Don’t sweat the small stuff

I assume this is a phase that all new missioners go though. I had begun to let a number of little things bug me. Not only is it hot and humid here in Mombasa, but it turns out that I arrived just in time for the rainy season. It doesn’t rain all day, but several times a day we will get tropical downpours that will last around half an hour. When it comes down, it comes down. If you are caught out in one of the deluges, your feet and pants will be soaked, assuming you have an umbrella. With no umbrella, you have no chance of survival. You’ll have to peel every piece of clothing off and wring it out like a wet towel once you find shelter. Even if you are lucky enough to avoid being out during a downpour, the aftermath is not pretty. Many roads here as simply dirt. Even those that are somewhat paved, don’t have sidewalks and so you have to walk in mud. Sometimes the water I need to walk through to get home comes up to me knees in spots. I resorted to buying a pair of Gumboots, which have helped, but sometimes the water gets in over the top of the boot and my feet still get soaked. Also, I really don’t like wearing the Gumboots all the time as they are not the most comfortable foot apparel and my feet sweat in them. Not surprisingly, anytime I wear other shoes, it is not long before my feet are soaked, even as I try my best to avoid water and mud. It is just not possible.

In addition to perpetually wet feet, most of the clothes I own are muddy and damp. It’s impossible to keep anything dry. Worse of all, once it gets wet, it’s impossible to dry in the dampness and humidity. I don’t have a washer or dryer and most Kenyans don’t either. I have to wash clothes the old fashion way – with buckets of water and some laundry detergent, which we do have. After washing and rinsing, I then wring the water out of the clothes by hand and hang the wet clothes on clotheslines to dry. It sometimes takes several rinses, although I have learned not to use too much soap in order to make rinsing easier. The first few times I washed clothes by hand, it took me forever to rinse the soap out of my clothes. I try not to do that anymore. To me, wringing the water out of the clothes is the worse part of washing clothes by hand. I hate it. I’m like a little baby when it comes to wringing out clothes. Lots of woman here wash many more clothes than I do every day and I’m also sure they also do a much better job at getting water out of the clothes than I do.

Although I had to hang my clothes out to dry while in school in Nairobi, I had access to a washing machine to do the dirty work. Now, as I’ve sadly found out, wringing clothes dry wrinkles everything. So besides, washing, rinsing, wringing and hanging the clothes out to dry, everything has to be ironed. At home in the US, I was always very careful how I dried clothes in the dryer to minimize the amount of items that would need to be ironed. Now, everything has to be ironed.

I had been able to get by washing clothes once a week before the flood gates opened for he rainy season, but I can’t usually wait that long these days. I wash my clothes at Mike’s house, which is about a 15 minute walk from the family’s house at which I am staying and is only accessible through dirt roads that are now often times flooded and muddy. My Kenyan family already does enough for me and they have enough clothes of their own to deal with that I prefer not to try to wash clothes at home.

Given all this, I actually have to plan my schedule to some extent around washing clothes. But it’s even more complicated than that now as the clothes won’t dry in a day like they did in the sun before the rainy season started. Last week, Wednesday was my day for laundry. So I headed to Mike’s in the morning right after breakfast, so that I could get the clothes hung out to dry as early as possible. I typically then spend the day doing things on my computer, like writing this blog, as I don’t keep my laptop with me and only have access to it when at Mike’s. Most of the week, I am connected to the rest of the world only with my phone. Not surprisingly, while washing my clothes last week, it began to rain. At that point, I was well into things with suds everywhere. There was no turning back. I rinsed the clothes and wrung them dry – or at least as dry as I have the patience and energy to get them. Luckily, in addition to outside clotheslines in the back of the house, Mike’s house has a small clothesline in the covered entryway in the front of the house. As the clothesline is not nearly big enough to accommodate all my clothes, I had to resort to using hangars to hang the clothes and then hang the hangers on the clothesline.

Given the rain and humidity, there was no way that the clothes would dry that day. I resigned myself to the fact that I would have to come back to finish laundry. Luckily, I only had a commitment in the morning the next day, and was able to swing by Mike’s house later in the afternoon to deal with the clothes. Of course, the clothes were still slightly damp when I got there, but I decided that this was as good as it was going to get and that I would proceed to iron them as best I could. Just as I was about to iron, the power went out. Power outages are a fact of life here. Not that there is ever a good time for one, but they always seem to happen at the most inopportune times. At this point I gave up on my laundry for yet another day.

