Tag: Kuria

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A Curious Mercy

I take in the surroundings of Nashon Gibuke’s home. He is a modest man entrusted with the care of an equally modest gathering of believers, young in the faith.

By the time of this visit he had served as pastor for barely thirty months. Had received the leanest of biblical training. What he might have lacked, however, in polished rhetoric or formalized doctrine, Nashon more than compensated through a faith rooted in personal knowledge of God.

We sipped the chai, exchanging customary amenities in a softer, more subdued manner than usual. Finally I rallied my best voice to offer condolences. This won’t come easily, I guessed.

I watched the pastor. He seemed keenly sympathetic toward me even as he struggled with his own crushing sorrow. He brought a compassionate gaze my way as he leaned forward in his simple, primitive-like chair. “Brother Jerry”, he began “I want to say something”.

It was my turn to lean attentively in his direction. Still, his opening took me back.

“I forgive these men who have done this thing. I forgave them when once I learned of their sad deed”.

Was I hearing correctly? No hint of insincerity belied his low, steady voice. My puzzled expression invited him onward.

“I know that these people do not understand the badness of what they have done. They do not know. They do not understand. They need God and I have begun praying for them that they should know him and gain his peace.”
I sat quiet for a time. I felt an atmosphere change. And was suddenly aware.

Aware of God, his presence here beneath the long grass weavings – the primitive roofing matter of this Kuria hut. I felt transported to a far-away place, a sacred setting. The holy land. I was seated in Solomon’s grand and newly-dedicated temple of the Living God. I stood alongside Isaiah, trembling at booming angel voices crying Holy, Holy in the hallowed sanctuary. And considered the earthen floor here under my feet. It might easily have dictated with hushed voice that I remove my shoes.

I knew a reversal of roles had taken place here in Kuria country. I, the missionary-teacher had come to extend comfort, but rather sat quietly, while a young, sparsely-educated, under-compensated pastor stepped, so to speak, to his lectern. His non-sermon to me – his audience of one – conveyed with astonishing eloquence the message of an ancient grace. Of mercy, traceable only to one place. Heaven.

Bwana Asifiwe – the Lord be praised. Indeed.

©2017 Jerry Lout

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A Sound Of Drums

“Do you hear something, Hon?”

The drum-beat rhythms seemed distant and ill-defined – more like a dream than real. Indeed, for a moment I thought the sound was a dream. But it grew in strength and as we lay wide-eyed in our fully-darkened sleeping quarters, our senses were strained. Time passed slowly.

“They’re coming nearer.”

Taranganya occupied a tiny dot on the rare Kenya map that found the outpost worthy of any space at all. The village’s claim to fame included a butcher shop. Flies gathered there to hike around on suspended beef portions well before customers took their cuts home to savor them for themselves. Pressure cookers were prized items in any missionary dwelling.

Two government schools roughly book-ended the butchery, one for elementary kids, the other, high-schoolers.  Beyond these, the one evidence that Taranganya village existed was Bukuria Mission.

Bukuria. Our first upcountry home. The place an outdoor hired hand pummeled a seven-foot spitting cobra after she raised her head just yards away and shot venomous spray my direction.

Bukuria – where a tornado ripped the metal roof off our neighbor’s house to hurl it across the compound, pretzelizing it in the branches of several trees on the way out.

Bukuria was a kind of place that stirs nostalgia. Past residents recall images of smoke clouds wafting over distant Maasai plains – evidence of herdsmen purging brown grasslands before the onset of welcome March rains.

A night watchman, Nyamahanga, was a fixed security presence on the station, greeting us at our first arrival. His armor consisted of a homemade bow with a handful of arrows (razor sharp). We had heard that tribal skirmishes may flare up in the area now and then. One wouldn’t want to be caught in the cross-fire, or worse yet, become the direct target of an angry archer.

“Lord, thanks for watching over us, over this place.”

The mission station rested on the uppermost slope of a gradually-ascending hill. Its entrance-point marked the head of a sweeping curve of the narrow, unpaved road passing before it. Our new home was in a remote sector of Kenya just five miles north of Tanzania’s unpatrolled border. The massive waters of Lake Victoria glistened from her banks 40 miles to our west.

We, the newbie missionaries, had just moved more than two hundred miles to this place, having received little orientation. We had no actual history with anyone of the Kuria Tribe.

The drumming volume intensified. Chanting sounds in a local dialect unknown to us fueled our anxiety.

Had we pondered more the impact of faith since the arrival of outsiders bearing the Jesus-news three decades earlier, our jitters would have lessened.

Our night of fitful sleep finally passed and we asked the obvious question.

The midnight drum-beats and chanting voices had stirred old film images of painted warriors, pith helmets and boiling pots. But we traced our Saturday night of sleeplessness to a little band of Kuria believers. En route to a prayer meeting.

