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| Williams's son Justin does the best impression of TW |
A myriad of thoughts are swirling around my head today.
In just over 48 hours we leave Kenya for the UK and then down for a long stint in South Africa. My head is full of Anthony, who we’ve been trying so hard to help get himself back to using his carpentry skills to earn more money to get his daughter through school; I’m wondering why is Dennis not back from the funeral upcountry where his brother was washed away in a nearby river and they never found his body; I cant get the woman I saw yesterday out of my head – her body strewn across the pavement, her bones and muddy rags forming the hopeless shape she cast on the dirty ground; my head buzzing with the amazing impact study report that was published yesterday evening on the past year of our work, which leaves me breathless; I’m thrilled as I read Purity’s email (Head of Kenya), to all our trainers. It is written with the confidence and courage of the lioness that she is. She is taking charge of her bench of new trainers, like a Pride of lions, as Jane and I move on to the next country. I’m also aware of the personal joys and pains of friends and family…those who come in close and those who choose to stay distant. All these are in my head today.
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| Dagoretti 6 after their 3 day training - Anthony second from right & Dennis second from left |
Over breakfast Jane and I spoke again about the subject of ‘robustness’. Are we any more robust for spending the larger part of our year here in Kenya? It doesn’t feel like it. We are so aware of our fragility in the midst of so much fragility, suffering and hardship. On one side people tell us ‘we are doing amazing things and want us home to keep us safe’. On the other side I have the words of a friend in Rwanda who spoke to me a while ago about the ongoing suffering of Rwandans, many who lost between 20- 50 members of their family in the genocide – “Trevor, depression is a luxury of the West. We have to just get up each day to survive. We don’t have time for that kind of indulgence”. That feels like robustness to me.
And yet every day we remind each other of one of our greatest discoveries over these months in Africa. The word ‘Mitzvot’. I found the word through the writings of the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Hershcel. I knew of the word "Bar-Mitzvah" – ‘becoming a child of the commandments’. Yet until this past year I hadn’t heard of Mitzvot. The Mitzvot are the singular, ‘commands’, literally the little actions we do every day that put the world back to how it was meant to be; the individual, small acts of kindness, courage and humanity that restore our tiny patch of the world. It’s the little things like, our guard, who had Malaria last night and still had to look after us through another Nairobi night and all we could give him was 6 paracetemol; Or the café we had breakfast in this morning where a waiter came up with the badge that just said ‘Trainee” on it and we told him that his name could not possibly be “Trainee” and that we wanted to know what it really was. “It is Washington” he proudly tells us. We were happy to give him this “badge” of a human identity.
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| There are so many levels of human compassion and kindness hidden within this one photo - Lunch at Bridget's house |
The little things. A thousand things every day that makes the world around us a little like it was meant to be. I’ve come to the conclusion that the faith I knew so much about for so many years is worthless unless it is a day full of the Mitzvot. I’m even sure that when Jesus said ‘if you love me you will obey me’, he didn’t mean at all that if you love me you’d live in an obsequious fear of getting it wrong all the time. I’m now convinced that what he meant was “if you’re on my team then you'll look at the day like I do…looking for the opportunity to do a thousand little Mitzvots"
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| Some faces are just a joy to train! |
- TW
