Humility "Part 2"

There is great humility to be learned in being a "foreigner". To be a foreigner is to be dependent. You are dependent upon those around you to open their lives and hearts to you, to welcome you into their midst, into their communities, into their circles of friends, into their families. You depend on these people to be bridges of understanding to their culture and traditions. You are dependent upon their willingness to be teachers of their languages and patient as you stumble about in your journey of learning. You depend on them for a great many things like these, and then, as you have started on that path to becoming one with them (I stress WITH them and not one of them. To be one OF them simply isn't possible. Nor should you seek it, as that would mean losing those things that make you who you are, largely coming from culture, from how you were raised, the education you received, etc. God has made you who you are for a reason and a purpose, and it is not for us to divorce from ourselves that which God has molded and shaped us into being as a result of our own unique backgrounds. However, it is so sooo important to engage in being ONE WITH THEM. This is being their sister, being their brother, walking in their shoes, eating their food, speaking their language...), you begin to depend on them for other things... Things like love and acceptance... like the extended family that the body of Christ is able to offer, because when it really comes down to it, we're all foreigners. You depend on these people who you are building relationships with, friendships with, to be your mother to comfort you when you're sick (because your own mom isn't there to make you chicken soup or ginger tea). :) You depend on them to encourage you when you're having a rough day, laugh with you as your joy shared is doubled, and cry with you to bear some of the burden of whatever pain you are going through. To be dependent is to know humility - a humility that is sweet to taste, full of love, and abounding in grace.

a mix of pictures (and more to come) :)

Preaching on the "maui" (stone) in "Kenya 2" (the people here are very hostile, and almost all are engaged in brewing illegal alcohol). My third weekend in Kipkaren, the students and staff at the training center went from house to house in our surrounding community to invite the to "the rock" for an afternoon of preaching and music. A lot of people are found deeply imbedded in poverty (not only economically), and have no church to turn to or to have turn to them. So out we went. It's the intention of the spiritual leaders at the training center to make these meetings a weekly happening, as people are responding to the Word and to the love being shown them. We've only just begun though, and there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done.

Listening.

Eating sugarcane (my first time) with Rashid and Henri (2 public health interns). The dairy unit is behind us.

Up before 5am to milk the cows. grins (they have 2 cows: Istoria and Nenile)

HIV/Aids Testing

Yesterday (Monday), I went with the public health workers and interns to an area called Osorongai (near Kipkaren) to test people for HIV/Aids. Betty (the worker), Rashid and Henri (interns), Miishak (driver) and I piled into the landrover/ambulance with our supplies and kits and headed out over the bumpy roads to Osorongai. The back of the "ambulance" acted as a sort of office/area of privacy, as those who were willing climbed in and out to get their fingers pricked, blood tested, results read, and personal information written for records. Of the 44 people we tested, most of whom were youth, all 44 were negative (yay!). And one of the opportunities of catching, testing, and educating people when they are young is that you can teach them how to protect themselves from getting HIV, as well as help erase some of the stigma surrounding the virus. And for some comic relief, we ended the day with loading the back of the truck with a couple bundles of squawking smelly chickens to bring home with us for supper for some visitors at the training center. grins Never a dull moment. ;)

Humility "Part 1"

The other day I was asked the question: "What is God teaching you here?"

Perhaps I might have responded "What isn't God teaching me here?" grins But I didn't. ;) Because he IS teaching me some specific things, one being humility (I'll share more of the others later), which is also completely inexhaustable as far as coming to know it. It's a lifelong learning. So anyway, to the details.

Humility...

The first part of humility I'm learning I expressed to a friend through email, so I'm going to include some of it here, and hopefully clarify it a bit better. (The second part of humility will come the next time I blog.) :)

