Tomorrow we will have our second Christian Meditation Retreat in Swahili from 9:30am to 4:30pm. We will start the day with Judy leading us with some exercises to limber up the joints, followed by 3 periods of teaching and meditation, in-between these periods will be free time to reflect and pray. The day ends with a meal of rice and beans and Eucharist.

We have an overflow group of 37 people coming. What are they looking for? What are their spiritual needs? What are their physical and psychological needs? Many are looking for healing. Healing services are really big here. They are usually large noisy affairs offering people a chance to be healed of all sorts of aliments with a big focus on “driving out the Devil”. The methods used are on the aggressive side with much shouting.

So many of our forgotten people are oppressed by lack of food, medical care, education and a healthy spiritual care. We hope to offer a gentle way of attending to the people’s interior struggles. We seek an inner healing in Christ that will gift the people with healing and peace as we sit silently together in faith and love in our Resurrected Lord, who now dwells within us.

This coming September I will have been working on the Lake House of Prayer for three years. Almost every Sunday during this time I have been leading Sunday Eucharist at the local Catholic Community Church. The experience with the local Christians has helped much in putting down roots with the local community. Most of the people I pray with on Sunday are regulars on our “Praying Community” here at the House of Prayer.

The time has come for a change in this arrangement for two reasons. Firstly, the local community has grown to the point that it can hope realistically to become a parish in the future; they need a priest who can give them a deeper pastoral presence than I can with my Sunday only presence.

Secondly, the House of Prayer has also developed well these past three years, so much so, that it now demands a full-time presence from me. Guests are starting to come, small groups are asking for day retreats, development of our land continues with a wall, garden, and future plans to build a wing for women of 6 self-contained rooms and much more.

Yesterday I spoke with the local Pastor, Fr. Mtema about my desire to withdraw from my commitment of celebrating Sunday Eucharist with the local community. I was consoled by his openness and support of this desire. Of course I will continue to help out when the need arises periodically but now my entire focus is tending to the growth of the Lake House of Prayer.

This new and totally focus is not about doing things here, as valuable and necessary that they may be. The most important focus will be on fostering a contemplative inner attitude for myself  so I can share the gift of INNNER PEACE with others who come to visit us.

I am enjoying taking a morning or evening walk down to the lake. When I get there I greet the fisherman who are pulling in their (illegal) nets for a catch.

I then try to find an open spot on the beach to gaze out at the lake for awhile (15min). People normally don’t come up a talk to me but this day one of the fisherman came up and said, “Unaangalia nini?” (What are you looking at?). I paused, a bit dumbfounded at the question since I was looking at, in my opinion a natural wonder, Lake Victoria. I replied, “Maajabu ya Mungu” (The Wonders of God). He didn’t understand.

The Lake for him is a place of survival; what he catches today is what he will eat, today. If he doesn’t catch anything, he doesn’t eat anything today and that goes for his children.

The Lake, for me, is a place of beauty and contemplation. I have no worries about what I’m going to eat tonight. The answer to the question ‘What are you looking at?’ depends on your perspective.

 

I have gone back to taking a beautiful walk to the lake these mornings. Today as I approached the end of the walk I met fisherman sitting along the edge of the dirt path. I asked them if there is anything the matter. One answered that the fishery department had come to drive them away, some of their number were caught.

Caught? For what? Illegal fishing. The fisherman here use large very fine woven nets to catch even the smallest of fish. And this is the problem, because of this illegal fishing the small fish do not mature and reproduce until the fish stock in Lake Victoria is going dangerously low.

When I reached the lake other fisherman were readying their illegal nets to begin fishing once more. One feels for them because this is their life, their families depend on these catches of now small fish. One feels also for the government who is trying at this late date to control illegal fishing. Something has got to give and it looks like a way of life for centuries is coming to an end.

People met at the House of Prayer to pray underneath a large mango tree before processing to the church. It was quite a setting to see a large crowd of people around this tree with Lake Victoria below to the west. Breathtaking really.

Now, getting this many people organized to walk in peace and joy is a challenge. But after 32 yrs of exercises such as these I’ve learnt just enough from my many mistakes that my directions did no harm. Our procession was at least one kilometer long, it included two choirs, hundreds of small children, adults and the elderly.

We passed through many dirt paths and streets, passing people sitting, washing, cooking, talking outside their cement block simple homes. Motorcycles and daladalas (public transport vans) waited patiently as we passed by singing and drumming our songs.  It was a joyful walk through our community to the church taking about 45 minutes.

Entering the church I blessed the singing throng with water and stopped to dance with a couple of the older women. Africa and the Faith still live in these people. Judy and I are blessed to be with them.

A couple of weeks ago we continued to make history here at the House of Prayer with our first infant baptism. We baptized Fiona the child of Michael and Ashley(Maryknoll Lay Missioners) into the community of Disciples.

Usually the first part of the service starts at the church door where we welcome the new born into our worshiping community. But since we don’t have a church big enough to enact such an action, we started outside under a tree “that grows out of a rock”.

