Final Stages

It has been almost a month since my last blog entry. My excuse is that I have been very busy finishing up work and that for the last two weeks (at least) we have not had internet at the house. Also, since I was on leave and was not at the office, I was completely without internet access.

Since the last blog entry, so much has happened. From June 10th I have been on leave because my friend Priscilla from Vancouver was visiting me. Just this evening we took her to the airport. It has been a special blessing to have someone walking alongside me as I began to take leave from Kenya, Nairobi Chapel and especially the friends I have made here. She also got a taste of Kenyan hospitality and how a one-hour meeting can easily turn into a whole afternoon as we visited some of my friends to say good-bye (she says I have become more patient here... there were indeed a number of times we just had to sit and wait for someone or something, and I guess I have gotten used to it - but don't expect this to necessarily translate to another context!).

Last week, we went on safari together to the Maasai Mara and got to see the beauty of Kenya after experiencing the dust, crowds and traffic of Nairobi.

The last few days have been times of saying good-bye as we had a farewell meal with the staff of Nairobi Chapel (those who could make it - mostly interns), with my discipleship class and with some closer friends. I have been blessed with many gifts and memories to take home. The communal emphasis of this culture becomes very apparent when almost everyone tells me to take greetings to family, friends and people back home - even though they do not know anyone they are sending greetings to. Herewith I am passing the greetings to you, receive the greetings from all the many people here.

In two days it will be my turn to walk through the security check at the airport and check in for my flight. Some of the things I will miss about Kenya: the value that people have here and the time they will take for you, people-watching at a matatu stage, the challenge and experience of understanding what people are saying in Swahili, real African worship and dancing at church, being inspired by the deep faith of people here in God, the aliveness of Africa, having my meals cooked for me and my shoes cleaned ;-) and of course, my friends here.
Favourite disgusting experience: cleaning my nose in the evening and seeing the tissue turn black from all the dirt and dust in my nose! ;-)
What I am looking forward to at home: Being HOME, seeing my friends and family, having dependable internet access and power, having a washing machine, good roads, riding my bike, being able to be out in the evening after dark, not worrying about anything being stolen or picked from your pocket.

All in all it has been a good time here, sometimes challenging, sometimes frustrating, but a time in which I have learned a lot and have been given a bigger and wider perspective of life and faith.

Thanks to Pris I have lots of photos to post on my blog (links will follow on the right).

Spinal Injury Hospital

On Saturday we visited the Nairobi Spinal Injury Hospital. This was our third visit. We have been going as a group of interns from our department, but we are trying to get other people from the congregation involved.

The experience is really worth it. The first time we went there I was not looking forward to it. It felt like just another task that we had been given (under the assumption that we are not busy enough?). Secondly, we were not prepared or organised that day. When we got there, we talked to the nurses and some of the patients sitting outside. After that, the four of us went inside together, visited each room, introduced ourselves, talked with the patients for a while and then prayed for them. We had come to minister to the patients in some way, though we were not sure what that would look like, and we felt rather helpless and unprepared. We were surprised, therefore, when we realised that some of the patients were actually ministering to us and encouraging us!

Most of the patients stay there for many months or even years, so they get bored and lonely when their friends and families stop visiting. They are very eager and interested in anything new, so it has been easy to connect with them. We were surprised at our second visit how much it felt like seeing old friends. Some of them are able to be in a wheelchair, so we have been doing a time of fellowship outside for those, reading a passage from the Bible and discussing it with them. Then we go inside to visit those who cannot leave their beds.

This last Saturday we also got a team of people to come and do their hair and nails (for the ladies) and give them a shave (for the men). I was especially encouraged this time by a small thing that happened with a guy who had hardly spoken to us the other two times. This time he seemed eager to talk and asked us to bring him a Swahili Bible! Those little connections and the trust we are building by going there regularly make it worth it.

And the moral of the story is... no, seriously, here is another thing that I learned from my friends at Spinal Injury: pain is not necessarily bad. The patients at the hospital are actually happy to experience pain because it means something is happening to their nerves. Pain means that there is healing. Now that is deep!

What I do all day...

I am two weeks into the second half of my stay here, and it suddenly seems like time is going to fly. Things have changed at work, partially because Msafara is over and everyone is doing their "normal" job again. We also had an evaluation two weeks ago in which we were given new job descriptions and tasks. When the guys from the worship department came back from Msafara, I was suddenly out of work, as they took over service planning and bulletin work (which I had been involved in) and I had finished baptism class and baptism. With everything being different, I thought I could give you an overview of what I do all day or all week - as that is usually hard to see anyway in ministry.

