"Kenya: A Journey of Giving and Receiving"
Jessica Harty Marzolf
Sunday, July 20th, 2003

Good morning. My name is Jessica Harty Marzolf. I grew up in Northfield and my family and I have been making the drive up to St. Joan’s for as long as I can remember. Somehow, the drive has gotten shorter as I have gotten older. I graduated from high school in 1999 and then spent the next year living in Argentina as a Rotary Exchange Student. I’m currently a senior at the University of Wisconsin Madison majoring in International Relations and Spanish. I just spent the past nine months studying and working in the field of international development in Kenya.

While in Kenya I worked as an intern for the UNICEF Kenya Country Office in the HIV/AIDS department. My field assignment was in Kwale district on the South Eastern coast of Kenya, bordering Tanzania, where I was working on a sports initiative to promote HIV/AIDS prevention among youth with a special emphasis on girls. Some of my responsibilities included community mobilization, working with key stakeholders (Non-Governmental Organizations, government counterparts, Community Based Organizations, etc), facilitating HIV/AIDS discussions with community members in two villages, etc.

As I said, I have grown up in St. Joan’s. In the past twenty-two years, St. Joan’s has become a place that has taught me about peace and justice; that we are all children of God no matter what race, religion, socio-economic class, sexual orientation or skin color. Part of what motivated me to go to Kenya was to share my gifts and talents; my messages of peace and justice. What I never realized, is that Kenya would teach me more about peace and justice than I would ever able to give them. As Ivan Illich said in his book Combining Service and Learning: A Resource Book for Community and Public Service, “the only thing you can legitimately volunteer for in Africa might be voluntary powerlessness, voluntary presence as receivers, as such, as hopefully beloved or adoped ones without any way of returning the gift. It is the awareness that even North Americans can receive the gift of hospitality without the slightest ability to pay for it; the awareness that for some gifts one cannot even say ‘thank you.’” Returning to the United States, provoked more questions than answers about the way the world works, what my place is in it and why some have so much and others so little. This morning I want to take this opportunity to share some of my reflections from Kenya with all of you. It is a way for me to complete my circle; sharing St. Joan’s message with the people of Kenya, and now trying to share some of the things that Kenyans taught me to the people of St. Joan of Arc.

Someone wise once told me that when you travel in Asia you will come back a mystic, when you travel in South America you will comeback political, and when you travel through Africa you will come back laughing. I experienced this laughter firsthand…

For nine months, I lived with daily contradictions that were so tangible they almost slapped you in the face. My friends and I resorted to laughter and humor because of the sights and sounds that surrounded us. We were afraid that if we started to cry, we wouldn’t be able to stop. Yet, Kenya is filled with another type of laughter. It is the laughter of beauty and wonder. It is a laughter that is filled with hope: hope that provides nourishment for the mind, body and soul.

For the past nine months, I lived in Kenya. I thought I would remind all of you, because often I would wake up in the morning and forget myself. In the month of December, for 20 days in a row, I woke up in a different bed every morning. I traveled up and down the Kenyan coast, I visited Lake Victoria, I stayed in some nice hotels, and had a few sleepovers with my friends. Before living in Kenya, I would have thought this to be an unstable life, but now I realize that no matter which bed I slept in, I was still sleeping in a bed and not on the streets, a slum, a cardboard box, a taxi car or under a stoop.

We laughed because we dare not cry about the poverty, desperation, hopelessness, and the dichotomy between the rich and poor. The thousands of children living on the streets who continuously came up to us screaming ‘jambo’, ‘how are you’ or more likely ‘how is you’. They were right there, in your face with their hands open, palms out, waiting for your $17.00 to solve all their problems, because Americans can solve everyone’s problems. All the while they were sniffing their bottles of glue that they brought at the gas station for 10 cents. We told them, ‘si leo, sina pesa, mimi ni mwanafunzi---not today, we don’t have any money, we are students’ when in truth, we were carrying our CD players, mobile phones and ATM cards linking us with thousands of shillings in our bags.

We laughed because we dare not cry about the parasites and worms that our bodies most likely had been gifted with, maggots in our faces, jiggers in our feet, lice in our hair. Maleria, Typhoid, eye infections, Cholera. We laughed that we might have to get our feet amputated after we could no longer fight off the flesh-eating sores, which had declared war on our bodies. We laughed that after amputation we would have to walk around on flip-flop clad hands like so many handicap Kenyans do to get around the streets of Nairobi. We laughed at my classmate Walker who woke up in the morning with a gigantic cockroach on his neck.

We laughed because we dare not cry when we heard preachers say that if you believe in Jesus a little more, your HIV status will turn to negative, or when we saw a nurse in the Kitui District Hospital put tape over her fingers to cover her open wounds, while testing someone for HIV/AIDS, or the belief that witchcraft was still one of the number one reasons HIV/AIDS was transmitted. We laughed at Cheri my classmate, because she tripped on the grave of an AIDS victim and fell in the mud.

