September, 2010:

There’s nothing more depressing for a missionary who lives and works at the extreme periphery of the Church than reading articles and books on the Church’s mission. Experts and theologians tell us how we should be, and what actions we should take to address the new and major challenges of mission life. Then, in fact, missionaries remain basically isolated.
Over time, every missionary learns to discern the things he can do, those for which has some talent, and then with God’s help, he tries to do something at the service of the Gospel. The failures are inevitably more numerous than the successes. Then of course, you are told you have acted in isolation. You start doubting whether you have done everything wrong, or whether you have betrayed your vocation and the charism of your institution. Or whether you are only a missionary because of the label that has been sewn onto you.
Some years ago I enrolled to attend a spiritual retreat led by a great theologian and writer on missionary themes. I had read his texts and found them inspiring. The topic under discussion, “Challenges for the Mission today,” was of great interest to me. The course was to be held in Malawi, an African country normally considered a tourist paradise. But it was not held because the famous theologian cancelled it at the last minute, apparently because he was told that in Malawi he would be at risk of contracting malaria.
I decided to use that week to make another trip to the Nuba Mountains region of Sudan, where there were Christians for whom it was a luxury to celebrate the Eucharist and the Sacrament of Reconciliation. It was something they could only afford to celebrate once every two or three years. The experience vaccinated me against fine words, spoken or written. I learned to believe more in the wisdom of simple people – and to the stimuli and calls we receive from them – rather than in the wisdom of the learned intellectuals.
Of course I did not stop thinking about what I did and still do. I continued reading all the materials that are written on the topic of mission life, at least in the texts that I can find. The duty to keep alive, alert and vigilant, as Jesus tells us in the Gospel, is valid not just for the sake of waiting the return of the Lord, but also because it is an integral part of the life of the missionaries, in order to deepen their knowledge of the society and culture of the people among whom they live.
After this long introduction, one written by a missionary of the streets – or as they say in Nairobi, a “jua kali” missionary (Swahili for “one who operates under the hot sun”) – it is clear that the following list is the result of a highly personal vision. I do not want to use words like “pneumatology,” “models of church” and “missionary paradigms”. In fact I would not be able to use such big words correctly. I speak of the challenges to my life as a missionary only thinking of the people I had met in recent times, of the questioning eyes that have searched my eyes, and of the questions they have sometimes asked without even opening their mouth.
Jeannine was born in Rwanda. She fled the country in the months immediately following the infamous 1994 genocide. At the age of 19 she arrived in Nairobi with her mother after two years of wandering between Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda. Now she is married to a fellow Rwandan refugee and they have three children. Her husband is a wood carver operating from Kivuli, the center for former street children where I live in Nairobi, while she does the housework. In the past few months since Rwandan refugees were allowed the right to reside legally in Kenya, and thus no longer have to hide every time a policeman passes, she spends her free time outside the door of the cabin that they rent in the Kawangware slum, roasting and selling corn cobs to passers-by. But this is not her home and her culture. She would like to go back to Kigali but does not feel safe. The same case applies to many Sudanese nationals who came to Nairobi over the many years of civil war in their country, and do not want to return because they fear that the fragile peace will not last. There are at least one in five refugees from the Sudan war in my neighborhood.
On the other hand, Denis is a Kenyan boy of 16. His mother is a single, economically independent lady from that generation of emancipated women who chose to have a child without wanting a husband. Denis attends a highly reputed private school where the monthly tuition amounts to the average monthly salary of many Nairobi workers.
Needless to say, Denis is a privileged boy. Yet last Sunday he approached me outside the church and said he wanted to confess, although he is not a Catholic. Actually he wanted to have some time to talk randomly about his fears and dreams concerning his future, his confused desire to deepen his relationship with Jesus and join the Catholic Church, his uncertain sexual identity, and his desperate need to find someone who will give him advice and help him navigate the forest of life. He uttered a revealing phrase: “Our elders in the village became adults through initiation. I have grown up watching television. I can not deny it, I like it, makes me feel in touch with the world. But I do not find answers to my questions. My mom? She is a stranger, although I love her because she gives me everything I need. ”
Young people across Africa are no longer any kind of guidance. The statistics tells us that in Africa 50% of the population is under 18 years. Although many of them have a strong demand for spirituality, the church can not reach but a few of them, and often quite superficially, for lack of apostolic committed personnel. The future is passing by and we just watch it to go.
Kivuli is a meeting point for a group of young Luhya, numerically the second Kenyan ethnic group, all of them teenagers or so, all recent arrivals from the same part of the country, all looking for a scholarship and a job, all wanting to work during the day and to study in the evening. Even they, like the privileged Denis, are in search of meaning in their lives. They meet frequently, exchanging stories of frustrating days on the pavements of Nairobi and have fun doing a little bit of ethnic dances and theatre. Still all of them have high hopes and a great sense of humor about their situation.
