Taking the Gospel from South to South

A TALE OF TWO MISSIONARIES

When Fr. John Dale visited us one morning, we walked round our small parish compound in the heart of the slums of Majengo in Nairobi. We talked about the different initiatives and projects being run by the team of Mill Hill Missionaries. After our rounds, he asked for my thoughts as a newlyordained missionary, from the Philippines, in an urban poor mission.

I reflected a while before telling him how I struggled adjusting to an evening work schedule: that is mass at six in the evening followed by prayer in a Small Christian Community until about 15 minutes past nine, then back to the mission to heat in the microwave oven the left-over food from lunch time, then eat until some minutes past ten in the evening.

At that point I have a shower to remove the dirt and the grime accumulated while passing through the open sewers and narrow alleys of the slums, also to ease the itchy feeling from sitting on benches in small, dark shacks made of mud and corrugated iron.

However, the hardest thing for me to get used to is the dependency of the urban poor on the financial help coming from the parish. Many still think that mission parishes and missionaries have bottomless pits of financial resources.

They come to us with concerns like money for school supplies, for the fare to go home, for phone calls, for hospital bills, for food a seeming endless list of requests. It is understandable; there are genuine cases in this situation of extreme poverty, but, sadly, some are conmen and women, in short, professional beggars.

This is my dilemma - I am a missionary from the South. I do not have access to sponsors or friends from abroad or from home. There is light, however, one which brings fresh purpose. A missionary like me, in an urban poor apostolate, can speak of new forms of mission; helping people become aware that mission is changing.

The Church is moving from dependency on the countries of the north to self-reliance and self-supporting missions. This is obviously an ideal and much more needs to be done to help shape the attitudes of the faithful in urban poor missions.

The reality is that faith abounds and there are enormous gifts and human resources in the parish where I work. The challenge is to tap and mobilize them for the common good of all. I know this changing of the face of mission will take time to get its shape, but the God of the Missions is always at work. I have full trust in this God.

A hoarding exhorts the inhabitants of the Majengo slums to respect their community space

HOPE IN HELL

WHAT a place! A desert in the heart of the city! This desert is unlike any other; some call it a wasteland or a slum. It is a place for people who have been abandoned by polite society and it has been my home for two years. I am involved in the urban poor apostolate in the parish of Shauri Moyo, which means `an affair of the heart'.

The reality of people's lives in the slum is not foreign to me because I had previously experienced living in a slum for a number of years. People living there are called squatters. The dictionary says that they are illegal occupiers of unused premises but the issues are far more complex. Poverty is the major reason that people end up there but its roots are often the result of global economic policies as well as local.

The slum, called Majengo in Swahili, is just a few yards away from the parish centre and it looks like a desert because of the colour of the rusting iron sheet roofing. I have seen houses made of anything available such as old metal sheets, mud, wood, boxes, plastic and even paper.

Some of the houses are collapsing and one can hardly stand inside. Others are so small that there is only enough room for one little bed; there are no toilets and no access to proper sanitation. People from all parts of the country converge there. It is the place of the weak and powerless but because all share the same struggle there is also a deep sense of unity.

This reminds me of Gehenna, the image of hell in the New Testament. Gehenna was situated outside the city, the waste disposal site for all rubbish from the city - a smelly and unclean place.

Similarly, the slum in Shauri Moyo has become a dumping ground of the people who do not belong to any social categories of society.

In the eyes of many, these people are like rubbish that is scattered around. They are people living at the margins of society. However, and this is the key, we must always remember that the marginalized were the first people who began to recognize Jesus, to name him, to have faith in him, and, through him, to believe in themselves.

Every Saturday I visit Majengo, with one of the church workers, to bring Communion to the sick. There I have a graced opportunity to encounter Christ as a sickly person, a lonely person, a beggar, living in the refuse of society. Meeting Jesus in this way is disturbing. I even hesitate to reach out to them.

In spite of the difficulties, I persevere in this special apostolate. Shaking the hands of an old sickly person and feeling the hardness of the worn out hands is like reaching out to Christ's own hand in his suffering. I must accept the challenge and embrace the difficult situation in the slum with love and humility.