FACES OF FAITH

Lutheran, The, Feb 2004 by Sevig, Julie B

...at the end of an uphill climb in Kenya Text and photos by Julie B. Sevig

Perhaps you've taken a similar pause. You've returned from a trip and been asked how it was, maybe even to pinpoint a highlight. Ahhhhh. Let me think.

It's especially difficult after traveling internationally, say, to Africa.

Most of us who have had the privilege to meet people and see circumstances quite unlike our own have had to go through a period of debriefing upon return. Photos help. So does sharing memories with others who experienced the people and places with you.

And yes, I do have an Africa story that works its way to the front of the memory line.

We had spent hours meeting with religious leaders at a hotel in Kisii, Kenya. The leaders-most of them men-were part of a ecumenical coalition fighting HIV/AIDS that is supported through the ELCA World Hunger Appeal's Stand With Africa campaign. A young woman in the group, a Muslim, had boldly invited herself "to the table" and then insisted our group visit the people with whom she works. "You must come and see for yourself where my people live," Khadija Hassan pleaded.

Rain kept us from going that afternoon, but the next morning six of us went with her.

The van stopped short of our destination. We piled out and started up a muddy hill, breathing hard and experiencing an unexpected taste of celebrity. Normal activity stopped, children waved or ran behind us. Several posed for photos and were startled and amazed to see themselves in a small screen on the back of a digital camera.

As we arrived in the village, we were welcomed into a building we soon realized was the mosque. No one insisted we take off our shoes, caked in red mud. We were invited to sit on the couch at one end and told some of the villagers would soon arrive. And they did, entering silently and sitting on mats at the other end of the room: women, children and one elderly widower.

It was a short history lesson of a people who had occupied the land some 200 years. These were ninthgeneration Nubians, brought to Kenya by the British to serve in their colonial Empire in Africa and left without legal status when the British withdrew. Hassan and the "sheik," the religious and community leader who came with us, explained that the people-mostly women and children, many of them orphans-were squatters. More than 3,000 of them occupied these two acres of land above Kisii. And as foreigners for more than a century, they still can make no claim to the land and have to pay rent. Their housing, Hassan explained, is "unfit for human habitation." Poverty and disease, especially HIV/AIDS, are rampant.

A teacher among the group was proud to stand and say she had attended a Lutheran school in Nairobi. She does her best to educate the children who are victims of nearly uncontrollable illiteracy.

But this day was the happiest of their lives, they told us. "This is the first delegation to ever visit them," the sheik translated to our group. We looked at one another in disbelief and with deep humility. "In fact," he continued, "you are the first to ever visit. Not even the locals have come up the hill."

"We work to help them know they are human beings," Hassan added. One widow, their spokesperson, explained that they believe it is God's will that the world be sustained, that leaders be righteous. That the poor will perish if the rich-"the elite"-are not generous. That the heavens will collapse with the sincere prayers of the poor.

And so it was that this day in Kisii which was happiest for some was most sobering and profound for six others. It was more than a stewardship lesson come to life. More than seeing in Hassan the face of the widow who pestered the judge for justice (Luke 18:1-8). More than a peculiar . pride in being part of a band of Lutherans completing what we had no idea would be such a significant ecumenical gesture to these Muslim widows and children. And it was certainly more than a travel highlight.

It was all these things and more. But as with any profound travel memory that gives pause, it is hard to put into words. So a photo will have to do.