Yesterday Kasuko, a beautiful girl, was imitating the lascivious approach tryed on her by a potential employer, while Kevin told how he risked being lynched for having inadvertently hit an elderly passer-by who started yelling “Stop the thief!”, fearing that Kevin was a pickpocket. Charles got too tired of going in search of a decently paying job. He is not even asking for much – he would be happy with a salary of $100 per month. Instead he has decided to help an aunt, taking turns to sell fruit at a stall along the main road in Kawangware. His father, one of the many losers in this urbanization game, is permanently drunk on cheap and dangerous alcohol. Yet these young people, despite the negative experiences they face, have not given up the search for El Dorado, because in their countrysides, where in theory they could have a more dignified life, the government does not provide essential services.
Mameo is a brave Samburu warrior. Or rather, he was. Now he has come to Nairobi to earn some money before getting married. He is a security guard in Kibera, the largest and poorest slum in Nairobi. The first job he got, which he is still doing, is to guard residents of a group of huts who are so poor that you cannot understand what anyone would wish to steal from them. They hired him to keep watch during the day, when all of them are either out at work or looking for work, except for a four year old child who is so seriously ill that his mother is forced to leave him alone at home.
These poor residents pay Mameo $0.40 a day. Later he has found a job as night watchman for a middle-class family in a richer residential neighborhood nearby. When does he sleep? He answers this question very seriously: “There us no time to sleep, now I need money to organize for a marriage with a good girl”. Suspended between nomadic and urban life, Mameo is also a religious nomad, every Sunday goes to a different church, wherever he happens to pass by. He thinks the church is not important, the important thing is to pray to the Creator.
On Saturday a group of women volunteers who go once every week to visit and encourage people suffering from AIDS, or are otherwise gravely ill, had only sad stories to share. Two of their patients, out of a total of about one 120, had died the previous week. Others are left to die, having lost hope of accessing antiretroviral drugs. One child died of malaria. Tuberculosis continues to ruin lives. Diseases that are easily cured in the neighbouring rich suburbs of Nairobi by swallowing a few pills, are a death sentence here among the poor. Agnes shook her head sadly, “The best thing we can do is help patients die peaceful, trusting in God.”
In Kibera, near the house that hosts our emergency shelter for street children, lives Musa, a Muslim of about forty. He is not a religious fanatic, but is a man of granitic faith. Musa trades in second hand clothes and during his leisure time he coaches a group of young people engaged in traditional wrestling. A couple of months ago he determinedly approached me for the first time, with a concise speech obviously prepared with great care.
“Mr. Kizito (that is what he called me), for the past two years I have watched what you and your Koinonia members are doing to help our children and to assist with the education of our young people. Why don’t we do the work together?”
And out of this conversation an initiative was born, in the form of a competition of African traditional wrestling. It is easy to work with Musa because he is a just man without deceit. I hope that together we can make things even more challenging in terms of human formation.
All these are faces that come to my mind when I think of mission. With them I am part of a river of life that carries me and makes me feel immersed in the inexhaustible and ever-shifting complexities of the human condition. The majority of them are poor, humble people struggling to support themselves and their families, obsessed with putting together something to eat everyday, and to be able to pay their rent at the end of the month. They are people who are in many ways in a transition between tradition and modernity, at the mercy of social, economic and cultural forces that are immensely stronger than them. When you talk to them about God they manifest a genuine faith. They are open to the Gospel, even if they come from different religious traditions. They are full of hope and positivity that helps them to overcome unimaginable difficulties.
I, from a world permeated by a strong sense of cultural superiority, reinforced by technological supremacy, want to share the gospel of Jesus of Nazareth, with them. Jesus was a poor, simple and good a man who was able to get close to all with understanding and affection, renewing their faith and bringing them closer to God the Father. Jesus loves the people, accepts all and forgives all our sins. He extended a hand to everyone, inviting them to grow in humanity by accepting the Father’s love, and at a sociological and cultural level, He was part of their culture and their dreams.
How can I be a missionary for all these people that I meet? What challenges do I face? I could make a long list: problems of justice and peace related to poverty and lack of development; urbanization; the attraction of a modern culture that is imbued with materialism; dialogue with other faiths, especially Islam. These seem to be, at least for me in Africa, the greatest challenges out there.
There are a number of other challenges that arise from deficiencies in our church and missionary training, and that may be listed as follows: a tendency to present the faith as if it were a series of precepts rather than a personal relationship with the Risen Jesus; resistance to change, and therefore inability to promote a deep enculturation, not only on external rites such as musical instruments or gestures during the celebrations, but the community relations and the Christian formation of the young people; a presentation of human sexuality that still goes back, at best, to the middle of the last century in Europe, focused on what you cannot do rather than on how you should be.
But the real challenge is in the people. Their need for meaning and relationships. Their need for God. People who are not a problem but an asset, the only true wealth of the church. The missionary methodology is the methodology of Jesus: go straight to the hearts of the people and build relationships and communities. If I am a Christian I can only look at others as brothers and sisters who need love and understanding.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great Protestant theologian who was so close to his flock that he died in a Nazi concentration camp, summed up the attitude on which we must put ourselves on front of others in one sentence: “The first service is due to your neighbour is to listen to him. He who does not listen to his brother will soon not know how to listen to God any more.”
Then, probably, the most pressing mission challenge is my conversion.