We have two trees on our property that grow, literally, out of large rocks, at least that’s what it looks like; for indeed the roots are in the soil but they(the roots) proceed to the light through a rock. A paradoxical symbol being planted on good African soil Fiona’s spirit will grow and endure on the Rock of Christ.

From the Rock-Tree we walked in single file to our small chapel where we continued with the service. Why single file? This is the way people walk in the villages, in single file. There are myriad paths much like a interstate freeway system in the States in an African villages.

When walks in a group of 5 to 10 people one walks one behind the other. A rhythm  gets established, conversations go on, there is no hurry and one reaches the destinations feel better than when one started. What is that? It is called being in the Present Moment, in the rhythm of Life. It is everyday African Spirituality.

We are preparing for our next project to improve our property which is to build a brick wall on 153 meters of our area. So, the first three things one needs are rocks (big ones but not too big), sand and cement. I pay so much for a load to rocks or cement to be dumped on our site and buy the cement sacks from stores.

After the first few loads we noticed that the rocks that are being dumped on us are waaay too big, why? We try to threaten the lorry driver to have the men breaking rocks to break them smaller so they can be used right away for building. He explains that the government has cracked down on drug dealers, especially marijuana ones. He goes on to inform us that the government has also prohibited the sale of hard liquor in the small packages people like to drink from.

What has this got to do with our big rocks? Well, rock breaking is a brutal work that is constantly shaking one’s insides to utter distraction. The rockbreakers use marijuana and small packs of hard liquor to ease the bone-jarring, brain displacing nature of rock breaking (mind you they are doing this by hand).

The lack of these need sedatives has put the rockbreakers in a very very bad mood. When the lorry driver asks them to break the rocks into smaller pieces, they tell him to get lost(the language tends to be more colorful) if he doesn’t like the size their giving him.

Today we hired a local man to break the rocks into acceptable sizes for building. One moves on, accepts the big rocks, stops trying to convince the rockbreakers to make the rocks smaller. Well, at least we are giving someone else a job, the country maybe be safer from drugs but there is a large group of rockbreakers who are in a very bad mood.

Last week we finished our water tower without too much difficulty, then the hard part came, pulling up a 10,000 liter water tank to the top of a 4 meter tower. By hand (as most things are done here at the House of Prayer).

We agreed with 7 local men to do the job that started early morning and lasted until sundown. Why so long? First, we did not have the right equipment, all we had was a strong rope and some long wooden poles (we should have got a pulley).

It took the seven of them all day to get the tank half way up the 4 meter tower. Finally towards early evening they got it to the top but they had to ask me to destroy part of the railing so they could slide the tank onto the platform. Then the men said they needed more men to finish the deed.

All of the sudden there are 10 men waiting at the gate to come into to help. I refused at first but after a animated discussion relented thinking let’s get this thing done.

Well, we did and thank God no one got killed. There were a lot of smiles and handshakes going around as I handed the “posho” (money for the work) to one of the leaders. One of the young men said as he was leaving, “Kazi ya Mungu ni safi” (The work of God is cool). Indeed it is but at times for me, it is very UN-COOL.

Even here in the city people raise chickens, pigs, cows and goats to supplement their incomes. One does not need an alarm clock as the roasters call out to the world, “time to wake up”. Frequently at Sunday Mass the people will bring up a chicken in the Offertory Procession(usually I get eggs, potatoes and rice). Two days ago our neighbor brought over a gift of a chicken and after waiting two days I decided to eat it.

But first someone had to kill it. First I asked our cook, she refused. Then I ask my foreman to get one of the women working in the garden to finish it off, both women refused. The I told him to kill it, he refused. So, it was on me to send the chicken to chicken heaven and to our dinner table.

I had slit the neck of the chicken years ago and tried to remember how I did it. First I placed it on the ground stepping on its wings and feet to hold it down. Moving the knife across its neck vigorously was not working. The knife was not spark enough, I swore the chicken was laughing at me. Then it got away and ran throughout the yard. I went back to the kitchen to sharpen the knife while Jeni, our cook finally ran it down.

Jeni, she’s the one who refused to do the chicken in tells me that I’m not doing it right and that I have to hold the neck while cutting away. She held the body. Well, without going into any more details, the deed was done. I’m now on my second day of eating chicken twice a day.

The Gift of the Chicken turned out to be an adventure of a comedy of errors. Such is my life here, at times.

We are in the process of planting red beans between our ‘forest’ of trees to enrich the soil for the trees and provide delicious beans for us. After overturning the soil we take the fertile dirt from our large termite hills in our area and place it over the newly overturned soil as fertilizer.

Last night thousands of Kumbi Kumbi came out of the termite hills. These are small insects that look like caterpillars who leave their termite hill in search of another hill to produce more little Kumbi Kumbi.  Unfortunately for them we human beings enjoy their taste. I’ve ate them before, they taste like a meaty potato chip after they are fired like French fries.

After morning mass today the people were gathering the Kumbi Kumbi to bring home to fry. Crows and small hawks were mixed in with the people gathering quickly the natural delicacy before it runs out.