Perhaps as it goes in many or most traditional cultures (including our own not so long ago), women lack voice. And I'm not talking about the kind of voice that stands up at a podium to demand rights. I'm talking more of being shut out or shut down from sharing thoughts, ideas, emotions, feelings, wisdom, using the gifts and creativity and intelligence God has blessed them with. With women to women there is freedom. But women and men sharing together on equal footing has yet to come to full life, and most especially (and sadly) in marriage. Within marriage, in a quiet but firm way, they are oppressed and treated injustly. Someone told me that once a woman enters into marriage she begins to self-destruct. She loses her voice, her ability to make decisions, her freedom to express thoughts and feelings... In traditional Nandi (the local tribe here) marriages, the men are trained beforehand - a kind of marriage counseling ceremony of sorts for men - and one of the things that they are told is that their wife is their "closest enemy", so build a wall against her and don't be vulnerable or share anything on your heart with her because she may turn against you. How horrible is that! So instead of marriage bringing a man and woman even closer together, it separates them. (Not exactly the picture of marriage we read of between Christ and the Church.) Where the man will perhaps share all on his heart to his girlfriend or fiance before they're married, afterwards he stops sharing with her and she is not allowed to share her thoughts and feelings and desires with him. She becomes simply an object of pleasure and a bearer of his children. With intimacy in marriages, women can never approach men or express their love or feelings of attraction to their husband. It's only when their husbands have the desire to be with them. And even if they theoretically can approach their husbands, they don't for fear of being beaten (regardless of whether or not their husband actually would). I'm not saying that that happens in ALL marriages (there might be the exception here or there), but it's definitely in the greater majority. Women are blocked out physically and emotionally and intellectually. So now you can perhaps see why it was said that they self-destruct. Even before marriage, women aren't given equal footing with men (intellectually, in leadership, etc). I maybe happen to be an exception here, simply because I'm a mzungu (white person), so I can access conversations that African women can't or are less likely to.
And it is in this sense of gender oppression and injustice that I've been learning a lot about humility. And I was thinking... that even though humility is always a good thing... the source of that humility, or what causes the humbling experience can be a pretty aweful thing. I guess that's not a new concept... arrogance is bad and so the humbling is good (put simply), but before now I'd never thought of humility and the cause of it as being systematic. The "system" is culture. The culture says that "the way it has always been is the way it should always be". And so you find a culture of injustice and oppression against women (and again, especially in marriage). But it is this system, this culture, that is causing humility in me, because I've taken equality for granted from growing up in it. My hearts rebels against being put in a box with no voice... when I know that a man, ANY man, looks at me and sees first that I'm a woman and so I'm on less footing from the beginning. Before we've even begun we're on unequal ground. And then, because I have white skin, I land just ahead of my black sisters because they have black skin. I'm somehow special because of a DNA code, a difference in pigment. And so I hurt twice - in hurting for being a woman, and hurting for the injustice against black women because even though I've started off on uneven ground, my ground is higher than theirs. And if you try and share these things with the majority of men of this culture, they don't see the pain that women experience because they are the ones that are benefiting from the system. How brave are the people that work for change even if it means losing some of the status and benefits (even though injustly gained) they possess! But even if you look at the so-called "benefits" and "status" and such, men have NO idea what they are missing in isolating women and their wives from themselves, chaining them to tradition because "things are the way they've always been". Where would ALL of us be if that was how we lived?? So, as I wrote my friend: "A burdenshared is a burden halved... A joy shared is a joy doubled..." (something like that). grins So, I'm learning humility - how to be humble - in this culture, while at the same time in my own small ways humbly challenging the powers that be. The humility I'm learning isn't from the source of pride, and it isn't a humbling who's source is something ill inside of me. The source is bigger than me, bigger than women, bigger than men, and really, bigger than culture. Who is the corruptor of all that God made good? Satan and his "principalities and powers". These are what we are ultimately fighting. And who is the only one that can fight Satan but Jesus Christ. Yet we have been given His power through the shedding of his blood. We have been given his name. And we have been given his Word and the Holy Spirit who gives us his words to speak.

Before I end I want to assert that Nandi (and Kenyan) men aren't evil. (You may laugh, but I'm serious.) I have met so many wonderful christian men here who sincerely love the Lord and desire to do his will, and I'm friends with ALL of the students, and we all hang out together and joke and laugh and talk together and there's not so much the sense of "you can't participate because you're a woman". I do want to share these things with you, however, SO THAT YOU CAN PRAY. Not only the women need prayer as they deal with their experiences of oppression, but the Nandi (and Kenyan) men need prayer as well - that our Mighty loving God would soften their hardened hearts... that the power of the hand of Jesus Christ would touch their eyes so that they can really see the intense pain and chasms of separation that their cultural norms are placing between them and their women and their wives... that the Holy Spirit would whisper in their ears, giving christian men a voice to speak out against their culture of injustice against women and instead uplift them before God, before their families, and before their communities. Christian men NEED to be different from what their world tells them is "right to do". Christ came to make disciples of both men AND women, and both were found at his feet. He fulfills those attributes in cultures that are godly, and he turns the tables on those that are not. Pray that men will be Christ in their culture. Pray that the Holy Spirit would give them the vision, the insight, and the courage to break cultural norms and defend the oppressed. Pray that they would see the value of their women, that they would see them as indeed being made - male and female - in the image of GOD. Cast out what ill feelings you may have against them and PRAY for them because they are being greatly deceived by the Deceiver. And pray that the Lord might even send men - foreigners or other Kenyans - who can teach them what they do not know, and that they would have ears to hear and hearts that receive.

Siki berurin mising' ! (Kinandi: Be blessed so much!)

A bit of life at Kipkaren

FULL is a great way to describe life here.

What am I doing and learning...?