Just to remind you, I am in the Pastoral Care department which involves pastoral care (weddings, funerals, births, illnesses, visitation etc.), adult education, small groups, visitors, and helping the Worship department with the worship service on Sundays. Here are my tasks:

• organise and co-facilitate discipleship classes
• put together a baptism class manual with the material I developed and with the information I gathered
• organise visitation one week a month ("Amtswoche")
• organise visits for our pastoral care team to the spinal injury clinic, lead our team
• take care of administration for the Pre-Marital Counselling Class, sit in on the class
• develop two study guides for small groups on two sermon series ("burn-out" and "the names of God")
• research on how volunteers at Nairobi Chapel are recruited, trained and appreciated; speak to staff team about possible problems or areas that need strengthening
• interview pastors in other departments about their work to get an overview of what the church does and how it does it

If you are thinking that this is a lot to get done in two more months, then yes, I agree. Especially because I sit in meeting half of the week! The senior pastor and the associate pastors have become very intentional about equipping me as much as possible in these last months, so I now sit in on meetings with the pastoral team. Right now they are discussing their vision and the strategies for getting there, so it is a very interesting discussion to be a part of. However, it also means an additional all-day meeting:
Tuesday: departmental meeting in the morning, service planning in the afternoon
Wednesday: "library day" (which means you can actually get work or research done with out being interrupted)
Thursday: pastoral team meeting
Friday: class in the morning, admin or visitation in the afternoon
Saturday: admin, visitation or service preparation as necessary
Sunday: discipleship class, service, pre-marital counselling class (Sunday is my longest day!)
Monday: off-day!

Intern Commissioning

Today is my day off, which I spent going for a swim and hanging out with Njeri (fellow intern and service manager). This is also when I get to catch up on blog-writing, because I still have not written about the historical event of intern commissioning on March 17th!
Last Sunday but one (as Kenyans say), the interns were officially introduced and commissioned (“eingesetzt”) in church. There are 23 interns, 18 Kenyans, one Indian-Ethiopian, one Armenian, two Germans and one Swiss (two of the interns were missing on Sunday). Dressed in black pants or skirts and with a Kanga (Kenyan piece of fabric used as clothing by coastal tribes) around our shoulders, we walked up on stage – barefoot! The bare feet were in order that we could receive African sandals as a symbol of those who go out to bring good news (“How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, ‘Your God reigns!’” Isaiah 52:7). In that sense we are now sent and enabled to do our work for the church and for God.
I was happy to receive new sandals (the ones I bought in 2005 broke shortly after I got here), but I have only worn them twice for a very short time. They are still very hard and stiff, not like my comfortable old ones, and after the first ten minutes of wearing them I already had a blister. I have worn them once since the first day, trying to break them in slowly (“einlaufen”). I guess it is the same with the internship and the work I am doing here. I am still in the process of being broken in, getting used to the culture, the expectations and the kind of work I am doing.
You can take a look at the pictures from the commissioning as soon as I put the link up on the right. I have also gotten some pictures from the German couple of our relief work in January which you might want to take a look at.


Intern Work
The last week I have been very busy, often working until six in the evenings and continuing at home. I now have specific jobs: being in the service planning team, being service manager (I am still a bit fuzzy on what exactly this entails), putting together the bulletin (“Mitteilungsblatt”) and teaching baptism class. I started baptism class last Sunday and will be doing that every Sunday until Easter. There are only five people in the class (in a church of 1200 people), but I have enjoyed preparing the material and teaching last Sunday. I am getting a slow start on the bulletin because there were special bulletins last Sunday and the coming Sunday, so I only had to do an insert with the announcements. In the future, putting together the bulletin will also mean ghost-writing the main article for the pastors!
This week, some of us are able to go to a seminar on counseling for rape victims. I am looking forward to it, even though it will mean catching up on all the work on Thursday and getting up very early tomorrow morning (latest by 5:30am) to get through the traffic and across town by 8am.

Survival Tactics for Interns

I am back. After having been very quiet the last two weeks, I am trying to catch up with blogging. Part of the reason why I have not written any blog entries is because I have been very busy. I have now gotten the responsibility together with Njeri, another intern, of becoming “service managers”. This means that we are in charge of everything happening in the Sunday service. We oversee everything from cleanliness to the décor to lighting/sound to making sure the pastors have everything they need for the service. On Sunday, I got the first taste of what this might look like and set up the following guidelines for myself (to be taken a grain of salt (= nicht ganz ernst nehmen)):

• Never ask about anything that is not your responsibility – it might become yours.

• Do not show too much interest or empathy for someone with an administrative or organisational problem – you might be asked to be part of the solution (or even worse, it might become your problem).

