mustafa who has his “cow face” on. Drama has always captured the imaginations of people. It’s a special kind of magic that transforms the mundane into the fantastic and extraordinary. The kids love being a part of that. Most of them have memorized all their lines already after only two days of practicing.

Being back on the farm has been good, but it feels quite different. Frankly, there’s not much for me to do here other than the dramas in the afternoons, helping a bit with the morning school, and maybe showing a movie in the evenings. The memories I had from last year of the long afternoons that never seemed to end, all the extra hours to find something to do… are replaying themselves in reality. I keep telling myself that I should think of this time as a kind of vacation to just rest…that I’ll be busy out of my mind for the whole month of September…but its hard when you are the only one on vacation in the middle of a working farm…everyone busy digging in their gardens, driving tractors around, and plowing. I sometimes try to get outside and play soccer or help with the work, but I end up busting up my toes or getting sunburned in the scorching sun. I remember last year I used to sit for hours on end reading tedious articles about Anglicanism, or researching obscure bits of church history on the internet to keep myself from going crazy…I found myself doing it again this morning!

I have been “making the dinner circuit” of all the houses on the farm. It’s a nice way to get caught up with people and see the families in their environment.

I went to my old church, St. Stephen’s Cathedral, on Sunday. It was really a wonderful experience going back. They haven’t changed at all in 14 months. They still start exactly on time, the same people work there, the choir still sings beautiful old British hymns and local choruses, they still use the same liturgy. It really did feel like my home church. The provost (the pastor who is in charge of a cathedral) is a good friend of mine and we had a great reunion. He invited me to give a short greeting to the congregation from my church back in Philadelphia, and to give an update of where I’ve been. I look forward to the opportunity to preach there next Sunday, before taking the train down to Nairobi Sunday night.

Last night I was invited over to my Indian friend’s house for dinner and a visit. Jasmit was born in Kenya into a family who were sugar cane farmers. The family, with a cut throat business philosophy, became rich off of growing and transporting sugar cane to factories. They own dozens of tractors and hundreds of acres of land. They are like a modified version of plantation owners from the Antebellum South, except they are quick to point out that they pay their employees!

We had a nice long chat about how things were going for him. I could tell that he was somewhat lonely out there on his farm. He had gone to college in California, and is very familiar with American culture and a high standard of living, yet is content with his quite and slow life in rural Africa. He is 27, married with a one year old son, and lives with his mother and aunt and uncle. He has a very sharp mind and no one to spar with, so he was eager to challenge and debate an American. We talked about Sikhism (his whole family are Sikhs), Christianity, the church, epistemology, universalism, relativism, the soul, money, morality, Indian culture, and African development. I always enjoy talking with him because of his honest and straightforward approach, and his willingness to jump into talking about difficult issues. He has very strong opinions about most things and has no one to talk to that will temper or refine them. So he will bluntly say things like, “It will take Kenya 100 years to develop to the place that India is at today”, or “No matter how much to teach Africans, all they really want is money. They have no respect, and they are all thieves. Sure the first year is fine, but then as soon as you begin to trust them they begin steeling. ALL my employees are thieves. No exceptions.”

He is a fascinating person and we began to talk about whether there was such a thing as a soul, and how to choose beliefs. He told me, “I don’t know if there are souls or reincarnation or God. But I’m sure that evolution is wrong. All this (the earth) couldn’t have just happened by accident. There has to be some sort of supernatural power behind it. But I don’t think anyone will be able to really know for sure what supernatural power is behind it all until we die.”

He’s a philosophical man who lives in a small mansion, complete with servants, where he trusts no one…not his family, not his employees, not even his Indian friends. He is sitting on close to a half a million dollars, with nothing to do with his life except make more money with the money he has. He is a fascinating person. Yet, I sense that deep down that he wants to trust. He wants to believe in something. But he doesn’t know what and he has no community to talk to about it.

As I drove away from his house at 11pm, he said through the window of my car, “Well are you free tomorrow? How about the day after? We should go down to the lake and have a beer and talk about ‘belief’. It will be another three years, until you come back, that I can talk to someone about ‘belief’.” I tell he was being genuine and that he really did want to talk more. I feel it is a fine line to be friends with the wrong people who will pull you down, and being friends for the sake of being a good influence in a person’s life. I hope, by God’s grace, that I can maintain the latter.