We laughed because we dare not cry when we received love notes and marriage proposals from Kenyan men who thought we would grant them hope, and get them a Visa to the US. We didn’t even know how you’d go about getting a Visa. We chuckled with pride after bargaining to the last shilling in Swahili to buy a used t-shirt from a Mama at the market when we knew in the back of our minds that those few shillings may be the only shillings she takes home to feed her children that night. My classmates laughed at me, because I could write a map of the sites to go to the bathroom in Nairobi because my house almost always suffered from water shortages. We breathed a sigh of relief when a pit toilet was available, because then we didn’t have to worry about whether or not it would flush. I laughed when a woman from the village I was working in, told me that she was pushed in a wheelbarrow 20 miles to give birth in a hospital. We laughed at what it would be like to walk down River Road at night and then counted the number of times we had done it. We laughed when a bus in front of the bus we were riding, was shot by bandits and my classmates thought they were shooting at wild animals.

We laughed because we dare not cry since we never knew what to expect or what could happen, so hazard kept us on our toes. There might not be rain for a long time. There may not be food tomorrow, so eat a lot today. All I have might be stolen. Live for today. Tolerate, deal, cope and live for the now, for the rest is uncertain and unpredictable and unknown. We couldn’t risk it, because all it was about anymore was mere survival.

And yet….Kenya was bursting with the beauty of laughter…

We laughed out of pure joy when we saw children in the streets playing with soccer balls made out of plastic grocery bags and string, resulting in endless hours of play for these barefooted youngsters.

We laughed out of pure joy at the beauty of this country and it’s people: people who are strong and peaceful. The intricate connectedness of life and deeply rooted culture. Simplicity, family, friends. We realized that we were not living in some savage, bushy place without infrastructure, society and culture, but in a complex society. In some ways, the society faces the same problems societies in the US face. We joined the overjoyed masses with cheers of relief, hope and joy that in December 2002 Kenyans peacefully elected a new president to take the place of his predecessor, who had been in power for over twenty years.

We delighted in fresh fruit picked right from the tree growing in my host mom’s shamba: passion fruit, guavas, mangos, pineapples, bananas, exquisite treasures that were right at our fingertips, and we marveled at how the earth was able to provide so much food to feed it’s people, and that we as human beings were given the ability to dig. This food never had servings and there was always enough for everyone. There was always room for one more. Health and beauty were more closely related in Kenya than in the US, eating was appreciated and a luxury, and a full figure was looked upon as a symbol of beauty.

We laughed out of pure joy at the ease of communication in Kenya. As Spencer Cronk said in his piece “Coming to Grips with Kenya, “languages flowed smoothly and fluidly throughout society, shifting, changing, adjusting, and adapting to the media of English, Kiswahili, Kikuyu, Kikamba, Kimeru…

We laughed out of pure joy with Kenyan women. They were inspirational and I have never seen people work so hard. Dedication. Loyalty. Persistence. Commitment and incredibly good at whatever they were doing. Well weathered and tough, yet warm and welcoming. I wondered what those eyes had seen, those ears had heard, and those fingers had touched.” These women got up to the cock’s crow, slung their babies on their backs, collected firewood to cook breakfast, served their husbands tea, and walked down to their shambas to tend to the fruits and vegetables that would hopefully fill their babies stomachs until the next harvest and they did it….everyday.

Returning from Kenya to the United States filled me with so many questions and hardly any answers. Yet, something I realized is that there are some essential things we as human beings, creatures of God, all share: laughter, the need for nurturing, love, the hope to raise happy and healthy children, an education, a comfortable lifestyle, the endless search for God, people thirsting for peace and justice in the world we live in. If there is anything that I could ask of St. Joan’s parishioners, it would be to take whatever gifts and talents each one of you has, and use them to spread the true messages of St. Joans, the teachings of Christianity, and the other great and timeless religions. Love God, love all your brothers and sisters, those in your home, your community, our world---and love yourself as God loves each of us. As you travel your journey of life, be you a citizen of the United States or Kenya, know that you are called to give of your own unique talents and also receive those of others along the way. Africa has much to teach us about family, love, laugher, humility, just as we have much to teach Africa. We both are called to be the gift and to receive the gift. This journey might provoke more questions about the way the world is and your place in it than answers, yet that seems to be the only way to make this world a more peaceful and justice filled place for all of us.

Before I went to Kenya, I wanted to see the world, learn about how other people lived, step out of my comfort zone. And I did these things. I learned and experienced so much in 9 months living in a developing country in Africa. I experienced laughter, yet I can honestly say that some of this laughter comes from sources that I didn’t want to know. They say that knowledge is a burden. The knowledge that I found in Kenya was oftentimes naked and raw. It did not discriminate and showed no mercy. It was violating. Oftentimes I thought twice about seeking knowledge, because I didn’t know what I was going to find, and which part of myself I was going to have to give up to have it. Maybe more of idealism, or my youth. And yet, Kenya filled me with warmth, laughter and love---laughter that flows from an incredible source of beauty. What they say is true, when you travel in Africa, you will come back laughing. I will always remember Kenya as filled with laugher….thank you.