As I write this, it has been a month and a week since my arrival in Kenya. Like most periods of time in my life, whether it be a week, a month, a year, or even a decade, when I look back, the time has appeared to have passed in an instant. This is not new phenomenon for me, not a product of my “advanced” age, but something which I have experienced my whole life. Time marches ever forward and I’m always trying to keep up with it. I’m never bored as there never seems to be enough time, always things I want to do, things I want to finish. However, I’m old enough now to realize and appreciate that life is what happens during the time when I’m trying to keep up with time – if that makes any sense.
As the well-worn saying goes, life is a journey. The question is where am I going and how did I get here. I often wake up here and find it hard to believe that I’m over 7000 miles from where I grew up and lived all of my life, the place where everything is familiar and where all the family and friends I’ve known for most of my life are. My journey has now taken me in another direction – one which I am on the journey of trying to understand. Coralis Salvador is my regional director here in Kenya. She often uses the tagline “Be in the Moment!” In her emails. This is constant reminder to me, that although the journey is important, life is really living the journey. I try more and more to make sure I’m doing that.
This wasn’t necessarily the way I intended to start this blog post, but this is what came out. I think I’ve been on this line of thinking since the first reading at last Sunday’s Mass – “The word of the LORD came to me, saying: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you, a prophet to the nations I appointed you.” It always amazes me how the little things we see, hear and experience, can bounce around in our heads and gently nudge us in certain directions. For me, I take this to be our Lord at work and Him urging us to come along for the ride. God has a plan. God is the plan. I don’t necessarily take the word prophet in the line from the reading from Jeremiah from last Sunday’s Mass to mean missionary work. This is just the direction my journey has led me at this point in my life. We are all called to be prophets. We are all called to be witnesses to the truth and the manifestation of that truth, which is love. We live this out in our journey of life.
All of this I hope serves a a preamble to some thoughts on the past month. My arrival in Kenya and being greeted by Kathy, Mike and Dee seems in the distant past at this point. Kathy and Mike headed back to Mombasa after spending a few days with me. Dee lives here at Consolata, but as she takes classes at a different school, I usually only see her once or twice a week. However, she always is available if I need something. Most of my days are spent with the Consolata Fathers, my fellow classmates here at the language school and a few of the Seminarians. As I mentioned in a previous post, my days are pretty regimented – Mass, breakfast, language classes, lunch, study, and dinner with time thrown in for occasional shopping trips, reading, praying, as well as trying to keep up with family and friends on Facebook and via email and texts. Saturdays are my primary days for resting and catching up. It is when I typically write my blog posts, wash clothes, do some things with other students, and prepare for the coming week. As for washing clothes, I’m fortunate to have access to the Fathers’ washing machine. Otherwise I’d have to hand wash and wring my clothes! There is no dryer, so everyone hangs their clothes out to dry. I’m going to miss the access to the Father’s washing machine once I leave Consolata. Sundays are pretty busy between Mass, or sometimes more than one Mass, and the pastoral visits with Francis to Kibera. I typically don’t have a lot of free time on Sundays, so Saturday is the day for getting done what I want to get done.
The unique experience here at Consolata is being together with such a diversity of people. With Dee off campus for classes, I’m often the only American here. Most of the Fathers and seminarians are from Kenya and Uganda. Most of the students come from countries in Africa – including a number of students from Eritrea, a country in the northeast part of Africa on the Rea Sea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), as well as the Republic of the Congo. I have to admit that I didn’t even know that Eritrea existed before I got here. However, I’m glad it does as I’ve been blessed to meet and get to know some of the students from there – most of whom are priests and religious sisters. While most of the students are from the countries I’ve mentioned, there are also students here from other parts of the world – Brazil, India, Italy, Malta, Hungary and Belgium. Working for IBM for 33 years, I got to meet and work with people from all over the world. However, this is a whole other level. If only everyone would realize how much more alike we all are than different. A number of things certainly vary by culture, but at the heart of things, we are all the same.
My Kiswahili classmates are Fr. Francis and Joseph. Joseph is a missionary from Malta, who speaks more than six languages and has lived and done mission work in both Cuba and South Sudan among other places. The society he is from is based in Malta, but has a house about an hour outside Nairobi. Joseph lives here at Consolata during the week and goes to the house that he shares with two other members of his congregation on the weekends and teaches catechism classes. Fr. Francis is a Carmelite priest from India. He was ordained about a year ago, but did his Theology studies at a university in Nairobi, so has been in Kenya for a few years. Fr. Francis also speaks several languages. Fr. Francis lives a distance from the school, but stays close by at another Carmelite house during the week and goes home on weekends. Fr. Francis has to say at least three Masses each weekend at parishes that are not very close together, so he is pretty busy.
Both Joseph and Fr. Francis both speak English fluently, which becomes the default language among us even though we should be trying to use Kiswahili more often. However, when our teacher is present, we have to use Kiswahili! Although I’ve studied and am familiar with Italian, German and Spanish, I’m probably the only person here who only speaks one language fluently. Hopefully that will change soon! Most of the Fathers speak at least four languages. Fr. Francis tends to pick up vocabulary the quickest. He can remember words and phrases that I struggle to retain. I want to attribute this to the fact that he has been in Kenya longer and has been exposed to Kiswahili longer than I have. However, in reality I know it has more to do with age and the fact that I never was good at rote memorization. Both Fr. Francis and Joseph are only taking the first level seven week long Kiswahili class for now, which means we only have two more weeks in class together. I will be staying on for an additional seven week level two class before leaving Consolata and heading to Mombasa.
Incorporated into each session of classes at the Consolata Language Center is a cultural activity. Yesterday afternoon the students went to the Bomas of Kenya, a tourist village that is a short walk from Consolata Bomas means homesteads. Traditional villages of Keynan communities are on display there. The Bomas also features a program of traditional cultural music and dance as well as one segment that was full of acrobatics and jumping through, over and under fire. The performers also invited a few audience members on stage and some of the acts are pretty funny. I kind of thought of it as the Kenyan version of the Harlem Globetrotters. Kenya is modernizing rapidly. The Galleria mall near the school has a Pizza Hut and KFC. The Bomas appears to try to preserves some of the traditional cultures in the midst of all this “progress”.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention before closing that the second reading at last Sunday’s mass was St. Paul’s beautiful Ode to Love, which many of us are very familiar with, especially since it is used in many wedding ceremonies.. Although there are many beautiful lines in that reading, the one that stuck with me this week is “If I speak in human and angelic tongues, but do not have love, I am a resounding gong or a clashing cymbal.” As St. Therese taught us, we don’t need to do great things, but rather do the small things, the things that constitute most of the, at times mundane, parts of our lives, with love. I know I fall far short of this ideal, but I keep trying. It’s part of my journey.
