Africa 2010 - Nairobi – A Bustling, Wandering, Busy Place

February 9th, 2010

In our 2 days of rest, we were ridiculously busy. Most of it was filled with preparing the message and the support material . Malcolm and I were sprawled out in Utugi’s living room, with the portable printer humming and the projector shining onto dark brick and mortar walls. (little powerpoint trick learned here – turning the background to black and text to white makes any rough surface usable). Through a process of Malcolm standing up, walking, and talking, he was able to get the ideas out in a relatively cogent form so that I could capture them with notes, get clarification, and begin to process them into something that could be communicated (ala slide deck).

We wandered into the Vanguard offices both days and took care of some business in town, in Nairobi. Faith was our guide as we walked out of the compound to the first bus stop. We hoped onto a Motato (people mover bus) and wandered into town.

Earlier that morning, I had a fairly funny BGO (blinding glimpse of the obvious). To cover my bald head, I brought a few hats. My favorite is a white jogging hat – lets the heat from my head out, while strolling in fashion (and it’s bendy). That morning I thought to myself, “I wonder if I should wear this, or if it would make me stand out because I would most likely be the only guy wearing a white hat”. The irony is that we were the only white guys on the bus, and maybe .05% of Nairobi was Caucasian. My BGO? “It’s not the hat”.
We meandered, wandered, strolled, and flowed with the bustling people. Nairobi is a busy city. It doesn’t have the urgency or chaos of New York or London, but rather reminds me of people wandering and occasionally stopping every once in a while. There were desperately poor people selling charcoal lumps on the side of the roads. There were government workers burning trash piles (no barrels, just piles) beside the bus stops. There are MPesa signs everywhere (a fairly novel technique where Kenyans send and store monetary value on their phones). And there were the normal routines of business – storefronts, malls, office buildings, schools, ministries, etc.

We also saw significant darkness and oppression. In particular there was one building I found disturbing in the middle of town – it was enormous and ominous. Turns out it was a seat of power for another religion. Members of that same religion were almost glaring at us as we walked the streets of Nairobi. My spiritual radar was on high alert and pinging often.

At the same time, there were obvious and significant signs or grace and redemption – including Faith’s school building where (for a normal office building, with the school administration offices on the 5th floor), the stairwells had planters with encouraging scriptures on it, as we wound counter clockwise up the flights. This was a public building – no ACLU to enforce religious sanitization, or removal of anything of faith where a human eyeball might experience it. This is Kenya – a place where Jesus is spoken of as Messiah and Redeemer. Indeed, as we were to find out – the people of Kenya have a faith that is perhaps their most valuable country resource, greater than their gold, their wilderness, or their fertile land.