Opening celebration

June 19, 2010

Saturday in Bwaliro was the day of the long-anticipated opening celebration for the Blessed Family Center. We haven't actually built anything yet (except Paul's house) and we haven't even completed the purchase of the land on which the complex is to be built (land transfers can take years in Kenya), but Chris and Paul wanted to move forward with the opening celebration anyway. So, the Huruma House guys on the US side of things just trusted the judgment of our Kenyan partners and followed their lead.

The purpose of the cerebration was to let the community know who we are and what we are doing in their neighborhood and to let them feel some ownership of this project to support the widows and orphans of Bwaliro. So, long before we arrived in Kenya, Christopher had sent out invitations to everyone in the neighborhood. All the local politicians were present as well as a large assortment of church leaders from the surrounding area. The schools even let out early so that the children could attend the celebration and provide some entertainment for all the guests. And on top of all of that we were supposed to feed everyone, too.

When Christopher sent us the itemized list of everything he needed to purchase for the celebration, the total cost of the party came to about $1000. So, the Huruma House guys had to do some soul-searching to decide whether or not we really wanted to spend $1000 on a big party. But Chris and Paul seemed to think it was important for our relationship with the community, and they are the ones who know the culture, so we went ahead and funded it. And in retrospect, I'm so glad we did. It turned out to be a very valuable experience for the whole neighborhood.

One of the items on the list of things to purchase for the party was a cow. That really piqued my interest, so as soon as we arrived at Bwaliro I let Christopher know that I was very interested in seeing what became of the cow. And he didn't forget either, so the day before the celebration, Christopher put me and Stephen on the back of a piki-piki (motorcycle) and sent us off to see the cow. As soon as we arrived, the six Kenyan men who were serving as the butchers got right to work. They led the cow over to a tree and tied all its legs together with ropes and then cut its throat with a big machete. I'm not really sure why I thought I wanted to watch that. It upsets me to see a spider die, so I don't know why I thought I would be okay watching a cow get slaughtered. I cried. But I filmed about the first 20 minutes of it, so maybe I'll post it on YouTube sometime (and get lots of nasty emails from PETA). It made me feel a little bit better when I thought about all the hungry people in the community that this one cow was going to feed the next day.

Anyway, back to the celebration. The plan was for me to get up early that Saturday morning at head out to the future site of the Blessed Family Center orphanage complex to set up the sound system. I'm a complete techno-tard when it comes to audio equipment, but somehow that got to be my job on this trip, so I did my best. Keith Gafner has this old PA system and a big speaker that we brought with us to Bwaliro, so the first thing we had to do was climb up in a tree and tie the big speaker to a tree limb so that we could project our celebration to the entire community and beyond. I think one of the Kenyans ended up with that job. My job was to hook up the rest of the equipment so that I could play music from my iPod over the big speaker. In preparation for this trip I went to Best Buy and purchased an assortment of different audio connectors for my iPod in the hope that at least one of them would work for the PA system when we got there. I had been kind of questioning the wisdom of those purchases, so I was elated when we ended up using every single connector that I purchased.

The celebration was supposed to start at 10:00am, so Keith wanted me to get there before 9:00 so that I could go ahead and start the music and begin advertising our upcoming celebration to everyone within earshot. However, at 9:00am, much to Keith's dismay, Christopher was still pouring more chai. This "being on time" thing was kind of a running dispute he had with Christopher and Paul. I would have thought that after 21 years in Kenya Keith would have adjusted to the we'll-get-there-when-we-get-there culture, but he still fights it. So, we finally arrived at the site a few minutes after 10:00 and found no one there. We hurriedly put the sound system together in a attempt to get things moving before 10:30, and we did it! "The Voice" by Celtic Woman was the piece I had chosen to lead off the celebration playlist, and Lisa Kelly poured out into the Kenyan countryside just a few minutes before 10:30.

So, I was still patting everyone on the back for getting everything set up so quickly and I was wondering when we were going to get started, and then Paul Bwire walks up to me and says "My wife would like to invite you to our house for just half a cup of chai." I was so confused. I said "right now?" and he said "Yes, right now". So, I relinquished my hopes of getting started before noon, and walked over to Paul's house for a two-hour long "half a cup of chai". Around 12:30 my 36 song playlist (consisting of a carefully organized collection of Casting Crowns, BarlowGirl, Britt Nicole, Celtic Woman, and Enya) was just about to wind down. And about that time, the show finally got underway as a Kenyan praise team picked up the mic and started to sing some Kenyan worship songs.