The next day, Friday, I had planned to go the the graduation ceremony for Mike’s school – Marianist Technical Institute. Although the school is only a few blocks away from Mike’s house, there is a sister school in Ukunda, which is a few hours away and requires taking the ferry. This year, the graduation ceremony was being held in Ukunda. As the logistics of traveling to Ukunda are challenging at best, I decided to take up the gracious offer from the staff at the school to ride to Ukunda on one of the school buses with the students, staff, and Mike. As the buses were supposed to leave at 6:15 AM the next morning (which really didn’t happen), at which time it is still dark here and so I wouldn’t be able to walk from home to the school to catch the bus, Mike invited me to stay at his house for the night. I had not planned on this and so had nothing with me but what I was wearing and the clothes I had washed. Luckily the power came back on and I was able to iron clothes to wear the next day before we went to bed.

As we had to get up early, 5 AM, to take showers and eat breakfast, we were in bed and asleep before 10 PM. In Mombasa, you have to take a shower before you go to bed and again when you get up in the morning. Typically, I take three or sometimes four showers a day. I also previously forgot to mention that there are no hot water heaters here, so you either have to use cold water or heat water separately. Although I usually don’t like cold showers, I’m fine with what passes for a cold shower here. The water is not freezing and I actually like the chance to cool off. Unfortunately, I’m usually sweating again within a few minutes of taking a shower.

At about midnight, I awoke from a deep sleep from banging and yelling at the front gate. Mike’s house, as many houses here, is surrounded by a wall and is only accessible by a locked, heavy metal gate. The compound where Mike’s apartment, also has a security guard that is there from dusk to dawn. Mike was also apparently woken from a deep sleep as well as both of us had no idea what was going on. People were banging and yelling at the front gate. With banging and yelling seeming to come from everywhere, it was very chaotic. To add to the confusion, it was pouring out – one of the tropical downpours I mentioned earlier. The rain was coming down in buckets.

Our first thought was that it was terrorist attack. Maybe al-Shabaab was trying to get in. Finally, the security guard recognized Mike’s neighbors and friends among the crowd and let them in. There is also another level of protection in the house as every door and window, like most houses here, is barred and locked. The people ran in and began to bang on the bars to get our attention. By then we recognized who the people were. I’ve stayed at Mike’s a lot and have gotten to know many of his neighbors, who are wonderful people. They were urgently trying to get us out of the house.

Mike lives in a two story structure. His apartment takes up half of the first floor. The other first floor unit belongs to priests who typically only use their apartment once a week and were not there at the time of this incident. The upper level belongs to the Bishop of Mombasa. He does not sleep there very often, but rather simply uses the apartment as a place to rest.

It turns out that there was a fire in the Bishop’s apartment, which Mike and I were asleep and completely oblivous to. There are no smoke detectors here, so we had no warning. Mike’s neighbors saw the smoke and fire and came en mass to save us (or at least Mike as not sure anyone knew I was even there). As there was also some initial confusion on their part in terms of what was actually going on, Mike’s neighbors came pepared to defend any type of attack that might be occuring. Many neighbors came bearing clubs and machetes!

Once Mike and I were safely out of the house, everyone’s attention turned to the fire. As most of the strucutures in Mombasa, and Kenya in general, are constructed with stone, the fire was not really spreading, but remained confined to the one area in the bishop’s apartment. However, it was an electrical fire – either a refrigerator or air conitioner- and there was a lot of smoke and the fire smelled really bad. The neighbors tried to call the Mombasa fire department, but the calls went unanswered. Go figure. They were eventually able to get in touch with the fire department in Nairobi, who in turn was able to get in touch with the Mobasa fire department.

Once the Mombasa fire department was alerted, a fire engine arrived within about twenty minutes. However, there were two major issues. The first is that the street on which Mike lives is a narrow dirt road. The fire engine was somehow able to make it up to the front gate. Kenyas are much more accustomed to driving in tight spots and closer to other vehicles than I am. Although the front gate was wide enough for the fire engine to fit through, there was not enough space in the street for the fire engine to make the turn through the gate. So although there was this very modern fire engine right outside the gate, it couldn’t really get close enough to be of much help.

The second problem was that no one had a key to the bishop’s residence where the fire was. As they entrances and windows were all pretty well fortified and locked, it was turning out to be very difficult to break through to access the fire to try to put it out. Furtunately, a priest from the archdiocese eventually showed up with a key to unlock the gates to the residence.

