9-a-day- Becoming Like Jesus

It seems a little strange to be writing this. This blog not only represents the last one of our Kenya trip but the last of our travels to film Langham Partnership’s programmes.

Let me start, however, with our trip to visit the water projects in the north of Kenya. Yesterday you got the more amusing side of the tour and little of the details.

We left Nairobi early Sunday afternoon and arrived at Maralal (see a map of Kenya) at 11.30pm on Monday evening. We weren’t on the road all that time, but it did represent a lot of driving for our Langham Scholar, Michael. On Tuesday morning we went out on to the savannah and started back at 4pm, arriving in Nairobi today (Wednesday) at 3pm. A great deal of traveling for six hours shooting! We did, however, get some excellent clips which may appear in due course on this website and in our videos to be released in January 2013. We were also able to see at first hand the difference pumped water has made to villages in the area.

Typically, villages, or at least those we visited, are around 30-50 people, though larger ones of around 100 people do exist we were told. In the past the women have had to walk several kilometres to collect water. For these villages it is now no further than half a mile away and for some just a few hundred yards. Water is taken from boreholes and pumped to tanks where the people live. The people own the project and as the charity is run by Michael, a Samburu Maasai himself, there seems to be an easy understanding of what is needed and how the project can develop. One of the more interesting aspects of the project was to see how the water is being used in conjunction with a greenhouse to provide tomatoes for the village and presumably for sale as well. Through the project Michael has seen villages turning to Christ and churches being planted alongside the crops of peas and beans, corn and fruit.

In Kenya we have seen both sides of the Langham Scholar coin. We have interviewed a host of lecturers and college administrators who are involved in training the next generation of pastors, evangelists and theology teachers, which is the main purpose of the scholarships. But we have also seen a few of them moving into different spheres of Christian service, aiding others in difficult circumstances and providing leadership to churches and professional organizations, as another way of strengthening the church and providing outreach opportunities. It would be interesting to know if Michael’s project is the most ‘far flung’ from the libraries and lecture rooms where he secured his PhD (on the needs of the Samburu Maasai) with Langham’s help.

Which brings me back to the far flung aspect of our project. It has been a privilege to meet and interview so many people involved in one way or another with the Langham programmes. I will arrive home with a much greater appreciation of all that is being achieved through the programmes and trust that we can bring together nine videos (three per programme) to allow you to experience a little of that. It perhaps goes without saying that the people we have met are very grateful to Langham and supporters for their help but it has also been clear that this is a Partnership and the work of Langham in the Majority World would be nothing without the energies, expertise and vision of those who practise what Langham preaches…

Finally, our thanks to you for following this blog. We have appreciated your continuing interest and your prayers.

God bless

Ronald Clements (www.ronaldclements.com) and Mezza Mehrabanpour (www.ignitecreative.co.uk)

P.S. For those who are still wondering: no, Mezza did not have a go on the bouncy castle. He had his chance but declined the opportunity. Which is probably just as well.

For those of you who enjoy wildlife programmes and particularly those great shots of Africa’s savanna, I have some bad news. It does seem that as soon as David Attenborough and/or his equivalent turn up creatures great and small emerge in their abundance and fill our TV screens with superb footage. Assuming Mr Attenborough (and/or…) does not have Dr Dolittle like qualities, I can only assume that someone has spent a awfully long time waiting for these clips to fill their camera.

On Monday we reached the end of the (tarmac) road and plunged onwards along dirt tracks that took us into the territory of wildlife programmes. We happened, for reasons I won’t explain, to do this just as the sun was setting. Four and a half hours later we had seen half a dozen rabbits, three very small deer, a lot of cattle and… the dusky shapes of two elephants picked out by our dim headlights. The elephants were definitely a bonus and a long way into the four and a half hours of off-road driving. But it was night and what do you expect?

On Tuesday we set out at ten (am) and finally reached the tarmac road some nine hours later, having taken a tour of the water projects run by a Langham Scholar that we had come to see. So, plenty of daylight and we did do a little better with several zebra, a few domestic camels, some antelope, a water buffalo, a lot of sheep, goats and cattle but not much else until we saw a solitary elephant in the distance and a solitary male ostrich in the distance. Oh, and a skunk like thing that wasn’t a skunk as Africa doesn’t have them apparently. Personally, I had high hopes of seeing a giraffe in the wild, given the length of their necks, but it was not to be.

I have to admit that missing out on the safari experience was not as disappointing as I have perhaps indicated and we were able to get some excellent footage of the projects and the Samburu Masaai that use them. Actually the real highlight was to stand under the untainted night sky and see it frosted with stars. The familiar shapes of Orion and the Plough, which dominate the British skies, were lost in a myriad of stars. And to see the Milky Way – so large that I could not take it all in – stretching up from the horizon was (forgive the cliche) breath-taking. Now that was something I would travel a long distance to see.

Tomorrow (Sunday) we are heading north to visit the Samburu area and a water project. We will be away till Wednesday evening and we are not taking our computer with us, so there will be a pause in these blogs. We’d appreciate your prayer for our journey, safety on the roads and during our visits to see the people and the work that is being done there. Thanks.

One of the more avid readers of this blog (my wife) has asked for more on what happened when we went into Kibera. If you missed the first episode then scroll down a few days.

On Nairobi’s Ngong Road you turn left at the Chinese embassy and left again at the sign marked ‘Kibera’. On one side of the street there is an ‘unending’ chain of metaled booths advertising their wares. On the other are piles of smoldering rubbish tended over by men and women with sticks, poking and pushing at the garbage. Our driver turned down into the slum and deposited us in a clearing and then we watched him drive away. Carefully we picked our way over rubbish-strewn dirt paths, crossed the Nairobi railway line and descended down to a dirty stream. My rucksack held all Mezza’s recording equipment and camera. Our Anglican curate carried the tripod, the only visible sign we were carrying anything valuable. After fifteen/twenty minutes we arrived at the ‘college’ where our escort and others run learning programmes for children and teenagers and for adults wanting to re-engage with their education.

