Part 2: The outhouse of friendship

KIBERA, Kenya -- The outhouse at New Life Restoration Centre could have been called a "two-seater," except for one thing.

Seats.

The outhouse, with its two separate stalls, had only holes on the concrete floor, meant for the user to squat over. When LEAMIS International Ministries founders Gail Drake and the Rev. Debra Snellen and staff member Frank Schroer arrived in Kibera, a few days in advance of the volunteer mission team, they told the church elders that some of their fellow Americans -- particularly the women -- would prefer to be able to sit down. The church members, eager to please the American visitors, bought a finished four-legged wooden toilet seat designed for this purpose, and then later added a length of PVC culvert as a splash guard between the seat and the hole.

The stall into which the seat was placed was marked -- to our chagrin -- as "STRICTLY FOR VISITORS FROM ABROAD" and protected by padlock. While we were in town, everyone else in the church would use the other stall, waiting in line if necessary. I thought to myself that we had taken a giant step backwards in race relations, with the unwanted return of the whites-only toilet. But any attempts by us to use the other toilet or to let any of the locals use ours would be shooed off by the elders of the church.

Irony aside, the lengths to which our Kenyan hosts went to please us throughout our visit was humbling. We were warmly welcomed, greeted constantly, and treated as friends. With a few exceptions -- like the sign on the outhouse -- the attention didn't seem fawning but sincerely affectionate.

I was part of a 14-member team from LEAMIS International Ministries last month, working with the New Life Restoration Centre on the edge of the Kibera slums.

The Rev. Paul Mbithi worked for years for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines before he and his wife Grace became associate ministers a decade ago for a mission associated with Potter's House in Prescott, Ariz. Then, seven years ago, they founded New Life Restoration Centre.

Most of our LEAMIS team got to meet Paul last November when he came to the U.S. for some conferences. He is hoping to come back here later this month if he can put together the money. He is a man of great warmth and enthusiasm. When most of the team arrived at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi on the evening of Aug. 20, tired from 24 hours in airplanes and airports, Rev. Mbithi -- who hadn't seen me in more than 10 months and who had 14 team members to keep straight -- greeted me by name.

Gail, who had already been in town for half a week, danced around with Rev. Mbithi's wife Grace in the airport parking lot.

"They're here," said Gail and Grace in a delighted sing-song.

Grace Mbithi is sometimes called "Mama Church." (In Swahili, "Mama" can be a salutation of respect for women regardless of whether they are your mother.) The Mbithis have two teenagers: Juliana, who greeted us on the 20th before leaving for her tiny boarding school, and Benjamin, who entertained us throughout the week with his wry humor and his similarity to countless 16-year-old boys back home.

Kylene McDonald: "Ben, are you excited about going back to school?"

Ben: "No."

Me: "Some things are universal."

Paul and Grace met us at the airport on the 20th, but we weren't yet ready to go to the homes where we would spend our week of ministry. Instead, we would spend our first few nights at the Anglican Church of Kenya guest house, a small conference facility in Nairobi. That would allow us a training day to refresh some of what we learned during our pre-field training retreat in March.

It took us longer than expected to get out of the airport -- there were long lines at immigration, and then some of the team's luggage was missing. By the time we got to the guest house, at 10 or 11 that night, it had been 36 hours since we got any real bed rest and we were ready for sleep. But Kenyan custom requires that visitors not be sent to bed on an empty stomach, and the guest house had prepared us a Kenyan dinner, featuring the two staples of Kenyan cuisine: ugali and sukuma wiki. We postponed our much-needed jet lag shuteye and sat down to dinner.

I can give you a pretty good mental image of this meal. Imagine some grits, made with slightly less water and cooked to a dough-like consistency. That's ugali. Now, imagine some kale (or turnip greens, if you've never had kale), chopped up fine and cooked with mild seasonings into a stew-like consistency. That's sukuma wiki. A little meat may be added to the stew if you have it, but the developing world often has to make do with much less meat than we Americans are used to.

Grace complimented me on eating my meal in the traditional manner, which we had tried out during our pre-field training. You pinch off a ball of ugali, roll it into a little scoop, and then use it with your fingers to scoop up the sukuma wiki or other main dish.