For years it was the “forgotten war” by definition. Every time a journalist “discovered” that in a corner of Africa called Sudan – a corner so to speak, as only Southern Sudan is vast as Central Europe – there was still an ongoing guerrilla war that had began in 1982 , the inevitable cliché became part of the title. Later, since 9 January 2005, when after two years of negotiations a complicated peace treaty – that the experts called Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) – was signed in Nairobi, it has become the “forgotten peace”. Waiting for a rekindling of the war?

Skepticism aside, it is true that there have been many efforts to end the long civil war but very little has been done to consolidate peace. The U.S. and its European allies during negotiations have not hesitated to evoke, both to the North and the South, alternatively the stick of international sanctions, cuts in cooperation programmes and political isolation, and the juicy carrot of economic development, limitless oil exports and abundant humanitarian aid. But today all seem uninterested in what is happening in Sudan.

I visited Southern Sudan recently. Expectations and emotions in preparation for the referendum scheduled according to the CPA in January 2011 have created an atmosphere of euphoria that obscures the real dangers. People will have to choose if staying united with the North or go for complete independence. I have never known a South Sudanese who did not want full independence from the North, even John Garang, who was affirming his belief in a united secular Sudan only for international political reasons.

So, that next January, the South Sudan people will vote almost unanimously for independence must be taken for granted. The historical divisions, cultural, social and religious differences between North and South are too deep to be healed in five years. And this was easy to predict. But the international community should have predicted and prevented also the conditions that could lead to the return of war, or to the fragmentation of South Sudan as a non-state, with the risk of creating another Somalia.

It is clear that the North has no intention of letting the South go – taking with it all the oil it contains – and will do everything to divide and weaken it.

In September, U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, in a speech to a committee of the American Congress, alluded to Sudan only briefly. Then, answering a specific question, she added that relations between North and South Sudan, in the context of the referendum that is being prepared, are “a time bomb ready to explode.” Discovery!

