A Christmas Story
A fusion of thoughts about my experience in Kenya and the original Christmas story.
It is hot. I am currently sitting in an air-conditionless parked van with my husband and three small children on a dusty, congested road in Mombasa. About two hundred flies are in the van, swarming around our legs, landing on our arms and faces. The pestering is relentless. My arms and legs are itchy from what I initially thought were mosquito bites, but a simple Google image comparison confirmed one of my worst fears: our cheap Airbnb last night was infested with bed bugs.
We recently moved to Nairobi to live with my husband's brother and his wife while we wait for a final move to France. This is our family's first time abroad and the learning curve is steep. Our four homes in the last 18 months are thanks to the benevolence of family members. The last year and a half has been stable, but not grounded—especially not for our children.
The first week in Kenya was a whirlwind of settling down, getting used to currency exchanges, passionate haggling for nearly everything, instructing children to step over refuse on trips to the store, navigating new social relationships, and in general, struggling to connect to this new place we call home. It has gone surprisingly well. So well in fact, that I'm not regretting our choice to venture on a ten-day vacation to the Kenyan coast a week after touchdown. Not too much at least.
"I'm so hot, Mommy," my six-year-old says, arms covered in flies. My three-year-old begins to cry as sweat laced with sunscreen drips into his eyes. We've been sitting in this damned van for over an hour now. The driver has walked off somewhere. Passersby stop at our windows, pointing at us and yelling to their friends in Swahili that there are Mzungus (white people) in this van. Others come to gawk. Some say hi, some ask for money.
The train ride from Nairobi to Mombasa was six and a half hours with stops. We chose economy seats over first-class; first because of the price, and second because the first-class seats were all sold out. After we took our seats and did our kid-led ritual of twenty bathroom trips in ten minutes, we realized we were the only Mzungus in economy class. The entire car stared at us. People began whispering and pointing. Many of the passengers were children from rural communities attending boarding school, who were taking the train home for the holiday. Most had never seen a Mzungu before. When my children spoke, the passengers tried out their phrases in their mouths. Giggles erupted around us. Adults took out their phones and took pictures of us. My husband, who suffers from social anxiety, was in hell. I was resigned. There was nothing to do but wait out the rest of the train ride.
Thinking of yesterday’s train ride experience, I picture Mary, who was told by Gabriel that she was chosen to be Christ's mother. The cultural, religious, and social implications of an out-of-wedlock pregnancy are huge. I can’t imagine trying to find the words to tell Joseph the impossible. I'm sure the validation of angels helped. I don’t know how everything played out or even who knew about the situation (other than Elizabeth and Zechariah), but at this moment, I imagine close family and friends speculating, whispering mental math calculations to each other about Mary's pregnancy and her and Joseph's wedding date. I imagine staring and pointing as she and Joseph do their daily tasks. Did rumors circulate? I wonder if Mary or Joseph had social anxiety.
We chose this vacation. We chose to fly to Kenya, to buy train tickets to Mombasa, to vacation on the coast. We put ourselves in this situation. Mary consented to bear God's Son, but the consequences were not fully her responsibility. When there was no room in the inn, it was surely because it was full, but were there some complicated feelings in Joseph's family about Mary's pregnancy? I can’t help but laugh thinking about the ridiculousness of a white Jesus now. There would have been a lot of pointing and gawking at a Mzungu Christ child, walking with his Middle Eastern parents as countless artists have portrayed Him. His life was filled with pointing and gawking without adding skin color to the equation.
One of the windows in my in-laws' Nairobi apartment faces an informal settlement (slum), about three blocks away. Being on the fourth floor gives us a higher vantage point than most of the other buildings around us. It feels like an invasion of privacy, but I find myself often spending idle minutes, watching what feels to be a different world than mine passing by. A community of plywood, sheet metal, red earth, and people bustling from one shack to another, playing, working, selling, and talking. It is a lively place.
Three days after arriving in Kenya, I was walking home with my children from the store when a group of girls walking home from school waved to us. We waved back and kept walking. A block later, I felt a tug on my arm. It was one of the girls, "Hello!" she smiled, "I have never seen someone like you before!"
"Someone like me?" I asked.
"Yes," she said, "I've never seen a Mzungu! Can I take you to my home and introduce you to my family?"
"Where do you live?"
"In Deep Sea." She lived in the settlement behind our apartment. I looked at my kids and paused.
"Let me drop off my children at home and I'll meet you at the entrance of Deep Sea in ten minutes."
