Pastors' passage through Africa

We have continued to host a slew of visitors, and for the past two days visiting us has been the pastor of the church in Seattle where I grew up (although she was not the pastor when I was there) and her husband, who is also a pastor at a Seattle church (where my Aunt Carol is a member). They decided to stop by Nairobi for a quick visit at the end of their time in Africa, after two and a half weeks on a sort of study tour of Rwanda through a Seattle-based organization. They are on a sabbatical/vacation and are spending quite a number of weeks visiting a number of countries in Africa and Europe.

Those two short days were really not enough time to see a lot of Kenya or even Nairobi alone. But one itinerary that gives visitors a good taste of some of the country’s history, culture and African wildlife in just a few hours, while allowing them to soak up some Kenyan sunshine and enjoy the warm air, is what I call the “Karen tour” – most of the sites are in the suburb of Karen, named after Karen Blixen, who wrote Out of Africa. We visited the elephant orphanage, where one can observe young elephants up close. Then we went to Blixen’s house, which you can tour. Then we had lunch in the garden on part of her old property. And then we went to the giraffe center, where you can stand face-to-face with these animals and feed them out of your hand.

On the morning of their second day here, I arranged a visit for all of us with the pastor of the Lutheran church (LCMS-affiliated) in Kibera, the enormous slum near us, that had been looted and burned during the post-election violence. This burned church and the pastor had made international news in January. Since our visitors’ time in Africa had been dealing a bit with peace and reconciliation issues in Rwanda, I thought a visit to this church would be along those same lines – a story of peace and reconciliation in Kenya. That pastor showed us around the church and its facilities that were burned, some of which are being rebuilt today, and told us about those tense days in late December and early January when the slum and other parts of the country had erupted in violence. He also took us for a walk a bit into the slum so we could see how people live there. Kibera is supposedly the biggest slum in the world, with about a million residents. Our visitors were moved by the powerful story and the scenes of destruction, so that was another side of Kenya that I’m glad they got to see, as tragic and negative as it is. Even I found it interesting, although I had visited this church once before during worship with our pastor and his wife.

We really enjoyed the visit with this couple. It was short but intense because of all the conversations we had, which ranged from talking about travel, past, present and future, to deeper conversations over work experience and being married. I did not know Kathy well, although she has turned over the pulpit to me many times when I have gone home and have preached at Our Redeemer’s. And I had never met Bruce before (his congregation’s secretary and her husband came with my Aunt Carol to visit us in Geneva at one point). So there was a lot to share about our lives, and since we have so many friends who are Lutheran – and Lutherans pastors – it was easy to relate to them. They took us out to dinner on the first night, and we went to a lovely restaurant in Karen. The food and conversation over a bottle of wine was excellent, and we enjoyed wonderful desserts afterwards.