©2017 Jerry Lout

 

 

 

 

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Sensibilities

Green – Naïve – Novice – Ignorant. String them together and you had my name tag.

The rambling house that my wife, myself and our bundle of Julie settled into had been built by missionaries who pioneered the work three decades ahead of our coming. The pioneers had fashioned the dwelling from local soil – rust-tinted bricks fired in a home-built kiln.

A day or two after our Bukuria arrival, a chorus of male voices took us by surprise. Not a musical chorus but a mix of busy voices growing loud, fading back, then loud again.

Are they angry. . . enthused. . . something other. . .which? Their language was neither English nor Swahili. Kikuria, no doubt. Unsure of their disposition and ignorant of who they were, I touched the screen door. And moved to the open veranda where the dozen or so African men had assembled.

I was twenty-seven, my wife twenty-three. It was clear most of the men out-seasoned me – their skin weathered from years beneath an equatorial sun.

The group of strangers – all male – coming unannounced, still left me uneasy.

Do we invite them in? If so, what do we do next?

Are these gents all friendly to the Mission. . . We have a six-month-old girl.

Whatever else Ann and I knew, one thing was certain. We were out of our element. These were waters we’d never swum.

One of the older men – their spokesman? – moved closer. His English was broken, his accent challenging but I could make it out easily enough.

“We come to greet. We come to welcome you here to this place.”

I drew near.

“Hello”, nodding. “Hello”, smiling. “Hello”, I greeted, shaking each extended hand one by one. Though I felt more at ease and was touched by their welcoming us to Kuria-land, I was still conflicted how to respond. Only to offer repeatedly. “Thank you, Thank you, sir. Thank you . .”

I searched awkwardly for some cultural bridge to temper the situation. Answers eluded me. The visitors glanced toward one another, voiced some quiet, mysterious words. And eventually, slowly, went their way.

It was months before I learned I had made a marked impression that awkward day. By then word had got around. It took a while to redeem our name. . . “They did not even welcome us in for tea.”

The new resident-missionary – come to live and serve among the Wakuria people – successfully offended a welcoming delegation of church elders.

Like the snaking road leading past the Mission, another bend in the way lay clearly ahead – our Taranganya learning curve.

©2017 Jerry Lout

 

 

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A Kuria Welcome

Most people the world over forgive offenses made by newcomers – especially when the error is done in ignorance.

We found the statement true, at least among the Kuria. Our failure as green missionaries to extend basic “please-enter-for-a-cup-of-tea” hospitality, drew no further mention from the slighted delegation of  elders.

”Hello, I am Reverend Joseph Muhingira.”

I drew comfort being courteously received by the local Overseer.

Muhingira welcomed us to his cement-plastered, tin-roofed home where his wife, Esther greeted us warmly one evening. Entering the grounds we noted several range cows – brought in from their day of grazing – jostling, mooing in the tight corral outside, just beyond the dining room. The holding pen was a weave of rough-hewn poles fashioned from skinny felled trees. Such trees dotted the rolling terrain of the area.

Esther and their eldest daughter, Robi, served my family up our first Kuria meal – roast chicken, a local spinach-like green called Sukumawiki, a cup of broth served in a modest tin bowl. And Ugali.

Ugali – a kind of corn-meal mush, was brought to the table hot – baked firm, molded in a half-moon-shaped metal bowl. Esther deftly inverted the bowl, planting it top-down on a round serving plate. She lifted the metal bowl, leaving the spherical hill of ugali steaming before us. The ugali had no odor. We did catch the fragrance of a kerosene flame. It shone from the single lantern perched atop a seasoned chest-of-drawers at the edge of the tight dining area.

A staticky short-wave radio, powered by D-size batteries, rested on the same furniture piece. From it there rang a distinct mix of African tones – high-pitched, electric guitar-plinking blended with smooth Swahili vocalists. Passing hole-in-the-wall cafes months before along Nairobi city streets I had wondered if more than one song had found its way from a composer’s pen. By now, I had started making peace with the style’s apparent monotony.

The lantern’s glow thrust eerie shadows jittering and waltzing in irregular moves along a wall, reflecting mother and daughter motion as they tended to the servings. We ate our fill and washed the remnants down with hot chai – cooked with sugar and milk thrown in together.

“Mungu awabariki.” Our first dining experience in Kuria-land had ended as pleasantly as it had begun.

Thanking our hosts with the Swahili “God bless you”, we stepped from the humble dwelling. Overseer Muhingira led us on the foot-path to our little VW. Light from the vivid Kenya moon played on Julie’s upturned eyes and across the soft blanket encircling her face, giving the blanket a magical look.

The evening had gone well – Muhingira, gracious, gentleman-like. Esther’s warm personality had fit naturally with her talent at food preparation.