I'll start with the people. I am #35 of the students here, and one of the olderst as well (most are between the ages of 20 - 22/23, a couple are mid-20s, and fewer still around 29-30). I spend most of my time with the students and teachers (who have also welcomed me as one of them) doing morning chores (2x a week I get up before 5am to help milk the 2 cows and learn more about sustainable dairy farming in Kenya), I water my popo mti - Kiswahili for papaya tree - that I planted last week, and I often help some of the students water and weed their gardens. Our daily breakfast of chair and bread and butter sandwiches is at 7am, and then we have our morning meeting/chapel time which we start off by singing a few songs in Kiswahili acapella (one of my favorites times of day), and then one of the students reads a few verses or a passage of scripture and talks a little about it. Following our morning meeting we usually have a morning practical - a different one every day. Some of what we've done in the past 2 weeks is shelling, drying, and bagging maize (to be ground into coarse flour for ugali), building a chicken coup, digging a ditch for water pipes (to supply ready available water to the kitchen and garden - especially the garden, as students spend A LOT of time hauling water in buckets and water cans from the river up to their plots), moving young trees to a nursery bed to be transplanted, planting our popo trees, etc. After our morning practical we wash up and head to class - the first one starting at 10am, and then 2 more following that, each an hour long. At 1pm we all have lunch together, followed by 2 classes after lunch. When classes finish we have our late afternoon practical which can include continuing the work that we weren't able to finish in the morning, harvesting our produce and preparing it for supper, planting or transplanting crops, building compost piles (3x3x3 meters), learning how to make organic fertilizers, etc. When we're finished with whatever we're doing, we hang out and talk and joke and maybe chew on sugar cane :) , or wander around, water the gardens, study, or do whatever else needs to get done. The bells for supper calls us around 7pm, and the dining hall is filled with people talking and laughing and smells of ugali and whatever vegetables/legumes have been cooked for the evening meal. We finish the day with evening meeting/chapel, and then either watch an educational movie (like organic farming techniques in Kenya or bee-keeping, historical documentary or one with some kind of spiritual lesson) or study or go to bed. I have learned SO MUCH in the classes and practicals we've had. I'm filling my notebooks and am looking forward to reading through them and studying them when I return home, and then in the future being able to put into practice the knowledge I've gained here.

What have I learned about Kenyan culture...?

You greet people with a FIRM handshake (and I mean FIRM) whenever you meet them. If you are close friends, especially with women, you touch cheeks on the right side of your friends' face and then the left. You might greet them in Kiswahili with HABARI (literally "news" but kind of translates to how are you) or HABARI YAKO ("your news") or HABARI ZENU (how are you all). Or in Kalenjin (the mother language of most of the people here and the surrounding people of this area) you might say CHAM'GE or YAMOYE (equivalent to the Kiswahili).

Most people are pretty soft spoken. Everyone loves to sing, and we almost always sing acapella (which I LOVE) with all sorts of beautiful harmonies. Everyone is pretty relaxed, taking their time, however in class the WALIMU (teachers) are teachign the students about good time management and the importance and benefits of diligent and perseverant work.

It's culturally appropriate for women to wear skirts below the knees, although that's very slowly beginning to change as women gain more equality of opportunities (you CAN wear pants or long shorts - below the knees - if you're playing sports and the like).

If you see 2 women or 2 men holding hands it means that they are good friends or like sisters or brothers - this is culturally appropriate. However, you'll never see a man and a woman holding hands.

Chai is essential for life, and especially for beginning your day. grins (Seriously. Some people won't go to work if they don't have chai.)

One of the neatest cultural experiences I've taken part in here is the HARAMBE. A harambe is when people come together and team-up to contribute financially for the need of a member of their community or church. The harambe is held for this person. It's community oriented, and often also acts as an accountability check for that person. For example, if your community or church hold a harambe for you to help raise money so that you can go to college or further your education, you're expected to come back and bless you community with what you've learned. You give back to the community in other ways what you were given. So our class did exactly that for our friend Temayo, who wants to continue on with her education after she finishes this program.

There are lots of other observations I've made, and some I'm forgetting, but at least I've given you a taste of what I've been experiencing. :)

What has the Lord been teaching me during my time here so far...?
Many things. :)
One which stands out the most is God's great faithfulness. It's been a period of about 2 years (while I was teaching in Japan) from when I first decided that international sustainable agricultural was the direction that the Lord was calling me into - and the calling not a quiet one, but more like he was shouting it at the top of his lungs in my heart. grins So between then and now I've been learning about WAITING. What is active waiting and what is passive waiting? How could I be active in my waiting and WHY should I be? One morning in Japan, while I was reading my Bible and journaling and praying and contemplating these questions, the Spirit posed me and said, 'Rachel. THE WAITING is just as important as THE ARRIVAL of that which you're waiting for. Don't waste a moment, because you will need all the experiences and the things that you are learning during the waiting for that time when you arrive at what you're waiting for. If you're passive in your waiting (and for each person that waiting looks different) you won't be prepared for when you arrive, and you may not arrive at all.' And so, after 2 yrs of actively waiting, I have begun my arrival. :) Here in Kipkaren I have found what my heart has so passionately been seeking, and it's more than I could have ever asked for or imagined. Day by day my joy is being made complete. grins

With love...

(Next post I'll put up pictures so you can see some of the friends I'm making and a bit of what we're doing!)