That was the last time during the trip I would eat ugali in the traditional manner; we were given silverware with all of our meals, and most of the locals used it as well except for a few meals at the church when there wasn't enough silverware to go around.

New Life Restoration Centre, constructed of corrugated tin, has a sanctuary, a few classrooms, and a church office surrounding a central courtyard. Each morning as we gathered for church, we could see some of the ladies of the church already making preparations for our lunch. The lunch was cooked in huge aluminum pots over a charcoal fire.

Our day began with a church service at 9:30 a.m. or so. Immediately after that, tea would be served. The hot tea was made with milk, in the British fashion, and served with little cookies (or "biscuits," to use British terminology). Kenya was British East Africa until the 1960s, and the British influence is still strong. Pastor Paul playfully told us last year that Kenyans spoke the King's English, not our ruffian American version.

Most of those we dealt with did, in fact, speak English. English and Swahili are joint national languages of Kenya, and though not all people speak English, most of the ones we met do. That meant for a much better mission experience than I had in Nicaragua, where all of our conversations had to take place through a translator.

Even so, all of our church services at New Life Restoration Centre were translated into Swahili for the benefit of the congregation. (If the speaker was a native using Swahili, it was translated into English for our benefit.) We had practiced ahead of time giving our testimonies in short, simple phrases, breaking every few seconds to give the translator a chance to translate a half a sentence or a whole one. Any testimony or sermon took twice as long as it would have otherwise because it had to be repeated in the other language.

Anywhere we went in the slums, away from the church, the little children would see us, wave excitedly and say "How are you?" in a sing-song manner that sounded more like "Howa-yooooooooo!"

When one tried to respond, they looked pleased, but surprised -- and they never tried to turn it into a conversation. I never got around to asking, but I suspect that perhaps "How are you?" is one of the first English phrases taught in school and the children just saw a chance to try it out.

Although most of the members of New Life Restoration Centre live in dire poverty in the Kibera slums, the LEAMIS volunteers were placed in three different homes outside the slums. Eight of us, including me, stayed at Paul's and Grace's townhouse. It is located in a development with a locked gate, and was laid out like a modest American townhouse, but the dirty streets and the presence just outside the gate of vendor stalls (not to mention the roosters that crowed each morning) reminded you that you were in Africa, not the U.S. The Mbithis work hard to keep up their home, and worked even harder to make their American guests feel comfortable.

We, by the same token, tried to be good guests -- and to remember that commodities like electricity and water are more precious in Africa than the U.S. The Mbithis have indoor plumbing, for which we were grateful, but they keep a plastic basin under the shower to collect gray water -- for example, the water released while the electric "widowmaker" showerhead is heating up.

On our training day, we were taken to Steers, an African fast-food chain, and allowed to buy burgers or fried chicken. Grace noticed several of us with leftover french fries, and she collected them from all of us to take to the orphan boys who live full-time at the church. When we talked about this at a team meeting the next day, we thought about how much food we all waste here in the U.S. I love to cook, and if I make a big recipe of something I often get tired of it before all the leftovers have been consumed. It spoils and goes into the trash.

That doesn't happen in Kibera.

The church people tried to make sure we had plenty to eat at lunch time, and sometimes our plates would be half-finished. But the half-finished plates could always given to someone, and no one was squeamish about eating after someone else. Food is a resource, after all, and not to be wasted.

Pastor Paul and Grace went to great pains to make our meals at home pleasant. As our hosts, they were receiving a stipend from LEAMIS, but I suspect they went above and beyond to make sure we were happy and well-fed. Usually, our food was Kenyan, but a few dishes were more familiar or western.

The hospitality we received was humbling, even overwhelming, and we tried to live up to it by serving the church well. When lunchtime came, we made a point of helping to pass out the plates to the church members and visitors in the congregation before sitting down to lunch ourselves.

Although our team was the first missions team to work specifically with NLRC, Pastor Paul and others involved with the church have worked with foreign mission teams in the past. Pastor Paul complimented Gail and Debra as the week went on by saying that our team, unlike those others, did not have a "wall" between the team and the locals. Gail and Debra attribute that to two of LEAMIS' policies -- placing volunteers in homes rather than a hotel, and thoroughly training volunteers before the trip.

The warm reception we received from everyone in the church made it easy to fit in, even if we weren't all using the same outhouse.

TOMORROW: The King of Copper Foiling