I turned the engine and we followed the dirt track home to the mission. In the quiet and calm of the Africa night, it seemed we had moved to a peaceful wonderland.

Meeting our neighbor, Grace – learning her story – would challenge such a notion to the core.

©2017 Jerry Lout

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Omens

(*Note. Due to the nature of some of this narrative’s content, some may opt to forego its reading. .Watch for Tuesday’s entry. .)

“They put my crying newborn there. Outside there. For the wild dogs or the hyenas to do as they would do.”

Sometimes messages – especially messages suggesting the worst kind of thing, the unthinkable – simply get rejected by the listener’s mind. Expelled from the world of thought before added information can follow. Perhaps this is a built-in reflex to shield the human soul being overly sullied by the unspeakable.

The poised African woman re-living her account was in her forties. She sat nearly immobile – her thoughts, even her body, seemingly lost in another time – years in the past where some things might be better left forgotten. To a place just a stone’s throw distance from where several had now gathered, huddled outside our mission home.

Grace shared how she had come to live in this area, separated by several bus rides from her own people. She had been brought here, far from her family’s region to the north, an outsider bride to a local tribesman. Her native clan followed their own practices, some good, others less so. What her own people did not practice – in her lifetime at least – was infanticide.

“The clan here into which I married had beliefs about child-bearing. Superstitions, I think.” Grace’s words fell from her lips, quiet, with little evident emotion. The days of jagged pain tearing at her mother heart had long past. But the memory lived fresh.

“If twins were born to a home, it was a bad sign, a bad omen.”

One of the two babies would be let go, Grace told us. There, outside the hut, once night has fallen. Outside, where hungry creatures scavenge for dinner.

“And, too, when the time for a baby like mine should come. It, too, must be let go.”

Can this be real? I had heard of pagan practices in far off places. Am I truly now living in such a place?

The African woman spoke of the occasional baby, like her firstborn, whose only wrong was failing to make her arrival to the world head-first. A breach presentation.

For Grace those years ago one night, her labor pains had reached what seemed their limit. She strained a final time.  Moments passed. A wave of relief came. Cries of a newborn – vibrant, healthy-sounding cries.

But not cries, after all, to be celebrated.

The new mother helplessly agonized her own horror as her mother-in-law moved the baby out of reach, then beyond the dwelling’s entrance way, out into the night.

As my wife and I learned the story we were taken by the nearness of it all.

In the instance of this young mother, the loss of her newborn had happened just a few years prior to our arrival to Kuria-land.

Mercifully for Grace, another pregnancy followed and, later on, another still. Each pregnancy heralding entries into the world of children lucky enough to arrive in acceptable fashion.

Does the presence of foreign missionaries matter? Does our coming really make a difference?

A young Maasai, slender and tall, had an answer for me. Years afterward. In Tanzania.

© 2017 Jerry Lout

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BOOM in the Night

“Bwana, Kuja! Ona nyoka kubwa sana!”

The African voices clamored – yelling attention to the white men of Bukuria station. “Sirs, Come see! Very big snake!”

Art Dodzweit leapt from his chair. Reaching for his rifle and a fist full of shells he shouted. “Bud, come! Seems a cobra or python has paid us a visit.”

In the mid 1940s, friends Bud Sickler and Arthur Dodzweit had boarded ships to Kenya from the U.S. The agency had commissioned them and their new brides – identical twins, Fay and May – to preach, serve where they might, and start churches. Early on an administrator had greeted them.

“That hill over there, just in the distance. Its the place we’ve approved land for your mission. Shall we have a look?” The Englishman of Britain’s Crown Colony showed the Yankee newcomers the plot of land. Then left them to the work.

Kuria country was covered with trees, underbrush, and occasional patches of grazing land, rugged and wild. Narrow creeks and rivers crisscrossed hilly terrain. These waterways flooded their banks most rainy seasons. Crop planting hardly got a mention among the traditional nomad cattle-tenders – the Wakuria.

       Among predator-creatures native to the area were large, slithering pythons,                                         camouflaged in the region’s undergrowth.

They moved about mostly at night, stalking small and, at times, larger game – their big, round eyes and nimble forked tongue, keenly detecting prey. On the night of the snake alert the sky was black. The men tramped the direction shown to them.

Art stopped. Movement in the tall grass by his feet sent shivers along his back. The snake lay nearby, no question. A young Kenyan bearing a flashlight, lowered it. They spotted the signs. Blotches of tan interrupted by cream-tinted borders and black outer lines glided forward. Art held the gun stock in a tight grip. A python for sure.

“Bud! Bud!” Art’s nervous voice cut into the night. “I’m gonna shoot, Bud.”  He squeezed the trigger. The kick of the rifle threw him back a step.

That moment the python’s fore-end, several yards out to the left, instantly rose upward from the blast’s impact, the high caliber bullet tearing into its midsection.

