The Graces Evacuated by U.S. Embassy Flight to Nairobi

FUM has just (Wednesday morning) sent out this e-mail from Eden Grace. They have left Kisumu and are currently in the Mennonite Guest House in Nairobi.

At dawn this morning, as I listened to the BBC in lieu of sleep, the reports were that Kenya is breaking apart and that civil war looks possible–even likely. 

 30 January 2008

Dear Friends,

Greetings to you all, and huge thanks for your messages of support and encouragement. You have truly been sustaining us through these troubling times.

Yesterday, our family left Kisumu on a chartered flight sent by the US Embassy to bring out families with children. The situation in Kisumu (and all of western Kenya) has taken a turn for the worse since the horrible events in Nakuru and Naivasha over the weekend, and it was no longer prudent to stay where we were. For the moment, we are staying at the Mennonite Guest House, and taking things day by day. Eden is continuing to work, and can actually get more done in Nairobi, where there is freedom of movement, than in Kisumu where she was confined to the house. James and the kids are planning to spend their mornings doing some informal homeschooling. We are all grateful to be in a calm and restful environment, and plan to do a lot of sleeping!

This comes, of course, as a shock and disappointment, since it seemed last week like things were starting to improve. Kofi Annan is still here, and there is still some hope for the political mediation process, but at this point, it will be very difficult to quell the violence, even if the politicians reach a settlement. Kenya is in desperate need of your intercessions!

We held a very successful National Kenyan Quaker Peace Conference last weekend in Kakamega — truly the Lord wanted this conference to succeed, since a “window” of peace opened up just for those four days, and we were able to travel and meet together! The Conference emerged with some very strong ideas for immediate action that Friends can take. If you haven’t done so, we encourage you to read the conference documents on Mary Kay’s blog — http://www.updatesonkenya.blogspot.com/.

Our work now is to implement the Plan of Action. Eden was appointed Treasurer of the Coordinating Committee, which means that she will be responsible for overseeing the right use of your contributions toward this work. We really hope that you will be able to partner with us, and encourage you to contribute at www.fum.org. The need is enormous!

Our thanks go out to Ginna, who felt a burden on our behalf to draw your attention to the fact that our family’s livelihood is not covered by the outpouring of emergency relief funds from Friends. We have important work to do now, and we do ask for your contribution toward our ministry account, so that we can continue to play our part in God’s work here. Thanks, Ginna, for helping “toot our horn”! We really do need you at this time.

Please, please continue praying for peace in Kenya. Things have reached a frightening “tipping point”, where we can envision a truly horrible future. But at the same time, we know that God is a miracle-worker, and that He has not abandoned Kenya, so we remain hopeful. Please join us in pleading for His hand of calm to stay the angry hearts, His hand of comfort to bind up the wounded in body and spirit, and His hand of wisdom to guide all of us who seek to do His will today and every day.

In Christian fellowship,
Eden

Eden Grace, Field Officer
Friends United Meeting/Africa Ministries
 

Ben and Jody Richmond Write from Western Kenya

Ben Richmond has been serving as interim dean of Friends Theological College in Western Kenya this past year on behalf of Friends United Meeting. His wife, Jody, is a therapist. Her training in trauma work is needed now, as you will read. 

Thursday, 24 January, 2008
Friends Theological College
Kaimosi, Kenya

 Dear Friends,

Since our last newsletter, a lot has happened, so we are writing again to update you and to ask you to redouble your prayers for Friends in Kenya.

FTC opened this week (as you will remember, we delayed opening for a week due in hope that the situation would normalize).  Today, about half of our students are back on campus. 

