We are family
Jez Smith visited Kenya in December. He shares the inspiration for going and what he found when he got there
I have stories to tell. About Friends from another part of the world, their lives and about how we interact. I want to write of how we’re all part of one big family, united by our use of the name ‘Friends’. About how we in the minority are connected to people in the majority world through our religion and about how we need to build bridges.
This isn’t a sudden revelation story. Revelation is a slow ongoing process. There are occasional rays of new Light, but for the cliché that this is, the Quaker journey goes on. For me, there won’t be a ‘Quaker Meeting is like coming home’ moment. Instead, the journey is it.
I hadn’t intended to travel to Kenya. In fact I hadn’t even intended to fly any more. That was one journey that I hadn’t intended to be a part of. And yet, off I went to Kenya, having flown from Heathrow on the day that so many of my friends were taking part in the pre-Copenhagen Wave demonstration in London. Had I sold out?
I had long wondered about how the Friend could develop regular content from Friends around the world. But no specific ideas had formed. We had hoped that our then news reporter, Oliver Robertson, would go to Kenya in 2008, but the disruption caused by the post-election violence early in that year put paid to any plans for him to go. As it was, the post-election violence had a significant impact on my trip, almost two years after it occurred, but more about that later.
The whole expedition began some six months earlier when I was in Woodbrooke Quaker Study Centre for a meeting. I had travelled there the night before I was due to be there, which was unusual for me as I always feel like I’m rushing from place to place. And there I met Bainito Wamalwa, co-clerk of the local organising committee of the 2012 world conference of Friends. Bainito had been a part of the World Gathering of Young Friends at Lancaster in 2005 and so knew Woodbrooke well. But up until then we hadn’t met.
In the weeks before the world gathering I had coincidentally been at Woodbrooke as part of my preparation to be a UK-placement peaceworker for Quaker Peace & Social Witness. I had met many of the young Friends who were passing through on their way north from Birmingham but that had been the extent of my involvement.
Bainito and I discussed ideas about how Quakers from around the world could share their faith. There were some members of the Quakers and Business group chatting late around the tables too, networking and sharing ideas. Some of them came over and shared ideas that fed into what Bainito and I were talking about.
A couple of months later, those of us who were at Yearly Meeting Gathering finished the event by singing ‘Building bridges between our divisions, I reach out to you won’t you reach out to me? With all of our voices and all of our visions Friends we could make such sweet harmony.’ I value my connection to Quakers around Britain and now I should develop the international links.
So it came to be, that I was in Kenya thanks to the Europe and Middle East Young Friends group, which had been invited to send representatives to Young Quaker Christian Association. YQCA is a bit like EMEYF but isn’t formally attached to any overarching body. And whereas EMEYF meets twice each year, YQCA meets once every three years, but with a leadership training retreat in between.
The theme of YQCA’s triennial was ‘divine perception’, based on the story in 1 Samuel of God guiding Samuel to make a choice of the new king of Israel. For man does not see as God sees. It was about discernment said one member of my Bible study group as we tackled the relevant verses together before I left London.
An hour or so after arriving in Nairobi I introduced myself to the congregation at Friends Centre Ofafa. Some time ago I had heard that if you’re among Kenyan Friends and you say ‘God is good’, you always get the reply, ‘all the time’. You then reply ‘all the time’ and your audience replies with ‘God is good’. Finally I was in Kenya so I called out ‘God is good’. ‘Amen’ came the reply of 250 voices in unison. It was not an auspicious start. I explained to my fellow Friends that I was in Kenya as a Europe and Middle East Young Friends representative to attend the Young Quakers Christian Association Africa Triennial and I would also be doing some work to record the testimonies of Kenyan and other African Friends for the magazine I work for, the Friend. ‘Praise be to God’, I concluded. ‘Amen’, they replied.
Before I went to Kenya, whenever I told anyone that I was going, the stock response seemed to be that I would need to know all about the Britain Yearly Meeting decision on same-sex marriage. I would need to know the theological points and to comprehend and be able to repeat everything about where we British Friends were at and how we had got there. As it was, no one asked me about the Britain Yearly Meeting decision at all. The only time that I heard it discussed was when my fellow representative Hetty Swancott, from Britain Yearly Meeting, brought up the issue at YQCA and had an engaging and long discussion about same-sex issues with some Kenyan Friends who were eager to learn and, perhaps most importantly, understand.
So I came to Kenya with the hope of hearing Kenyan Friends stories, their testimonies and about their lives. In particular, I wanted to meet Friends from East Africa Yearly Meeting North, known simply as ‘North’ locally to distinguish it from the similarly named East Africa Yearly Meeting. North has a particular place in British Quakers’ recent collective memory, as the Yearly Meeting that sends out vile epistles (2006 and 2007) proclaiming against gay people so strongly that Britain Yearly Meeting changed its practice and no longer publishes all epistles received from other Yearly Meetings.