The list of delays and failures of the CPA is long. Not only little has been done to make the country’s unity attractive to Southerners, as required under the CPA, but the international community has pretended not to see that the two sides were rearming. It has allowed the proliferation of human rights abuses and corruption. It has accepted without flinching elections like those of last April, that were far from being free and fair. It has allowed the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) in the South to consolidate centralist and dictatorial tendencies. Southern Sudan – or whatever the new state that will be born by the inevitable division will be called – is repeating all the worst mistakes of the failed independences. Like Congo, Nigeria, Central African Republic, to name a few: Countries that after years of formal independence are still to be built up as dignified independent States.

The most serious failure, and the one that might have the most tragic consequences – is related to the claims on the huge oil fields that lie on the border between North and South, a boundary that was supposed to be demarcated within six months of signing the CPA. Up to now some long stretches have not yet been demarcated because of ethnic tension, with others stretches being questioned. Now the clock is ticking. To overcome the impasse is not just a job for technocrats, political good will is important.

The tension mounts every day. To the bellicose as well as inappropriate statements made by representatives of the South, the North reacts with methodical obstruction of the dialogue and of the preparatory work of the referendum. The closer we get to the referendum deadline in January, the greater the chance of a return to armed conflict.

The minority of hardline Islamists and fanatics who control the North seem to rely on its ability to let the storms pass, to absorb dissent, to foster divisions in the opposing camp. See the media silence that they have managed to bring down on Darfur and the ineffectiveness of the arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court against President Omar Al-Bashir.

Perhaps the South believes that, at worst, it can win a quick war of secession, imagining it to be supported by the international community. Southern leaders, in fact, are no longer ‘rebels’, but the democratically elected representatives of the South Sudan people, in spite of the doubts on last April elections.

The struggle for control of oil reserves, by all possible means, seems inevitable, unless there is some agreement or some plan known only in the corridors of international diplomacy, and in the offices of the arms merchants. One cannot, in fact, believe that Hillary Clinton and the “international community” have not noticed what’s happening, have not foreseen all possible scenarios and have no plans to intervene. Are Obama and Clinton really just waiting for the bomb to explode before intervening? The Sudan is not only an economic battleground. It is an important testing ground for relations between the U.S. and the Arab world. In the early nineties, Khartoum was the operational base for Osama bin Laden and many Northerners would certainly be ready to give hospitality to al-Qaeda. In this scenario, a new armed conflict in Sudan would be a serious destabilizing factor in the Horn of Africa, that is already a powder keg.

The independence of Sudan, both North and South, is still a long and difficult process, with a high risk of becoming bloody. It ‘s a fast moving train, and if some shunters seem distracted, no doubt at the appropriate time they will be ready to intervene and determine the direction.

Philip Emase, who worked with us for nearly three years as Head of Communications has just left to Accra, Ghana, to work for an important Pan-African NGO. Philip was completing the training period to become a member of Koinonia, and distance will not prevent him from continuing.

From today his place is taken by Eric Sande, who was also with us for almost three years. Eric is reactivating or starting new sites on the internet, where you can find information on the work of Koinonia. In addition to Koinonia Kenya, which remains for us our main website, where you’ll find more and more links to short videos, the most important changes are:

NewsFromAfrica is now updated at least three times a week, with important articles. It is in partnership with Afronline, that last month took more than a dozen articles from NewsFromAfrica. Eric is also preparing a new logo.

The website of The Invisible Cities, the structure that works with us in video production, has been reactivated.

To replace Africa Peace Point (APP) – created to work with Koinonia in peace projects and then gone on his own – we have initiated a new activity, called Koinonia Action for Peace (KAP). KAP, with assistance from the Centre Helder Camara of Milan, has started a six months program of education in children rights. You will find all information about this program at the site of KAP which should be ready by early next week.

Eric is also preparing the website of the Shalom Institute of Social Studies (SISS). I will have some other chnces to speak more about this initiative. For now just know that it offers a Certificate in Youth Studies, run jointly with the Tangaza College. The certificate should continue with a diploma and finally, after three years of study, a college degree. Before having SISS website updated – at the momnt it is only a generica presentation – we must give at least 10 days to Eric.

Links to these sites are in the column on the left, even those not yeat operational as I write. operational.