As with any Kenyan celebration, there were lots of long speeches. I was supposed to make one of these speeches as well, and it was going to be my job to talk about the US organization, Huruma House, and the role it plays in funding the work of the Blessed Family Center. But something else I was supposed to do in my talk was to introduce the next speaker, Stephen Greek. Stephen and I thought that since Kenyans are really big on titles, I would make sure to introduce Stephen as "the president of Huruma House". So, I did. And that was met with tremendous excitement from the Kenyan audience. They were all so honored to have the "president of Huruma House" in their midst.

What is so funny is that right now Huruma House is very new non-profit organization, so it really isn't much more that a group of four friends that have a conference call occasionally and send money to Africa. We didn't actually draw straws for the officer positions, but it was pretty close to that. But in the mind of our Kenyan audience, the president of Huruma House probably flies around in a private jet and has his office in the penthouse of a New York skyscraper. Anyway, Stephen was kind of embarrassed that so many of the Kenyans went on and on about it at the mic. But if you weren't Stephen, it was pretty funny.

After the speeches, we got quite a bit of entertainment from the local schoolchildren. Several groups of students performed some of their traditional Luhya dances for us, and a recurring theme of these dances was that they would take the opportunity during the dance to invite us by name to come dance with them. Each of us wazungu complied in turn. Stephen pulled out some of his 70s dance moves, and it turns out that Claudia is a master of the Luhya shuffle. I don't have the first clue about dancing so I just put my arms up in the air and jumped around in circles like I was in a mosh pit. I probably looked pretty ridiculous, but the Kenyans got a good laugh anyway. Apparently, I stayed out dancing too long and wore out my welcome with their troop, so one of the schoolgirls had to ask me very politely "are you tired of dancing yet?"

The tradition, after you finish dancing, is to give some money to the kids. We had advance notice of this tradition, so Stephen made sure to bring a big ziploc baggie full of coins to the celebration so that we would be ready with our small change. Unfortunately, as soon as the kids noticed our huge bag of money, they resolved to just keep dancing until the whole bag had been transferred to their pockets. Eventually, after 96 verses of the song, the event coordinators had to shoo them away. But we all had a good time.

Keith was the last speaker at the celebration, and he was kind of disappointed that he had to keep his sermon under an hour. He said that was the shortest sermon he had ever preached in Kenya, but the thunder clouds had started rolling in and we still had to serve up the cow to 500 people, so he had to cut it short.

Right after Keith finished speaking, we just barely had time to get the sound equipment out of the tree and put away before the heavens opened for the third day in a row. And we still had lots of people standing in the food line when the torrential downpour came. Each person at the celebration did the best he could to huddle under the tarps and try to stay dry, but it was coming down hard and sideways so staying dry was pretty much a lost cause unless you were right in the middle of the covering. I finally got tired of just standing and waiting for the rain to stop, so I decided to make a dash for Paul's house about a quarter mile down the road. After all, I thought, it might be kind of fun to go for a walk in a Kenyan thunderstorm, and what's the point of wearing this high-tech quick-dry clothing if I'm not going to get wet.

Well, walking in the rain in Kenya isn't quite like walking the rain in the States. I was planning to just walk down the middle of the road, but I couldn't seem to find the road. It seems to have mysteriously vanished and suddenly there was this raging river where I thought the road used to be. So, I thought I might try walking on the side of the road instead. But the soil is so soft and sandy, that that the side of the road was just a long patch of quicksand. So, I just had to play frogger and jump from one small patch of vegetation to the next while trying not to get eaten by alligators. Paul Bwire's family was very surprised to see me show up at their house all by myself in the middle of the storm, soaked from head to toe.

O God, we don't have a clue what we are doing. We are just stepping out into the unknown trusting that You will somehow take our small actions offered in faith and magnify them for your purposes. There is such an amazing opportunity here to reveal Your love and Your power to the people of this community. Bless us with the courage and strength to not squander it. Amen.