Kenya

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 13, 2000 by Evelyn Mattern

Visit to desert town is daunting

When I asked a cardiologist friend to help me get medicines to take to a clinic in northeast Kenya, he said, "Of course. But Africa is off my mental map. We hardly hear about it in the U.S." His comment resonated with my feelings. After all, I was going to Africa to visit a sister in my community who was feeling isolated in her desert town, a plane ride away from Nairobi and only 60 miles from Somalia. Were it not for Sr. Teresanne, on an average day I might not think about or pray for Africa.

Wajir, a lonely dot on the map of Kenya at the end of a thin line stretching from Nairobi, gets mention in the guidebooks for its Martian landscape, bandits and AK-47s. The guidebook does not suggest travel there. The Kenyan air force has an outpost there, but civilians who can afford it fly in on an unscheduled, hired missionary shuttle and leave on the plane that brings in the town's supply of mira or qat, a twiggy drug chewed for its intoxicating effect.

Wajir is home to Somali pastoral people, who have with their camels and goats survived in the red desert for many generations. The town and the entire northeast district of the country were included by the British in Kenya instead of Somalia when they redrew the map of East Africa early last century. As a result of the British-drawn borders, a predominantly Somali population has had visited upon it a predominantly "down Kenya" civil service, police force and military. Overwhelmingly, those from "down Kenya" (anywhere not the northeast) are Christian; the Somalis are Muslim. These differences generate only a few of the tensions in Wajir.

In May, Virginia Azcueta and I, members of the Sisters For Christian Community, embarked on a five-week visit to Wajir to spend time with Sr. Teresanne Fornasero, who has worked there for 25 years. Teresanne founded a village for tuberculosis patients, has established programs for women and the aged and destitute, runs a small clinic, and is helping to build a school.

She has lived through famine, war, repression and the devastating floods of El Nino that killed the animals on which the Somali depend for survival. We think of Teresanne as a woman of steel, so when she expressed the need for companionship, we went, carrying several hundred pounds of medicine and the hope of getting her set up for e-mail.

In Nairobi, we got an old Mac laptop fitted up for e-mail by several young computer experts at the Missionary Aviation Fellowship, a Christian group that provides airplanes and other technical support for missionaries in East Africa. Their four-seater plane carried us, the computer, and about half of our medicines on a two-and-a-half hour flight to Wajir. Our young Dutch pilot led us in prayer after he had carefully weighed us, distributed our baggage and belted us into the seats of our "toy" plane. Aloft, we watched as paved roads and the lush landscape of Nairobi gave way to sandy desert tracks, fewer and fewer as we approached Wajir.

When we landed at the military airport, we were met by the pastor at the Catholic Mission, Capuchin Fr. Francis Jabedo, and also by a German missionary for the Protestant African Inland Church in Wajir. At the mission, we had tea and a tour of the church and rectory, which were vandalized in 1998 on the same day (some say the same hour) as the bombing of the American Embassy in Nairobi. Some say the embassy was bombed because a Christian minister, put on trial for defacing a mosque, was spirited out of the country, presumably by the U.S. government, before he could be punished.

Desecration in Wajir

In the attack on the mission, a mob of Muslims desecrated the Blessed Sacrament, battered the crucifix and statues, and knocked through rectory walls in an attempt to kill the pastor. Providentially, he was not home. After the incident, Fr. Francis was sent to Wajir to assess the situation. A young "down Kenyan," he is both brave and judicious.

As we started out for Sr. Teresanne's house and clinic across town, a young Somali man came running to tell us a mob had gathered there. The men were battering the gate and demanding biscuits they said UNICEF had left with Sister after the El Nino emergency. The young man's breathless intrusion reminded us that the last time Teresanne had been scheduled to return to Wajir from Nairobi, she carried money from a Health Age International grant that provides seed and food for destitute "grannies." The local police had thwarted a plot to take her money and steal the Catholic Mission's old Land Rover. Half a dozen Somali men with a cache of automatic weapons were apprehended.

In light of that memory, we left our boxes of medicine at the mission and drove to Teresanne's house, where we found that the mob had been dispersed. The women who live and work there were shaken, however, and after the distraction of travel, Virginia and I were reminded that we had come to Wajir to accompany our sister in a place of violence. We were afraid, but we remembered the prayers of friends and community members who hod supported our coming.