We last wrote that Kaimosi remained an island of peace.  Shortly after sending out that newsletter, clashes began in our area.  Houses have been burned just the other side of Cheptulu, our nearby market.  Quite a few have been injured with arrow and panga (long, sword-like knives) wounds, and are being treated at the Kaimosi hospital just down our road.  Some of the kiosks at the junction were burned the other night.  (Those of you who know Alex, will be glad to know that his kiosk is okay.)  Two people have been killed in the area:  one, the uncle of a recent graduate.  One of our groundsmen is “sleeping out” meaning that he and his wife are sleeping in the forest because homes near their home have been burned.  Other staff members are caring for relatives who have had to leave their homes. 

We should reassure you that the college and the mission compound in general have remained safe.  Last night, according to reports, things were calm in our area.  Perhaps, this is a good reaction to the Kofi Annan mediation efforts, and the response of the opposition leadership which called off plans for mass demonstrations today. 

Tuesday was scheduled to be our first day of classes.  Instead, the faculty decided to cancel classes and devote the day to sharing our stories and praying for one another and the general situation.  Those students who had been able to travel to the college, together with faculty and staff, gathered in the Dining Hall, and for three hours recounted the impact of the clashes in personal stories.  Some had experienced terrifying moments at roadblocks.  Others told of neighbor’s houses burned, or people killed.  Several pastors recounted how they had given refuge to members of targeted tribes.  Others recounted how family members had had to flee from their homes in the face of threats.  One mentioned that gunshots in his vicinity became so common that they almost began to seem normal.  Others reported that calm prevailed in their areas, but all were affected by seeing “a Kenya they had never seen before in their lives.”

Jody led that session, with Pamela Igesa, the College chaplain.  Ben preached from Luke 4 and Isaiah 61 about the healing power of the spirit and contrasted the heresy of a “gospel” that pretends God’s love is only for “our community” with Jesus’ Gospel of the Kingdom of God that embraces all communities.  One member of our staff shared an incident of this lived out, when a vehicle carrying refugees from violence-torn areas came through his village in the first few days after troubles began.  He was amazed and touched to witness a number of market vendors gave food to them freely, never asking for any money.  We’ll remember the image of street vendors tossing avocados into a truck full of their hungry “enemies”!

Ben preached again the next morning, at our regular daily worship, carrying forward the story in the Gospel of Luke to the sermon on the plain in chapter 6.  He drew on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1957 sermon on loving your enemies, in which he said, “So this morning, as I look into your eyes, and into the eyes of all of my brothers in Alabama and all over America and over the world, I say to you, ‘I love you. I would rather die than hate you.’” Later in the day, we held a convocation at which Mary Lord, a Friend from Baltimore Yearly Meeting with vast experience in peacemaking work, spoke.  She rooted the Friends’ peace testimony in our experience of the power and love of God, and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.  She then recounted stories to illustrate many ways in which Quakers have lived out the peace witness to demonstrate what a vast toolbox is available to peacemakers.  In the question and answer period, one of the teachers asked Mary to talk about the biggest obstacles she has faced and overcome.  Mary responded from her own experience the need to forgive violence she experienced as a child; and then told about how God had, unknown to her, used a conference she had organized in the 1980s about the effects of nuclear weapons, to impact Ronald Reagan and start the beginning of Reagan’s pulling back from nuclear brinksmanship.  Today, Mary spoke to Jody’s class on Peace and Conflict Transformation about the cycle of violence.  Students and faculty have been deeply engaged. 

In Quaker Theology, we have modified the syllabus to begin from an experiential basis to ask what theological questions rise out of our experience.  Ben and Jody have invited the students to think over the last weeks and ask what mental images come to mind, and then share why they are important.  Some of the images:  “people being slashed in nearby homestead; young kids, displaced from their homes in Eldoret walking by my place to find refuge; people burning down houses and looting; members of parliament on TV pouring out their anger, seeking power; a young child in the hospital with an arrow sticking in him; a member of the church, home from Mombasa, asking for prayer because he was being sacked from his work in a hotel, and facing an unknown future; women being fallen on by soldiers, and young men and even old men (“wazee”) and being raped.”  One image was of “a man being slaughtered, the way one would slaughter a hen.” 

