These Neighbors in This Neighborhood

This article is excerpted from Steve’s book Hints of Hope: Essays on Making Peace with the Proximate, available at Hearts and Minds Bookstore as well as elsewhere.

“Hello,” she said, “I am Kikuyu, and I work for Médecins Sans Frontières.”

The day before I had flown to Kenya, most of my hours reading The Africans by David Lamb.^[1] Like everyone I had impressions of Africa, but only impressions, and so had asked a Kenyan friend at the World Bank what I should read to know more. A long flight, a long read, and yet years later I still remember the gift of the book, painting with a necessarily broad brush and yet making honest sense of the many people and the many places that are “Africa.” People by people, place by place, he looked through two lenses: 1) to understand Africa is to understand that it is a continent of tribes, not a continent of nation states, and 2) that throughout African consciousness, the hearts and the hopes that thread their way through its almost incomprehensible diversity, the idea of fate is somehow, somewhere present— and over the next days I began to see and hear the reality of his analysis, from city to village, wherever I went.

When I boarded my flight from Nairobi to Kisumu, and the woman in the next seat introduced herself to me with the words, “I am Kikuyu…” explaining that she worked for Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), that she too was traveling to the west of Kenya— as the plane took off, I realized with an unusual poignancy that I was in Africa, seeing the words I had read become flesh in the seat right next to me.

Most Kenyans are Kikuyu, but there are other tribes too, the Akamba, Luhya, Kisii, Meru, Mijikenda, and the Maasai, Turkana, Samburu, and Kalenjin as well. When I stepped off the plane in Kisumu, I stepped into the Luo culture, somehow African and Kenyan, even if deeply distinct, with no intention of becoming lost in the larger world— the Luo are Luo, after all.

Why was I there? What had taken me to Africa? Several years earlier I had given a lecture for the Veritas Forum, and after the students had asked all of their questions, a group of guys maybe ten years beyond their student days were still standing there, with their own questions— and so we talked late into the night.

That evening I had addressed the challenge of the responsibility of knowledge, which is at the heart of every vocation within the academy, whether student or faculty, administration or staff. What will we do with what we know? Beginning with a conversation I had had with a good friend whose own work with USAID had taken her to Africa the previous months, tasked with evaluating its complex medical needs in light of growing disease and famine— concluding that the situation was “outrageous!” —on into a reflection about the film “Magnolia” with its surprisingly profound treatment of the most cosmic questions, the ones that rumble through every century and every culture because they are asked by every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve, viz. do our choices matter? Do we have true responsibility? Or in the end is it a fated universe? A world where the dice has already been rolled, the pretensions of “choices” and “responsibility” only that, ideas pretending to be something that is not and cannot be? And then finally into the rich vision of learning rooted in the Hebrew and Christian understanding of knowledge, where if we know we must care.

The guys were a band called the Jars of Clay, and over the next months we talked and talked again, focused on what they could do in light of the global health crisis in the early 2000s brought about by HIV/AIDS in Africa. “What could they do? What should they do?” In the years since then much good work has been done in and through the the Blood:Water Mission, the organization that was birthed out of those months, and at least one good book written, A Thousand Wells by Jena Lee Nardella, a beautiful, thoughtful reflection about her own pilgrimage into the hopes and heartaches of Africa.

My trip to Kenya was with members of the band, and Jena. That first day we met with a public health nurse, Elizabeth Obiero, who already had experience with the very questions we had entered into; she was willing to help us know what the needs were, and how they could be met with the help of our newly-birthed Blood:Water Mission. Amazingly, and yet not, 20 years later she is still helping, now working throughout the western region of Kenya, with the village of Lwala as the center-point with its confluence of the community of houses, a school and a medical clinic. Over the next days we listened, learning more about these people in their place, beginning to understand more of the necessary complexity of their history, of who they were, of why they were, of the way they lived their lives.

And yes, we began to feel the weight of fate— agriculturally, educationally, socially, that, “We are acted upon, more than that we are actors.” While one word can never capture the complexity of a continent, it seemed in the air we breathed, i.e. that whatever we did would have to be against the spirit of, “what happens, happens.” In the Yoruba language of Nigeria, the word is ayanmo; in the Swahili language of Kenya, it is hatima. But more than these relatively isolated words and their usages, windows that they might be for us, what is true for Africa is true the world over, overwhelmingly so, in the Northern Hemisphere as well as the Southern Hemisphere. In the pantheist East it is called karma, while in the materialist West it is called evolutionary determinism. “A life has been chosen for me,” is the meaning of ayanmo, while it is, “I am my DNA,” in the Enlightenment-formed cultures of the 20th and 21st-centuries in the Northern Hemisphere. Time, chance, matter— there it is, and that is it. There are nuanced differences, but at the end of the day it is, “I have been acted upon.”

There are exceptions though, by grace there are always exceptions. In a thousand different ways they are signposts of something more, signposts for something more. From the first conversation on the first day, Elizabeth stood out to me, formed within a worldview that saw human agency, honest responsibility born of love, as integral to being human. Very accomplished and serious in the best ways, she knew the Luo people, and she knew the most important questions to ask about health and well-being, not only offering her medical training, but also her additional study in economic and social development. With well-formed eyes to see the deeper, truer needs of the women, the men, and the children of Lwala, for 20 years now she has overseen the W.A.S.H. program in the village— Water Access, Sanitation, and Hygiene —knowing the important relationship between clean water and clean blood in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

One cannot know Elizabeth without being taught by her commitment and resolve, given with open-hearted gladness and profoundly-grounded maturity. Describing her labor of love as a life among the vulnerables of Kenya, the Lwala clinic serves over 30,000 people, offering good care for heart and mind, soul and strength. And while many others have come and gone over the years, each someone with eagerness and passion, willing to work hard with hope, she has stayed, choosing to keep on keeping on, pouring out her life for her neighbors near and far, in Lwala and beyond.

But “beyond” is a weighty word. She has a great heart, and very good gifts. Her work would be judged excellent all over the world; she knows what she is doing, and she does it very well. But she has chosen her own “neighborhood,” one that stretches across miles and miles, including thousands upon thousands of people; while choosing to center her care in one village, knowing that she can do something, even if she cannot do everything. In a deeply Augustinian way, she embodies his understanding of “dilectio proximi”— while the whole world is there to be loved, any one of us can only love a small part of it, that which is proximate to us. A good life is one that makes peace with that reality, feeling the responsibility for more, while living within the responsibility for this-and-not-that, of these neighbors in this neighborhood, for this time and this place.

To have sustained her vocation as she has, Elizabeth has lived within the ancient and holy rhythm of ora et labora, and is profoundly conscious of its ordering of her days and years. Praying and working, working and praying, hour by hour, week after week, giving her good gifts to all who come, to all who have need, especially to those on the frontiers of medicine, the faraway places that even most Kenyans have never visited— called to care for those who feel their own vulnerability. With a holy heart, born of a life given to God and to his world, she has loved her people in her place, a Luo who has loved the Luo.

^[1] David Lamb, The Africans (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 1987).