The college is no different than the multitude of houses either side of it. Corrugated iron walls and roofs. The student’s rooms, kitchen, computer room and bathroom are crudely built sheds. The classroom is dimly lit with a few tables and chairs. We interviewed the curate standing in an open narrow corridor beneath damp washing, while a woman sloshed the next wash around in a tub behind the camera. Once the interview was finished we came to the tricky part of our journey. Would we be able to take pictures as we returned to our car? At the college gates we were mobbed by children only too eager to be filmed, so that was easy! After that we walked slowly back, Mezza taking general shots of the streets, tin roofs and a lot of pictures of the curate. We were fortunate that only one person passed comment. Someone we had met had had difficulties in taking photographs the previous day.

Eventually we arrived back at the car and drove back out onto Ngong Road. It had been a moving experience and we were left with a lot of admiration for those who work there day in, day out. I must admit to a sense of relief that the trip had gone so well. I put my watch back on, sorted out the bits and pieces I normally carry with me, and put my biro back in my shirt pocket.

Today I attended a lecture on the Greek used in John chapter 1, a Hebrew class, a seminar on social justice, and a review of a thesis regarding Ezekiel consuming a scroll (chapter 3). The last of these was the one that most interested to me. My knowledge of Greek is limited to its letters being used as mathematical symbols and the word ‘kai’. Hebrew is a complete mystery and I can only admire those who confidently place dots in and under letters and know why they are doing this. To be honest the social justice class seemed to be stating the obvious. But Ezekiel eating papyrus – now that was something to get your teeth into, so to speak.

Unfortunately I stayed with Ezekiel no longer than with any of the other classes. Mezza and I slipped in and out of lecture rooms, filming the teacher, filming the students, filming books on desks, filming people and their laptops. Five or ten minutes and we were on our way again with another set of ‘cut-aways’ in the camera. (These are those shots you will see while a person carries on speaking and you watch them doing something else with their time.) It is usually not the most interesting part of the project – certainly not for me, since I am not the one with the camera. However, I must admit regretting that we had to leave Ezekiel behind. Apparently, the thesis equated the prophet’s unusual diet with the movement from an oral tradition to writing down prophecy. But that was as far as I got. No doubt what remained of the lecture gave the students something to chew on… (the jokes will get no better).

The review was being given by George, a PhD student at the Africa International University and a current Langham Scholar. Most of the people we have interviewed studied a few years ago and are now well established in leadership roles, either in colleges or heading up organizations that are involved in mission and social action. It is good to meet someone, like George, who is currently benefiting from the Scholars programme. He certainly has been most helpful to us and, if the little I heard of his lecture is anything to go by, a worthy candidate for Langham’s help. We will be interviewing him at his home on Friday. Maybe I will slip in a question on Ezekiel.

Yesterday Mezza and I found ourselves in a slum. Not just any old slum but one within Nairobi city, reputed to be the largest in Africa. Kibera sprawls across a huge swathe of the city and provides tin-shack housing for 700,000 to a million people.

If this sounds frightful, it is. It looks no different than any other slum you may have seen, but it is its sheer size that is difficult to take in. Acre after acre of battered tin roofs, family after family squeezed into small spaces. As you will imagine, it is not a safe place. We needed an escort and not just because we are foreigners. Kenyans require a police escort if they want to venture into areas deep within its precincts or into the ‘villages’ of people of a different ethnic background. We asked a local Roman Catholic priest working there how he felt about the threat from gangs. ‘When it is your time, it is your time,’ he said. He was glad to be working there, but here was nothing he could do about the violence other than take basic precautions. We took what basic precautions we could, removing anything likely to be stolen (even the biro in my shirt pocket – my family will tell you how serious that is) and followed our escort, a Kenyan Anglican curate, down the dirt tracks into the slum.

Both Mezza and I returned with an appreciation of the great work that this curate and many others are doing in Kibera. It takes courage to live and work in such an environment. Our escort had been there nine years. His work is overseen by one of the Langham Scholars, whom we had interviewed earlier in the day. The scholar, now principal of a college set within another deprived area of the city, told us of the need for academic study and education to find practical expression in Christian mission which addresses the needs of society. We were left humbled by the very real evidence of this at Kibera.

As I was saying…

The Nairobians, in general, are not happy about being photographed – a fact that is at odds with our brief here. One of our contacts told us that if we offered to pay we would have a queue. But we aren’t offering to pay. So we ask, a lot refuse, a few agree and we move on.

There may be two underlying issues here. The first is suspicion of our motives. Why do you want to photograph me? Not an unreasonable question and one most of us would ask. Are you a journalist? What are you going to do with my picture? Are you going to put it up on the internet? So we ask, a lot refuse, a few agree and we move on. But this isn’t always a comfortable place to be. We have already upset more than one person.

The second issue is equally valid. Why do you only photograph ‘poor’ Kenya? (Which we have done, though by no means exclusively.) Another good question and one, I believe, Christian organizations need to get to grips with. How frequently do we see ‘poor’ Africa portrayed in our publicity? And as a result what are our perceptions of this part of the world? The campus where I am writing this is not poor – far from it. The church we visited yesterday morning was not a shack in the middle of a village with hard wooden benches – far from it. ‘We know there are poor areas in Kenya. We don’t deny it,’ said one of our contacts at the university, ‘But it is not the whole story. Show both sides of Kenya. Not just one side.’ And therein lies the challenge for us. Sometimes it is good not to feel comfortable.