• When having made the mistake of taking on extra responsibility, be sure to delegate the job to someone else.

• When being asked to solve someone else’s problem (e.g. “Please go look for XY and tell her to come to here”), have a good reason at hand why you are not available right now. – Look busy at all times!

• When faced with a problem, the best solution is not necessarily to ask your supervisor. Ask someone who you know will give you a clear answer, an immediate solution or realistic options. Ask someone you know will get things done!

• Do not give the impression of being reliable or trustworthy or you will be given more work than you already have. Other option: Make sure to delegate your work to others, but make sure they are trustworthy, otherwise it will all come back to you!

Not Business as Usual

A week ago I thought that the internship was starting to become clearer and more organized, but on Friday, everything changed.

The first few weeks in January, everyone was focused on the political situation and the violence that had taken place. Churches were trying to help those who had suffered from violence and were speaking out publicly for peace. As things quietened down, people tried to return to their normal lives, expecting the situation to be resolved soon. Now it has been more than a month, and the situation has not really gotten better, even though here in Nairobi one can live one's life almost as if nothing had happened. While the mediation talks are going on, there is still violence and the number of internally displaced persons (IDP) is increasing. I have heard stories where the message was passed around a town or neighbourhood, warning the members of a certain tribe to get out before the end of the next day unless they wanted to be killed. The people concerned do not wait to find out whether the threat is true but leave their homes behind and seek refuge in a police station or church. This ethnically motivated violence has continued and will not be stopped through the resolution of the political situation. On the other hand I have heard reports of an area close to Nairobi where the pastors in the area reacted to the threats of ethnic cleansing by going out and speaking to people one-on-one and in groups, convincing them that this was not the right path to pursue. In that way, violence in that neighbourhood could be avoided.

Last week, the pastors of my church, Nairobi Chapel, decided that they could not continue business as usual. It is not business as usual for those people living in camps fearing that their attackers will come to attack their camp, neither should it be business as usual for us. The situation is not resolved yet and we believe the church should be part of the process towards peace and reconciliation. Therefore the church has decided to release a part of the pastors and staff to work in the following areas: opening the church ground up to displaced people (especially since the Jamhuri camp close to Nairobi Chapel is closing down and sending people back home - not all of them can return home), being a media presence to tell stories of hope instead of violence and destruction, setting up a "caravan of hope" (500 pastors who will visit the affected areas), and networking with community leaders in Kibera and Dagoretti (the area around the church) to convince them to use their influence among the populuation for peace.

It is exciting to see the church making this kind of a decision, but it also means that a part of our internship program is put on hold for now. A third of the staff will keep the Sunday services running while the others are busy on new projects. As I am on the pastoral care team, we are still more or less working on the same things, but we have also taken on service planning in addition to our regular tasks. The other tasks that I have been given is to set up a canteen (a cafeteria) after church on Sundays to raise money for the interns and to come up with a four-week baptismal class which will be starting in two weeks!

The canteen was successfully started last Sunday, and we made a good profit, though we have to get more efficient on setting up and cleaning up. We hope to sell even more as people get used to the idea of having a snack (samosas, donuts or hamburgers) or a soda after the service.

I do hope, however, that we will be able to continue our readings and discussions which I found very interesting and stimulating. We have been reading two books on leadership and church growth/church management ("Courageous Leadership" by Bill Hybels and "The 7 Practices of Effective Ministry" by A. Stanley, L. Jones and R. Joiner).

A Month Since the Elections

This will just be a quick post as I want to get to bed soon.

The political situation is at the same time getting better and worse. On the positive side, the government and the opposition have officially started the talks today with Kofi Annan. They have chosen their representatives and set the rules and goals for the negotiations. So far, so good. On the other hand, one of the ODM (opposition party) MP's was murdered last night in Nairobi. That has caused a lot of uproar and unrest again. You may have also been hearing that the situation in the Rift Valley has gotten worse as the people driven from their homes have started fighting back. The violence there has gotten out of hand - it is no longer political, but ethnically motivated.

Internship news: This week is still focused on team building and training (this is kind of like a course week). We have been given reading to do on the topic of leadership and ministry and will be discussing it this week.

Despite the violence and the unrest, I have been kept safe and have not seen any mobs or any unrest when out and about (Kibera and the district of the MP who was killed are not far away from here). This is also one time when being a mzungu (engl: "moozoongoo", dt: muzungu - white person/caucasian) is an advantage, even though at other times it means being seen as a ticket out of Kenya and paying mzungu prices.