Even if the Annan peace efforts succeed today, and peace returns to the land, and all the hundreds of thousands of displaced were able to go back to their homes (many of which are, of course, burned), there would still be a tremendous need for trauma healing.  There is fear, distrust, and deep uncertainty because people who seemed to be friends so easily became enemies.  What theological questions does all this raise? 

This is a testing time for the church in Kenya.  Will we be able to be bearers of Good News that is deep enough to bring healing and hope to those who have been traumatized, and reconciliation to those who have experienced the reality of enmity?  Will you pray for a special outpouring of the Holy Spirit? 

In the midst of these extraordinary circumstances, normal life also continues.  We are making progress on the design of a new administration building, and wrapping up final details on the new Meetinghouse.   To continue to pursue “normalcy” is a part of living the Kingdom of God in these times—proclaiming hope that God plans for a good future for Kenya.

Thank you for your prayers, and support.

Jody and Ben Richmond

Listen to Eden Grace on PRI

On January 16, Lisa Mullins of PRI (Public Radio International) spoke with FUM’s Eden Grace, about violence in Kenya.

Click here to listen (via PRI’s website).

I found what Eden had to say about the so-called tribal nature of the violence worth thinking about.

Here is a picture of Eden and her family from the Friends United Meeting Web site.

Kenya Update

John Muhanji was able to send another e-mail yesterday. The Graces, Richmonds, and Muhanjis are safe. John is busy organizing peaceful forms of recreation in his village. Here is an excerpt from the beginning of his message:

Friends when you see yourselves enjoying the peace you have now wherever you are praise God for everything. Because that can be taken from you in a twinkling of an eye as it happened here in Kenya. Peace is something that needs to be guarded with a lot of care from everybody in the world.

I do not feel clear to posting on the Internet further excerpts from his message given the volatility of the situation and the tribal nature of the conflict. There is a media blackout. No news is being broadcast in Kenya. The stories and blogs I’m reading do seem to be saying the same thing. Kenyans are stunned that this is happening to them. Comparisons to Rwanda are being made. And it looks like there’s some military activity going on on the Uganda-Kenya border.

Here is one of the most informative Kenyan blogs I’ve found, the Kenyan Pundit. It has links that will take you deeper into the story if you’re so led to follow to them.

John cautions that January 3 may be a particularly dangerous day because a demonstration in Nairobi is scheduled.

I can only repeat his request. Pray for Kenya.

Norman Mailer

I learned by e-mail early this morning that Mailer had died in the night. I’d been expecting the news for weeks. I knew he’d been sleeping his way toward death in Mount Sinai Hospital. That doesn’t mean I was ready for it. I’ve spent most of the day divided among phone calls, e-mails, and tears. 

Not for Mailer, of course. He’s fine. I have no doubt of it. And already busy at it taking notes. But for all the rest of us who have to figure out how to get from here to there without him.

I first read him in April 1964 when my American Lit professor assigned Advertisements for Myself. I became obsessed with his work and devoured everything he wrote. There were times in those bad days, as we moved into the late 1960s, when his was the only voice that brought me any comfort. (His and Bob Dylan’s.) So I began writing him letters. It seemed the only sane thing to do.

After about a year, he risked answering one. It arrived in my mailbox on April Fool’s Day 1970, and it took me some minutes to understand that I wasn’t being joshed by my grad school colleagues who knew of my passion. But, no. He really had written me from Brooklyn Heights. We met two months later. He liked the way I wrote.

As was appropriate for the pair of us, our friendship remained its closest and most authentic on paper, in our correspondence, which is now archived at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas. It will close with the letter I sent him on October 9 musing on the fact that I had to be at the Friends United Meeting general board in Greenfield, Massachusetts, at exactly the same time that the Mailer Society was holding its annual meeting at the other end of the state in Provincetown. He never got to read it.

