Breakthrough!

Thursday, February 28, 2008 will go down as a historic day for Kenya.

It was somewhat ironic that we were on a reconciliation retreat with the grassroots leaders that we serve to reflect on cultural issues that have emerged over the past two months when the news broke the air. Perhaps the most symbolic part of our retreat was 20 of us huddling around the television for the evening news from different ministries, different tribes, different socio-economic levels and different political affiliations to learn that the government and opposition had signed a power sharing deal. While the memories will never be buried, the breaking news provided cautious hope as Kenyans move forward from this difficult time in history.

The following day as I traveled through town, it seemed that the vibrant Nairobi that we had come to forget, had returned. Uhuru Park (Freedom Park) was finally open after being shut down in fear of mass meetings for two months. Young couples wooed each other over Cold Fantas and old men read books without military officers waving their AK-47’s in sight. The buses and matatus buzzed with noise as the burdens of conflict began to subside. At one of the matatu stops, a banana supplier bringing a shipment to a roadside kiosk leaned in the window of our matatu, counted the heads and gave a banana to everyone. Even the aggressive hawkers (street sellers) nudged their sales tactics down, offered a smile to those walking by and joked with their sidewalk neighbors as they competed for sales.

Yet buried within the relief of moving on from the 2007 elections, I can’t forget about our CTM retreat where leaders were given space to learn from one another in how the past two months had impacted them. It became clear that members of our network had experienced a great deal during these times. From having their homes taken over and not being able to work in a church because of their tribe, to having to learn to operate with a machete in hand and learning code words to protect themselves from “the enemy”, this stuff was not just national news, but snapshots of the life stories that many are dealing with. It’s real, it’s ugly and it runs extremely deep.

This week marked an important time not in that the issues of the past two months can or should be lost or forgotten, but that it gave us all permission to hope for the future rather than being consumed by surviving the day. There have been many times in my life where I have been grateful to experience adversity because it brought me to a fuller appreciation of the world around me. Once again, I feel that I have been blessed with an experience that has tinted the lenses that I use to see this world. But for our friend Mark, whose finger was shot off and Peter, who lost his home and job, to the hundreds of thousands that have been displaced and to the families of those that have lost loved ones, we are reminded that it is a privilege to be able to move on from life’s valleys.