"If I cannot prolong your dance, I will proclaim it. I will proclaim your dance to God and to the world."
- Jeremy Funk
The Mathare Valley is Kenya's largest informal settlement, better known as a slum. It is "informal" because many of the estimated one-half million people who live there do so illegally, squatting on land that is technically not theirs. Mathare is an old rock quarry that flourished in Kenya's colonial and early post-colonial days. Now it is a wasteland of tin shacks snaking along the contour of the Mathare River, a mile or so in length and about a quarter- to a half-mile wide in most places.
Today I will visit Mathare for the first time. My guide and companion is Peter, a thirteen-year-old boy from the community center where I intern this year as a social worker. Peter and I have just dashed across Juja Road, the busy street separating my home in Eastliegh and Peter's in Mathare. Nothing I have seen in Eastleigh thus far, no matter how impoverished the people there, no matter how dilapidated the area's streets and buildings, could have prepared me for our trek into Mathare.
Peter hobbles in front of me as he leads me through the narrow corridors and muddy pathways toward his home deep in Mathare. He hobbles because of the wound on his leg, just below his knee. The wound, along with a similar one on his forearm, came three years ago when he fell while playing here in the slum. Left untreated for these past three years, it has festered and rotted its way to the bone in both his arm and his leg. But it is with a joyful limp that Peter takes me to his home, almost skipping at times, darting around corners of buildings, ducking below clotheslines and between shacks into unseen corridors. It is all I can do to keep up with him and his excitement.
The paths we walk are now muddy from yesterday's rain shower and are a slippery shade of grayish brown. I notice that along the sides of our pathways flow open drainage canals filled with a similar colored liquid that in places spills over from clogs in the drains. I walk gingerly through this slick mixture of once-blood-red clay and the opaque sewage. Although my feet are sealed up in my Vibram-soled hiking shoes, I tiptoe and hop from rock to rock. Peter, who is limping confidently ahead of me, looks back now and then with a grin as if to reassure me that we are nearly to his home. He is wearing flip-flops, the shoes that he wears almost every day.
Peter's house stands at the end of a row of houses like all of the houses in Mathare, a one-room hut of tin sheeting with spindly tree branches for a frame. His mother welcomes me into her home with a huge smile, saying "Karibu," and "Wa na mahali tafadhali," gesturing toward a stool near the corner of the room. So I sit as she and Peter hurry out the door. I am left to my senses. Immediately I notice the smallness of this house - one room for Peter's entire family, which is composed of Peter, Peter's mother, and his three younger brothers, two of whom sit perched on the side of the bed with their feet dangling and their eyes fixed on my every move. Peter's other brother is somewhere nearby with Peter's mother. He is strapped into a kanga on her back like so many other infants in Kenya, his head dangling to the side, looking over his mother's shoulder, taking in the world and all of its newness from inside his little hammock. The floors are dirt and why that surprises me I am not sure. The room is filled with the heavy stench of wet diapers and sleep. This room has no windows, making it oppressively dark except for the beams of bright sunlight that shoot across the room through tiny holes in the tin sheeting. I realize then that Peter's house is not impervious to the elements. I wonder to myself how much of the torrential rainfall we have been having drips through these holes and how much of the runoff trickles and streams across the floor. My eyes meet those of Peter's brothers and we sit, looking deeply into each other's worlds, lost in their peculiarities. Our profound gaze erupts into giggling that fills the room.
The laughter evaporates as Peter and his mother return in a flurry, whipping up tea and heating up mandazis (African fried bread) on the jiko. I watch carefully for the tea water to boil. It doesn't, but merely steams as the tea leaves, milk, and sugar are added to make Kenyan tea, otherwise known as chai. I am given a cup of chai and a warm mandazi, both gestures of hospitality that I cannot understand from a woman who is unemployed, has four young boys, and lives on an average of a dollar a day. My mind repeatedly screams "NO!" to the tea, wondering what kind of volatile amoeba or, worse yet, life-threatening bacteria I'm about to introduce to my body. However, my heart sips the tea with an overwhelming "YES!" and I go back for a second and a third cup.
Peter's mother and I have a wonderful conversation over that pot of tea and plateful of mandazis. She tells me about their life and how they came to live in Mathare. She tells me about her hope and her faith in God. The inescapable question I have for her, however, is, What happened to Peter's leg? A few years earlier, she says, Peter's father left their family for Tanzania. While in Tanzania, Peter's father was killed in an accident. It was soon after his father's death that Peter fell and was injured quite badly. Peter's mother describes her feeling of being cursed by God because of this series of events and how helpless she feels to do anything for Peter's leg. Hers is not an uncommon belief here in Kenya, where pastors and preachers lift up a God who rewards and punishes based on what you do. Throughout our conversation a knot emerges in her faith that I am entirely unsure how to loosen up or untie. It is faith that is both precarious and precious in the midst of all of these difficult circumstances.
Henri Nouwen writes that the caring person is the one "who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not-knowing, not-curing, not-healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness."1 While I'm not sure how to respond to this knot in Peter's mother's faith, I do know that I can be silent with her, that I can wrestle with these complexities, and that I can pray with her. We silently hold each other's gaze in what is at first an awkward stillness but what soon becomes comfortable healing. We pray in a mixture of Kiswahili and English. We embrace, then again hold each other's gaze which is now full of deep gladness. 
I tell her that the community center I work for is prepared to pay for Peter's surgery and medical care if she is willing to take a chance. She thoughtfully smiles and agrees to let us take Peter to the hospital, and I hear beneath her smile and her soft words Jesus' words, "Daughter, your faith has made you well." I am suddenly aware that it has been more than two hours since I arrived, and the shadows in Mathare are growing in the waning afternoon sunlight. So I thank Peter and his mother, I hug the two sticky little boys still sitting on the edge of the bed, and I follow Peter back through Mathare's tin maze.