The e-mails, as I mentioned, have been flying as those of us who loved him reach out to console ourselves. Anecdotes and literary quotes are jostling for position. I haven’t found the one that speaks for me yet. It’s going to take a while. But I knew I wanted this one here.

From pages 318-319 of my 1968 Signet paperback of The Armies of the Night . . .

But probably it was in Occoquan and the jail in Washington, D.C., that the March ended. In the week following, prisoners who had chosen to remain, refused in many ways to cooperate, obstructed prison work, went on strikes. Some were put in solitary. A group from a Quaker farm in Voluntown, Connecticut, practiced non-cooperation in prison. . . . some of them refused to eat or drink and were fed intravenously. Several men at the D.C. jail would not wear prison clothing. Stripped of their own, naked, they were thrown in the Hole. There they lived in cells so small that not all could lie down at once to sleep. For a day they lay naked on the floor, for many days naked with blankets and a mattress on the floor. For many days they did not eat or drink water. Dehydration brought them near to madness. 

. . . . These naked Quakers on the cold floor of a dark isolation cell in D.C. jail, wandering down the hours in the fever of dehydration, the cells of the brain contracting to the crystals of their thought, essence of one thought so close to the essence of another–all separations of water gone–that madness is near. . . .

Did they pray, these Quakers, for forgiveness of the nation? Did they pray with tears in their eyes in those blind cells with visions of the long column of Vietnamese dead, Vietnamese walking in a column of flame, eyes on fire, nose on fire, mouth speaking flame, did they pray, “O Lord, forgive our people for they do not know, O Lord, find a little forgiveness for America in the puny reaches of our small suffering, O Lord, let these hours count on the scale as some small penance for the sins of the nation, let this great nation crying in the flame of its own gangrene be absolved for one tithe of its great sins by the penance of these minutes, O Lord, bring more suffering upon me that the sins of our soldiers in Vietnam be not utterly unforgiven–they are too young to be damned forever.”

The prayers are as Catholic as they are Quaker, and no one will know if they were ever made, for the men who might have made them were perhaps too far out on fever and shivering and thirst to recollect, and there are places no history can reach. But if the end of the March took place in the isolation in which these last pacifists suffered naked in freezing cells, and gave up prayers for penance, then who was to say they were not saints? And who to say that the sins of America were not by their witness a tithe remitted?

Learning from an Episcopal Priest’s Blog

Every few months or so I check in with the blog of an Episcopal priest I stumbled upon called “Father Jake Stops the World.” Father Jake’s posts for the first week in September 2007 remind me that I need to read him more often.

 As you may know, the Anglican Communion is being challenged by its African members–to the point of schism–on LGBTQ issues. Archbishop Akinola of Nigeria is recruiting conservative American congregations to join him in a breakaway communion. He’s got five in the U.S. standing with him so far, and he’s actively working to get more. In a post for September 8, Father Jake calls for attendance at a demonstration against Akinola when he arrives in Chicago. And Father Jake’s posts about an outrageous statement made by another Nigerian bishop may interest those who’ve been following Friends United Meeting’s struggles in the wake of its February 2007 general board meeting in Kenya.

I was interested to read about the Listening Process that the Anglican bishops are engaged in. It reminds me not to get self-righteous about Quaker process and Gospel Order. It’s a humbling revelation to this proud Quaker that others who seek to follow the Gospels might also be capable of following Gospel Order.

Father Jake’s post on “Sexual Ethics and Scripture“ was helpful to me and I’ve saved it. The remarks of William Countryman that he quotes on the authority of Scripture sound very Hicksite.

This week Father Jake is focused on the schismatic struggles rending the Anglican Communion he’s given his life to, but he ranges widely. I suspect few Quakers could resist a post titled “Pacifism for Violent SOBs.” Both these archived posts are listed under their respective categories on the Home page of his blog.

His entries are filled with links that make his blog an interesting portal for matters of faith, Scripture, and social justice. I commend Father Jake to your attention.