First Day - New Friends in Kenya

On our first morning in Kenya, we attended church on the ELI property. We loved seeing a group of twenty youth come up the aisles to sing a worship song complete with joyous dancing.

Then, a boy who looked about Trevor’s age came forth to lead worship on the mic. He had a voice that just filled me with joy when I heard it, and I could tell as I watched him sing that he had music “inside him,”just like Joel in Uganda. We later learned that it was Kelvin, a boy in 7th grade like Trevor, whom we would come to adore.

After the singing, Samuel had our family come up front before the congregation. Again, we felt humbled by how they treated us with such importance. We were beginning to learn that we had better be prepared to say something as honored guests…but it took us by surprise and like the day before, it happened in a blur, and I’m not sure what we each said. I do recall at the end of our sharing, I told them I remembered one Swahili song from my time in Kenya many years ago—Mungu yu mwema (God is so good), and they knew it too, so we all sang it together. We took our seats again, and were relieved to be “out of the spotlight” as the service proceeded.
Afterward, when I was standing with Laban, I met one of the Sudanese Boarding students, Magdaline, a student in grade 8 (who wasn’t especially tall, like the others).  We learned right away that her mother still lives in South Sudan, and her father was killed in the war with North Sudan. Laban knew some of her story, and he said, “I’m so sorry he was killed in the war.” Without even a speck of pause, Magdaline, responded immediately:
“That is just the way life is.”
Wow, did that hit me when I heard her words—just as it had hit me when we learned about the LRA in Uganda abducting children and forcing them to be killing soldiers—that the experiences of so many young people here in Africa were SO utterly foreign to anything we can fathom.
NO, that is NOT the way life is, not for most young people in America, that is. It is beyond unimaginable for a child to be forced to murder, let alone to kill their own family members, as Kony’s army forced children to do. And it is rare and totally tragic to lose a parent, as so many kids have here, either from war or from AIDS. To hear her say, “That is just the way life is”—so matter-of-factly--had a profound impact on me.
The topic of the war led her to explain that in South Sudan, it is mostly women and girls in the country because most males were killed in the war. Again…Wow. That is so hard to wrap my head around.  Because of this, she explained, men have many  wives. From there, she and Laban explained that a man pays cows as dowry for a wife. Laban said that in Kenya, it is standard for a man to give 5 cows for a wife, and that is what he gave to his wife, Angelina’s family as a dowry. They explained that multiple goats and sheep can count as 1 cow, and also how having many wives is a sign of wealth, because it means a man has many cows. From there, we moved from one topic after the other. Already I just loved this girl, and how frank and how grounded she was. She seemed wise beyond her years! Before we parted, she said how much she hoped that our family could join she and the other Boarding students at their evening devotion time during our stay here. I certainly hoped we could…I was so taken by her, and hoped to have the chance to spend more time together. She had already left a lasting imprint on my heart.