On the streets of Eastleigh

Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Nairobi, Kenya

I have always read Larry and Hollye Conway's emails and reports about their work with Made In The Streets, a ministry to the children who live on the streets of Eastleigh, a slum in Nairobi, Kenya. The pictures of the children are always shocking, children sitting in the middle of trash heaps, sniffing glue from little bottles, dirty and tattered clothes, no shoes. The photographs tell a story of human suffering at its greatest, and it is almost beyond belief that there are children who know no other home but a trash heap in the slums of Nairobi. It shocks the senses even to view photos of the children on a 21" inch monitor in an air-conditioned office in a high-back leather chair thousands of miles away, so naturally I reasoned that meeting these deprived children face to face on the trash heaps of Eastleigh would be 10 times more heart-wrenching.

But it wasn't. In fact it is actually worse to view their condition from the point of view of the luxury to which we are accustomed. I think what strikes us so is the stark contrast between what we view as the normal human condition (middle-class America) and the gross deviation from that condition experienced by these children. The journey to Eastleigh from Abilene, Texas is a long one, and I don't mean that it is long in terms of miles traveled, but the journey is long in terms of the spectrum of the human condition traversed along the way. Even the nice parts of Nairobi still bear the marks of poverty, and you can't even travel to Eastleigh without first navigating roads that look like they been bombarded with large meteorites. The route through Nairobi is going to pass by hundreds of shabby little shops lining badly littered streets and manned by what look to us like impoverished people. The dust and black soot from passing traffic is heavy in the air, and the smoke from the buring piles of trash that line the streets just adds to the smoky haze.

While on our way to Eastleigh we would occasionally dance inside a crater-sized pothole with a very nice car going the opposite direction, and I would think, "Why on earth are they driving that luxury vehicle through these roads, in this part of town, or that that matter in this country. Luxury cars just seem so out of place here." Then as the car passed I would look at the back of the car to see the model: Toyota Corolla. And it became apparent to me that my eyes had started to adjust to Kenya. And by the time we finally arrived in Eastleigh and pulled up to the locked and barred gate of the Made in the Streets ministry, the landscape of shabby shops and general squalor had just started to look normal to me. And when Larry took us on a hike to see the bases, the trash heaps where the street kids live, he had to point the kids out to us. I was kind of under the impression that I would be walking through the streets of Nairobi and witness this devastating scene of destitute children living on trash heaps, but it absolutely wasn't that way. By the time we got to the first base and started shaking hands with the kids Larry knew, my natural response was "Well that makes sense that they would live and sleep on the trash heaps. The decomposing trash generates heat which keeps them warm in the cool Kenyan nights." Looking at the slum around me, and with my eyes grown accustomed to the reality of life here, the street kids at the base were not surprising at all.

I met a young mother with a precious little girl about nine months old. She seemed to be a happy child and her mother seemed very proud of her. She was only a few months older than my baby girl, Anna, and she made me really miss my children. I sat on a piece of cardboard on the ground next to them to play with little girl a bit and then several other teens started showing up in the area. Pretty quickly about ten teens showed up and, after shaking our hands (hand-shaking is a really big deal here), they seated themselves on the ground to listen to what Larry had to say. Larry went around and had each of the teens introduce themselves and then had each person in our group introduces themselves. Before we arrived in Kenya, I was under the impression that all Kenyans spoke English. After all, it is one of the official languages of the nation. However, the Kenyans learn English in school, and these teens we were talking to didn't go to school. I really wanted to talk to them all, spend the day with them, and get a first-hand account of what their lives are like. And it was very frustrating that I wasn't able to do that due to the language barrier (and our time constraints).

Larry kind of put us on the spot and asked if any of us on the team had any words to say, so I spoke up and told the teens (with Larry translating into Swahili) that I teach a Kindergarten class of precious little girls, and each week I ask the girls what they want to pray for. Invariably they always pray for the children of Kenya, specifically those with no home to go to. So, I told them that whether they knew it or not there were some little girls on the other side of the world praying for them every week. I don't know if that meant anything to them or not. Maybe they didn't care. I'm sure that there were probably some words I could have said that would have been more meaningful or more encouraging, but at that moment I really didn't know what they were. If someone were to ask me back home to say a few words on the spot, I could probably come up with something relevant to the situation. But this situation and their condition was so completely foreign to me, I just didn't even know where to start. On different occasion, I was asked to lead a prayer for a couple of other street kids we met, and I didn't even know what to ask for. The road from their current condition to the "normal" that I am accustomed to is so immeasurably long that I can't even envision the map. So, I had to punt with a general prayer for peace, joy, and wisdom in all things and just trust that the Spirit of God was interpreting for me "with groans that words cannot express."

Anyway, at the first base camp I was telling you about, after I had babbled something about my Kindergartners praying for them, Carl Moore had the wisdom and presence of mind to lead them in a prayer. Carl is deaf, so Carl signed the words of the prayer to Jerry who spoke them in English, and then Larry translated them to Swahili. And Carl knows just what to say. After the prayer, I passed out some granola bars to the teens at the base. I had brought along a bunch of them as snacks for myself on our Kenya trip, but I figured they needed them more than I did, and I was really drawing a blank about how else I could help minster to them, and passing out granola bars was really the best I was able to come up with under the circumstances.

Although I don't see any direct benefits from my brief trip to the bases, I am somewhat reassured in knowing that Larry and Holly Conway are continually involved in long-term ministry to these kids, and that their long-term involvement in the lives of the kids on the streets of Eastleigh is bearing real, tangible fruit in terms of rescuing these children from lives of hopelessness and giving them a bright future off the streets.

Lord, I feel so completely insignificant in your service. I am so small, and the combined suffering of your children throughout the world is so overwhelmingly vast. I know that your Body on earth, the Church, is blessed with divine power to heal and to love and to smash the gates of hell which shall not overcome it. I really do know (though I sometimes forget) that I am not able or expected to heal this broken world alone and certainly not by my own power, but only as a member of Your Body of which You are the head. So heal me of all my delusions of grandeur and use me in Your Kingdom however you see fit, according to your wisdom, even if it means I have to be a toenail in the Body of Christ. Amen.