Not to be deterred, while the fire department was attempting to break through the locked gates, the neighbors had already found a ladder, connected up a garden hose, and had begun to put out the fire through one of the windows. I doubt the hose had much water pressure at all, but they were very successful in containing the fire until the fire department was able to enter the apartment. By this time there were also police on the scene, some of them holding machine guns at their side, a common site here in Kenya, which only added to the surreal nature of what was occurring. Once the fire department gained access to the apartment, they were able to extinguish the fire pretty quckly.

After about two and a half hours in the pouring rain, the fire was completely out and everyone left. A few of us were fortunate enough to have umbrellas. The umbrellas helped, but I was still soaked – especially my feet. Pretty much all the neighbors who came up to help us did so in bare feet with no shirt. It wasn’t cold, but it wasn’t warm either – especially for Kenyans, who are not used to the cold. Mike and I returned to his apartment and tried to get some rest as we had to leave early for the graduation in few hours. The smell of smoke was bad outside, but I didn’t think it was that bad in the apartment, although it appeared to bother Mike more than it did me. I don’t know how, but I somehow managed to get a few hours sleep before I heard Mike telling me that it was time to get up. Mike said that he never fell back to sleep. We took showers, ate breakfast, and walked over to the school for the bus ride over to Ukunda for the graduation. Thanks to our neighbors, we lived to see another day.

When I look back at last week with the prespective of time and distance, I can more easitly see how I was beginning to let small things really bother me – the rain, the mud, the power outages, and difficulty of getting from one place to another. I struggle with the fact that things that I didn’t even think about before, now require a lot of time and effort. However, the experience of the fire helped put things back in perspectivefor me. What I witnessed that night was Mike’s neighbors concern for his well being, people coming out in the middle of the night with weapons in case they were needed to protect him, people standing out in the cold rain with no shoes or shirts, and Mike’s neighbor’s climbing ladders in dark, cold and slippery conditions to try to put out the fire. What I saw were neighbors doing whatever it took to help their fellow neighbor in need. What I saw was people who may not have a lot of material things to give away, give away the most important thing – they gave of themselves.

I’m not claiming that this one, albeit in retrospect, very beautiful experience, has made me a perfect person – I only wish. I still struggle with dealing with many little things. However, I do think I’m now able to step back a little better to get some perspective when I need it. I’ve had to let go of so much since I’ve gotten here – the way I think things should work and they way I have to live my day to day life. I still have a ways to go, but it’s all part of my journey. However, I have been overwhelmed by caring and sharing nature of the people whom I’ve encountered, gotten to know and with whom I’ve formed friendships. These people would literally give you the shirt off their back.

During the past week I’ve happen to come across and read several reflections on the Trinity. I’m not convinced that it was entirely by chance that I happened to see these articles, as they fit in so perfectly with what I have been experiencing in the beginning stages of my journey here in Mombasa. The belief in the Trinity is at the core of my faith as a Catholic, most of all, beacause it reveals the inner nature of God. That is, God is a relationship of persons, not a solitary entity. St. John puts it so beatifully and simply when he says that “God is love”.

Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love.

1 John 4:8

However, this is not just some abstract statement about an attribute of God, but by the fact that God is a Trinity of persons, it is an affirmation of God’s very being. The Trinity is a complex mystery that we can contemplate our whole lives and continually discover new insights, and I will continue to do this. However, I feel my entire understanding of the Trinity is grounded in the idea of relationship. Three persons eternally and perfectly loving one another. How else could three persons be in perfect relationship except as a complete and total manifestation of the love between them?

The good news for us is that we come into the picture as this complete and perfect love of the Trinity overflows from God to creation and thus, to us. Love is the one thing in the universe that the more you give away the more you have. So I believe it is with God. All God can do is love and love completely. This causes God’s infinite love, to increase even more, spilling over into an expression of that love as manifested in creation.

A quick aside. This brings me back to some of the discussions we used to have in college. Are there different degrees of infinity? Yes, infinite is infinite. But if I take an infinite number and multiply it by itself (n*n), or worse yet, raise it to its own power (n**n), is that the same degress of “infiniteness”? I don’t want to think about how long it’s been since I’ve thought about stuff like that. Maybe something to ponder another time.

Furthermore, although in an imperfect form in our sinful world, the imprint of God’s inner relationship of personal love is stamped throughout creation, and most significantly mirrored in our relationships with one another. When we love one another, we express the image of God within us.

Although the past few weeks have brought a certain level of frustration, they have also made me more aware of the love of God manifested in my relationships with others. As I continue my journey and perservere in continuing to let go and not sweat the small stuff, I continue to be amazed at how others desire to share their lives with me. I can’t do other than view this as the imprint of God’s intrinsic nature as a relationship of persons manifested in us His children.

God is good.