Tumaini - Hope

Kenya is back in the headlines! (If not, then I am disappointed.) And this time for good reasons. Kofi Annan arrived on Tuesday evening and spent yesterday and today talking to the two parties. After his talks with Raila Odinga and ODM yesterday, they cancelled the rally that had been planned for today. This afternoon, Odinga and Kibaki actually met face to face for the first time since the elections and talked. We do not know what the results were (the talks will continue tomorrow), but they appeared before the press and spoke to the people, affirming their will to have dialogue and urging the people to keep peace. Kofi Annan said that he was encouraged, so we hope and pray that the good progress continues tomorrow.

As for my internship, things have started to get going, though still slowly. On Tuesday, we had a staff meeting to be introduced to the rest of the staff. Yesterday and today we had meetings about the concept of discipleship, for our department and for Sunday service planning. Tomorrow the meetings continue with our department.

My department is the pastoral care department. Pastor Janet is in charge of this, and it includes pastoral care, adult ministry (small groups and Sunday services) and internship program. Pastor Cathleen is also a part of the team, and then there are six of us interns - four Kenyans, one Indian-Ethiopean and myself - three women and three men. This week and next week we will spend a lot of team in meetings of our department, getting to know one another and setting our department goals for this year. As the speed of work picks up, you will be seeing less and shorter entries in my blog, so be assured that silence on this blog is nothing to be worried about.

Intern Retreat

The last few days I was on a retreat with all the interns. We went to a place called Diguna about 20km outside of Nairobi - right by or even in the Nairobi National Park. The surroundings were beautiful and we got to see two zebras passing in the distance while we were eating dinner. A lioness had been seen the week before on the compound, but they put up an electric fence towards the park to keep the lioness out before we came.

We had a great time bonding as a team of interns despite the fact that we spent the second day in silence - we had all the more fun in the evening when we were talking again! From Tuesday on we will be working in different departments, but it is good to know that there are other interns to encourage one another when we start getting stressed.

Coming back to the city was rather depressing. It had been so peaceful that it was hard to imagine what was going on during our absence. I had been hoping for less violence in the rallies that had been announced and was sad to hear that their had been lots of violence and destruction in the Rift Valley and also in Nairobi, especially in Kibera (people stopped a train going through Kibera, pulled it off the tracks and removed 10km of train tracks! Check out the movie "The Constant Gardner" to see the Kibera slums and the train tracks).

Today, Raila Odinga actually spoke out against the violence that was happening in the name of ODM. It seems that what they started (by paying unemployed youths to riot) has gotten out of hand. He is now in a difficult position because his supporters will not accept anything else but the presidency for him - or else he need not show his face in Kisumu (unless he wants to endanger his life). The mediation talks with Kofi Annan are set for Tuesday, but ODM is still setting conditions and does not want to speak to the people Kibaki has delegated. The situation is depressing right now - maybe that is just because I am tired. Please pray for the negotiations on Tuesday.

First Day

As I am writing this, the parliament is voting on the house speaker - a very tense moment because the speaker has the power to determine the agenda and to make the motion to impeach (jmdn. seines Amtes entheben) the president. We have been watching the live coverage of the voting process - don't worry, I am not missing much. It is actually quite a tedious (langwierig) process and has been going on now for almost three hours. First there were discussions on how the vote should be conducted. Now they are in the second round of voting, and since every one of the 207 members of parliament votes separately, it will take a while for them to get through. No final result can be expected until the third round when the vote is decided by a simple majority (first and second round is two thirds majority). That is when it will get really suspenseful.

We are still hoping that the rallys set for tomorrow and the following days by ODM will be cancelled or postponed, but that probably depends on the outcome of this vote. In general, people here a hoping that the conflict and the violence are (as someone put it) "a dying fire," and that is how many people will treat it, trying to go to work and school if possible.

Anyway, my title refers to my first official day as an intern, so I better get on topic here. After three days last week of working with a different style of organisation or management than I am used to as a Swiss, I am happy to say that Nairobi Chapel seems very well organised and strict in what they expect of interns and pastoral trainees. There is actually a 50 shilling fee (USD: 70-80 cents; CHF: 90 Rp.) for coming late!

Today was orienation (Einführung) and I learned that we are expected to work a five to six day week, with classes twice a week and several reports to hand in at the end of the month (a book review amongst others!). I am looking forward to being challenged in many ways and am actually also looking forward to getting back into study mode as well, even though that will only be part of the work. I will be working in the adult ministry department which includes Sunday services and small groups (and maybe more). We will also be doing visitation in hospitals and at people's homes. This week we will be on a retreat for the interns and pastoral trainees from Thursday to Saturday to be able to focus and prepare for our ministry engagement. I am excited about what is awaiting me and looking forward to learning, growing and being stretched.

The second round has just been completed, and as to be expected, they will now go on to another round with only two candidates.