I dropped my kids off with my husband, changed into something less eye-catching, left my phone and wallet, and walked to the meeting point. Mary (name changed) met me with a smile. She grabbed my hand and took me proudly into the settlement. She introduced me to her family, her friends, and her teachers. Her teachers work for a Kenyan-UK-based charity called The Fursa Trust. After speaking with them for a few minutes, I asked if they could use my help. They said yes and I agreed to begin volunteering a few hours a week, putting my dormant teaching skills to use.
Every day since meeting Mary and before our vacation, I went down to the settlement to volunteer. Sometimes with bread in hand, sometimes with biscuits. The children are happy, grateful, and eager to learn with their teachers. Learning about the challenges these children face and the alternative choice Fursa provides to things like huffing glue (which staves off hunger pangs but destroys mental capacities), gangs and criminal activity, and/or prostitution is humbling. Some of the Fursa volunteers grew up in Deep Sea, but were able to get out. After the nightly sessions, they close with tea and bread. The children eat with intent and in silence.
Most of the work my first week was geared towards helping the kids practice a Christmas program they prepared for their community. They sang traditional Kenyan songs, Christmas carols, and even “Feliz Navidad”. They danced as they sang, and performed a few sketches, including the nativity story in Swahili. Watching these children from Deep Sea perform the nativity in Swahili was stirring. Talking with them, they were more shocked about the gifts the Wisemen gave than about Mary giving birth in a stable and putting Jesus in a manger. Settlement mothers, whose families earn around one US dollar a day, give birth in the privacy and shelter a three-walled shack provides: unsanitary and uncomfortable at best, deadly at worst. The Christmas story does not seem like such a foreign story that took place thousands of years ago. It could have happened this morning.
A slight breeze is a welcome guest as our van begins to slowly move. The driver informs us there was a bad accident on the only road that leads to our destination and traffic in all directions is at a near standstill. We have driven two kilometers in four hours. And we have forty winding kilometers and a ferry to go. So much waiting.
Since arriving in Kenya, I have learned that time is a construct of the wealthy. Start times and end times don't mean much when you don't have appointments, work, school, or clocks. There is only the grumbling of your stomach, sunrises, and sunsets. When there are start and end times, it is because they are dictated by the wealthy or by institutions. Living in the present is deeply embedded in Kenyan culture. I think of the families on the train who stared at us. Our children were playing on their Kindles and eating a tacky amount of fancy snacks, we were desperately trying to keep them entertained for just one more hour, please just one more hour— all while they sat patiently with nothing. It is evident that either our middle-class American culture (and/or our parenting) did not prepare our children to sit for half of a day patiently in the heat.
Looking out over the sea of cars, tuk-tuks, and trucks, my mind wanders to the great migration of the census of Judea. The traffic jams, the lines, the waiting. If getting from one place to another is this inefficient now, it probably wasn't much better two thousand years ago. I think particularly of the grueling 145 kilometer route from Nazareth to Bethlehem that Joseph and Mary took towards the end of Mary’s pregnancy.
I absently scratch at my bug bites and imagine where Mary and Joseph must have slept on their pilgrimage to Bethlehem. If they were covered in bug bites like us, or worse. Our ride in the van is slow, bumpy, overrun with flies, and hot, but I wager Mary and Joseph would have gladly taken it over a donkey. As I ponder this holy family, I snuggle my now sleeping, red-faced and sweaty three-year-old and whisper, “I can wait a little longer.”
Christmas feels a little different this year without our traditional cold weather and probable snowfall my New England clan is used to. “It feels like a summer day, far away from Christmas,” my husband says. He misses the sledding, the hot chocolate, the snowflakes, and the snow angels. So do I. But our traditional white Christmas is somewhat removed from the original story, whose characters presumably never saw snow in their lifetimes. The palm trees, whose fronds were used later to cover the ground upon which the Savior entered Jerusalem more than thirty years later, are our new Christmas trees. The lush Kenyan vegetation, whose flowers bloom even amidst human dereliction fills me with wonder and hope. This Christmas in Kenya, it feels like the earth is bursting with creation in celebration of the Giver of Life. The mild nighttime weather here feels more akin to the cool air Mary felt on her skin the night she bore her precious son.
With these thoughts, the waiting becomes less arduous, my hunger and thirst less imminent. I feel closer to the Holy Family and the first Christmas than I ever have. Our disastrous holiday feels more sacred to me than something to be endured.
Beautifully written and moving as read by a Christian in the United States.
Thank you, Erika. This is all eye-opening. Also, I’ll be thinking about these lines: “Since arriving in Kenya, I have learned that time is a construct of the wealthy. Start times and end times don't mean much when you don't have appointments, work, school, or clocks. There is only the grumbling of your stomach, sunrises, and sunsets. When there are start and end times, it is because they are dictated by the wealthy or by institutions. Living in the present is deeply embedded in Kenyan culture.”