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Feb 25, 2013

College Students Visit Kenya, Leader Calls it 'Going Home'

Kenya UT 3
Kenya UT 2

 

Over Christmas break, Episcopalians from the University of Texas didn’t rest to prepare for another semester. Instead, they traveled to Kenya with Comfort the Children (CTC) International, a nonprofit working alongside Kenyan communities to create sustainable change.

 

Led by the Rev. Beth Magill, missioner at the UT Episcopal Student Center, the trip was billed as a pilgrimage for building relationship. Magill and the students worked with CTC on a different project each day, learning about how the organization seeks to change the lives of disadvantage people in Kenya, including children with disabilities and community members with HIV/AIDS.

 

Magill wrote the following blog entitled “Going Home” which is also published on the CTC website:

 

In anticipation of my second trip to Kenya, I was full of gratitude for the opportunity and eager to reunite with friends. While I was excited to return, one of the feelings I could not have anticipated was the relief one feels upon arriving back home – to the place where one truly belongs.

 

Home is not a dwelling place. It is not simply brick and mortar that holds together a structure, or the dry wall that gives the room shape. It is not a soft feather pillow, or the smell of a homemade casserole. Rather, home is a feeling. It is a sense of security that comes with belonging. It is the reassurance of comfort that transcends time and circumstances. It is the knowledge that you are more complete because of that place and those people.

 

Much to my own surprise, these are the gifts that greeted me as I returned to Maai Mahiu on January 1st. Waking up under the mosquito net after our first night at the Transit felt completely natural. As I stepped outside onto the patio, I was nearly knocked over by the smell of home. It as one of those sensations that is impossible to describe when I smell it every day, but that I find startlingly strong after an absence. It was the combination of smoke coming from the kitchen, chicken wandering about, and the morning breeze off the mountains. I breathed deeply, wanting the smell to coat my nostrils and seep into my lungs so that it might stick. That somewhat odd and indescribable smell evoked a feeling – a sense of belonging – that made me grateful for the gift that is home.

 

That first day, we toured the town, reexamining trees we had planted two years ago that had since died, and discovering new ones that had come to life. I was shocked to find the town as clean as it was. Dirt was now visible on streets that had once been piled high with trash. There was still much to be done, but I was astounded with the progress. I was grateful to be familiar enough with the nooks and crannies of the tiny town to feel as though I could have navigated it on my own. This sense of familiarity, of a path that I had walked before, was yet another gift of returning home.

 

And then there were the children. The beautiful, compassionate, bundles of love greeted us without caution or pretense. Echoes of, “How-r-uu! How-r-uu!” followed everywhere we went. They rushed to hold our hands, climb on our backs, and run the odd texture of our hair through their hands. George, Joyce, and Mike from the Shooting Stars classroom bowled me over with smiles and embraces. Each of these children loved as one ought to be loved upon returning home – joyfully, fully, and without condition. I had not earned it, I did not deserve it, and yet I received it gratefully, catching a glimpse of something truly divine.

 

A few days before we left for Kenya, I received the book “Tattoos on the Heart” as a Christmas gift from a lifelong friend. As I lay down to read in my bed at the Transit that first night, I was surprised to find these words on the opening pages, “In Africa they say, ‘A person becomes a person through other people’.” Of course these words echo the phrase that has come to be so familiar through CTC, “Ubuntu - meaning I am because we are.” Thousands of miles from the address I list as “home,” in an unexpected gift from a friend, in the embrace of a people and a town, I was reminded of the call to truly become who God has created me to be.  With the gift of belonging comes the opportunity for self-discovery and realization.

 

Home is not a place where you receive love because you have earned it. It is not a place where the people are concerned with what you have done, or have failed to do. Home is the only place where you don’t have to negotiate your place at the table, or earn your authority with others. It is the only place where you are loved simply because you can be. The gift of home is that these people and that place allow us the freedom to discover who we are and who we want to be.

 

The time our team was able to spend with the CTC staff was the fruit of this most recent trip home. It was a reminder of what relationships can and should be like - built on a mutual exchange of the self. We listened without pretense or tools of measurement that we often carry in our back pocket in our daily lives. There was no need to assess what could be gained from the other person. Rather, we took time to genuinely glimpse into the soul of another with clarity and love. It was a rare opportunity to see one another more like how God might see each of us. This kind of seeing one another, of being present with one another is so full that it reduced me to a messy, blabbering pile of tears when it was time to depart. But that is the gift of home – a place where you can find love unlike that you find anywhere else. I wept because I didn’t want to say goodbye to my friends. I wept because I know that finding relationships that full is difficult and rare. I wept because you can’t stay home forever. 

 

If we are paying attention, each of the gifts that we receive at home prepare us for our inevitable departure. My time at home in Maai Mahiu has filled me with a renewed sense of gratitude for the love I have received that I don’t deserve. It has given me clarity about the people in my life who have help me to become who I am, and those who will help shape me into who I hope to become. My time home with each of those souls has given me the courage to pay more attention to who God has created each of us to be. Gerard Manley Hopkins described the task of encountering Christ in others in these terms, “For I greet Him the days I meet him, and bless him when I understand.” I am grateful for time at home that provided ten full days of understanding.