Along the way, Peter takes me across the Mathare River, flowing thick with garbage through the center of this village. Even though it is reported to be Africa's most polluted river, women wash their clothing and dishes on its banks and children play gleefully in its eddies and pools. Possibly most appalling as I gaze at this scene are the row of outhouses along the shore. These latrines, now full of waste because of mismanagement, overuse, and neglect, have been converted into alcohol distilleries, and therefore, spraying from each of them through a pipe emerging from their backsides are the byproducts of the distilling process. Sunk into their cool sewage are fifty-gallon drums which contain a mixture of contaminated water, laundry detergents, and most appallingly, mortuary preservatives like formaldehyde and methyl (wood) alcohol. This mixture, known as chang'aa, is sold cheaply on the streets for consumption, and has become increasingly popular with people in Mathare and other slum settlements in Nairobi. Unknown to many of its consumers, however, are its detrimental effects, such as blindness and brain damage.
My stomach churns as I perch on the metal girding of this bridge with Peter. I am troubled by this place he calls home. Uncertain that taking Peter to the doctor to work on his leg will make a hill of beans of difference in the grand scheme of his life. Uneasy about the world and my worldview, which is rapidly crumbling under me. I am sick at this scene before me. In my peripheral vision, though, is something perhaps more shocking than the waste of the Mathare River. Up above me, to my right, looms a giant, lonely thorn tree. Around this tree, as if out of a fairy tale, dances a group of school children playing what looks like ring-around-the-rosy. I can hear their laughter and their singing. I can feel their joy and their excitement. They loom large, like that tree they encircle, under the immense African sky. Then and there, in the scene played out before me, I realize that joy and sorrow are companions dancing beautifully together here in Mathare. The awkward giggles in Peter's house, the deep healing and understanding I've shared with his Mom, and now these dancing children are the various proclamations of life in the midst of a seemingly hopeless place. I begin to cry on that bridge, over that river, and under that big sky.
It has been three years since this profound day in the Mathare Valley. In the time following I have returned to the United States, gotten married, and begun studying at Princeton Theological Seminary. Kenya seems to grow more and more distant each year. I have already begun to forget names and faces. I often long for the places I lived and visited. Yet as I reflect on these experiences, the words within these reflections have never been more alive. Author Eugene Peterson calls seminary a "word world."2 Thousands upon thousands of words are read, written, spoken, and meditated upon here. As a seminarian, I am a student of words and am being trained to pay careful attention to their nuances and contours. Therefore, words like "companion" jump off the page at me.
The English word companion comes from the Latin words com which means together or with and panis which means bread. My wife, Elisabeth, often bakes bread on Sunday afternoons, filling our home and our neighbors' homes with mouth-watering aromas. I have learned from her the complex and creative process involved in making a hearty loaf of bread. I was never aware of the "sponge" or of the various risings the bread must go through. I had no idea that you could put molasses or sun-dried tomatoes into a loaf and create a magical treat. Yet the most wonderful moment on Sundays is sitting down at the dinner table with Elisabeth and slicing into one of her fresh loaves of bread, spreading some butter on it, and marveling as it melts in our mouths. Like our bread, the companionship between joy and sorrow has been creatively forged over time and enjoyed peacefully at the table. It's a table not unlike the one I sat at with Peter and his mother. A table like that shared by those dancing Kenyan children and the Mathare River chang'aa brewers. A table much like what I imagine the Last Supper that Jesus shared with his disciples was like.
During that meal Jesus not only offered the gifts of bread and wine. He demonstrated profound companionship with his simple words "Remember me" - words that reverberate through generations and bond us together in a mysterious way. They serve not only as a challenge in the midst of our resurrection proclamation but as the link between word and act, feeling and experience, hope and despair, joy and sorrow. Jesus' table is set for the nurturing of companionship between some of the most beautiful and the most awful experiences the world has to offer. It is a table set for the big players in our society like those who have worked and are working to overcome racism and oppression as well as the small and unrecognized figures like dancing schoolchildren and men brewing chang'aa. It is a big and roomy table.
Yet our tables are often more mundane than these. They are Thanksgiving feasts, quiet evening meals with our spouse, or the generous Kenyan feast of chai and mandazis. They are riding on a bus with a handful of strangers or a road trip with a few close friends. They may be meandering on a solitary mountain slope or teaching in a noisy child-filled classroom. Our tables are the places we work, live, and serve. The fact is that you and I have sat at a thousand tables in our lives and we will likely sit at a thousand more. Whatever our tables are, wherever they are, we are all called to them at one time or another. We are called to sit, eat, and enjoy the company, as difficult as that might be. Author Frederick Buechner writes that "the place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."3 It is when we pause on bridges, paying attention to the dance of life all around us, that we witness the paradoxical miracle of companionship. We have the choice to join this dance or walk on by. But I guarantee that if we join, our lives and our world will never be the same.
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1 Nouwen, Henri J.M. Out of Solitude. Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 1974.
2 Peterson, Eugene. Subversive Spirituality. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994.
3 Buechner, Frederick. Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
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JACK BRACE is a Charter Class Krista Colleague (1999). During his term of service in Kenya he partnered with the PC(USA) Young Adult Volunteer Program and worked with homeless and street youth in the Mathare Valley slum settlement of Nairobi as well as near the town of Chuka on the eastern slopes of Mt. Kenya. Prior to his work in Kenya Jack volunteered for three years with New Horizons Ministries in Seattle, where he served and loved homeless youth. Jack is currently living with his wife Elisabeth in Princeton, New Jersey while studying at Princeton Theological Seminary.