Would the Friends from North be openly and virulently anti-gay? No. Not least because many of them have never knowingly met an out gay person. This may be part of the problem, but I soon realised that going on to North Friends about Britain’s position on same-sex marriage was not going to help our relationships. It just wasn’t in context. We need a dialogue before we can start sharing. I don’t have any doubts that some Friends have been and will be treated very badly because of their sexuality. I just don’t think that condemnation of all Friends on its own will help us bring about the broken world transformed. We need to start conversations and we need not only to listen but to show that we are listening.
The main issues that Friends wished to discuss, beyond the mundane and the minor, were about overcoming poverty, dealing with HIV and AIDS, climate change and most importantly who we were and what our Quaker experience was like.
I had left Britain as the Copenhagen summit was about to start. In Kenya the negotiations were played out on the international pages of the newspapers. This was not an event at which ordinary Kenyans had any role to play. And even their government was considered to be mostly a bystander, likely to be screwed by whatever deal was arranged. For all their huff and puff, the strongest nations in the talks were looking out for their own interests. So much for ‘united nations’.
On the television that blared non-stop in the dining room of the YQCA conference (a television is seen as a status symbol of sorts) we saw on the news the dreadful droughts of Turkana, northern Kenya. Later, on my return, I would learn of the floods that devastated the region. After no water for so long, there was too much. The irregularity of the rains has had a tremendous effect and there have been fears that this year Kenya may run out of national food stocks.
There are currently under 15,000 members of the Religious Society of Friends in Britain today, compared with approximately 170,000 in the US and over 150,000 in Africa. As methods of gathering statistics like these vary, more recent reports suggest that there could be as many as 200,000 or 300,000 Quakers in Kenya alone. And most of them are not like us.
I first learned about Quakers from other countries when I was a participant on the Quaker UN Summer School in Geneva in 2001, less than a year after I first started going regularly to Quaker Meetings.
One aspect of the YQCA conference was a deliberate attempt from the organisers to bring together participants from across the Quaker spectrum so that, especially through informal learning opportunities, we could find out about all that we have in common, as well as understanding what our differences are.
So what I can I say? I can try to speak of what experience we have in common, within the limits of language. There is something of God in everyone and we try to celebrate and appreciate it. We use the teachings of Jesus too.
After YQCA was over I headed off to Eldoret, a large town in Rift Valley Province, which was to be my home for the next few days. With a population of over 200,000, Eldoret is the fifth largest town in Kenya. I stayed with Bainito and his family. Phori, a member of Central and Southern Africa Yearly Meeting from Lesotho, was also with us. Phori is an African representative on the Friends World Committee for Consultation youth board.
On Monday 14 December we set out to Kaptama. We met with Friends there and had fellowship time together in their church, with a reading from the Bible, prayers and time to introduce ourselves to each other. Then we went visiting the secondary school and 1,900-pupil primary school, as well as the health centre. We learned about Kaptama Friends’ plans for the future.
During my meetings with Kenyan Friends Bainito expressly told our hosts where ever we went that I was there just as a guest and visitor and that I was not there to donate money. It must have been hard for them though, seeing this seemingly rich person from the minority world waltzing briefly into their community and leaving again just a couple of hours later. It was hard too not to commit to helping them out, thinking about how just a few hundred pounds might make a credible difference to the materials in their schools or the medicines they can prescribe in their health centre.
After Kaptama we spent a morning at Eldoret Friends Church with some of the community there. The violence that spread across Kenya like wildfire at the end of 2007 and in early 2008 affected that town. The Friends who gathered with us came to tell their stories and give testimony to the grace of God. At the height of the violence, seventeen families with sixty-eight members were sheltering at the church. The situation was difficult. But a small amount of cash was raised and sent from a Meeting in Britain. The clerk went among the families finding out how he could try and meet their need. Each responded, was helped and slowly but surely this Quaker community got its members back on their feet. Since then the Church has taken part in Alternatives to Violence taster sessions, has held meetings where youths involved in the violence and the victims can get down and discuss their experiences, and has done its best to work for a more peaceful future. But everyone in Kenya knows that the tension is still there, albeit in the background for now, that the violence could return and that there are still many disaffected youth.
During my trip to Kenya I valued the opportunity to worship with Friends from other backgrounds. I found the experience of singing praises to God in worship at YQCA in western Kenya bringing out similar feelings in me as when I find myself in a settled Meeting for Worship back home, on a cold winter’s night in Peckham. I appreciated it so much that I’ve started looking out for opportunities to sing with Quakers more often.
The fellowship was important too. Simply spending time with Friends, sometimes not talking, but being comfortable in each other’s presence even when we’ve just met is a great feeling. We talked a lot too, for the record to share with others, also conversations over dinner, in between meetings, on the road, in churches and in houses. My trip to Kenya was definitely worth it.
The longer I stayed in Kenya, the more I felt that we can all call ourselves Friends and despite our differences, that’s okay. And, whether in our Local Meetings or in international visits, I was reminded that when we Friends spend more time with each other we can be better prepared to answer that of God in ourselves and each other.
See jezsmith.wordpress.com to read Jez’s blogposts from Kenya.
Our coverage of Friends in Kenya continues next week.
You need to login to read subscriber-only content and/or comment on articles.