Bud stood meters away, silent in the dark. A nearby African, gripping a flashlight, caught the image of the huge snake’s head, suddenly meeting eyeball-to-eyeball with Bud Sickler – perhaps two inches before his nose.

Bud’s throat took in a sudden suck of air. His backward fall came instant and sure. The tall, red-haired young man lay flat in the grass, out cold from the shock of the encounter.

We never learned how the two friends, when they finally retired for the night, managed to sleep.

What we would learn now that we had landed at Bukuria. The Python family hadn’t gone away. They were still in the neighborhood.

© 2017 Jerry Lout

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In The Name Of A Friend

The young pastor strained under the weight of the bleeding man he supported. “He is my brother.”

He labored to keep the wounded man upright. The machete blade had gone deep.

“How did it happen?”, I asked, as my nurse-wife entered from a side room and approached to lend aid.

“My brother has a friend. The friend sent my brother to collect money owed him by another man.”

I took in the unfolding story as we all helped the wounded brother out of his coat, it’s back soaked through in red.

“The man owing money was drinking beer and got angry when my brother told him why he came. My brother decided to leave and come back another time. But the man had taken up a panga (machete). When my brother turned to go out, it was then he was slashed, before he could reach to the outside.”

Ann had brought out a sizable roll of gauze. By now his shirt had been removed and, with strips of old sheets and tape, she bound his bare torso. The panga had opened a V-trench some eight inches long – vertically, between spine and shoulder blade. She wrapped the material about his torso several times, in hopes it might slow the blood, buying us time to get him to the clinic where they could sew him up.

The government-sponsored clinic, a thinly-equipped medical outpost established to serve the Wakuria clans, sat at the edge of the village nearest us, five miles to the north.

Life was hard for the tribal people, often heartbreaking. It was a rare home that had not lost at least one child to malaria.

And there were the skirmishes.

With cultures of the region given to decades-old feuds – mostly to do with livestock – violence could erupt in a heartbeat. Kuria country lay bordering other cattle-tending families – the Maasai, the Luo, the Kipsigis. Bands of spear-wielding parties of either tribe, trekking by foot in their stated quest to take back rustled livestock, had become a common image.

I grew to slow the bug down on our dusty road and roll gently past the occasional vigilante parties. We couldn’t guess when a band might come into view on the twenty mile drive to our mail box (we checked for letters once, sometimes twice, weekly). Though as a missionary family we did not feel directly threatened, our verbal charge to the back seat passengers came with regularity, “Roll your windows up, kids.”

The task at hand just now was to get a terribly wounded young Kuria to a place for treatment.

I hope the doctor is in.

©2017 Jerry Lout

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Just Do It

As a foreigner in a region where locals had rarely sighted a light-skinned person , I was learning the feeling of different.

During one season of discouragement, when my best efforts to connect with the Kuria seemed frail, I knelt on the concrete floor of a back room in our house. The prayer was brief, sincere, and seems as clear today as that morning I voiced it.

 “God, please help these people know that I love them.”

In the silence an inner voice interrupted my pleadings.  While it was kind, it was also direct, firm.

“Love them. You just love them.”

Just that. Simple and sparse, like a mail-order kit arriving without instructions.

How do I do this?

Years afterward a definition of Love crossed my path.

To will the good of another. I have yet to hear a phrase that, for me, better reflects the term.

I found myself in subsequent times revisiting the Bukuria scene. Going to my knees in blue jeans and t-shirt back then at that location fifteen hours’ drive from where Stanley met Livingstone under a Mango tree. I ponder again the response to my prayer on that day. Just love them

Gauging love, measuring its impact, seems not always easy.

***

“Mwalimu”.

Pastor Mwangi calling to me (‘Teacher’) lifted his textbook as in a gesture of devotion.

“Before you came with the teachings – before bringing us these Bible courses. . .” The pastor’s voice went low.

“. . back then, when on Saturdays I would prepare a sermon for my people on Sunday, I only knew to follow a certain way. I did not know another way.

“I would pray, close my eyes and open my Bible – letting it fall open where it would.  Then, feeling the page, I let my finger go to a place there. Opening my eyes I looked at the place. The words there became my sermon scripture for Sunday.”

“It was all I knew”, he repeated. “I did not know another way.”

Pastor Mwangi concluded as if offering up a sacrament as well as a confession.

“Now I know the good way. Thank you for bringing this Bible School, this T.E.E. I feed my people now and they are helped.”

Mounting my motorcycle that afternoon, I turned toward home, warmed by a gratifying thought.

Thank you, Lord for your word, and for this means of sharing it here.

He (God) was willing the good of a tribal people hungry for truth and for him.  And was letting me have a part – growing me in a small measure to care as he cares.

Just loving them. Together.

©2017 Jerry Lout