We wake to the alarm clock– borrowed, because we forgot ours. And then it’s your typical morning: maybe a shower, getting dressed, and heading out the door to our dining room, where we sit with other members of the team at tables of various sizes, enjoying the buffet that Alice sets out for us.
The juice isn’t American, and neither is the rest of it, for that matter. But we do well with the hard-boiled eggs, the crepe-style pancakes, the cornflakes and the Wheetabix. And then we’re on the buses– by 7:45 if we can muster it– off to Beacon of Hope for the day.
It’s nice to be out in Kenya this early. Bill may buy a Standard Nation from the newspaper salesman just outside the main gate, but nothing else will delay us– unless it’s the Nairobi traffic or the Nairobi matatu drivers or a donkey pulling its load across the road. But these are things for another post.
We travel down Ngong road and look for the Ngong Hills. The name means “knuckle” and that’s precisely what these low blue hills look like: as if someone has pressed his fist up from under the earth. We take Karen Road through Karen, and the broad and pitted shoulders of the road are places of business. Tidy plant nurseries stretch back toward the wall-lined streets, and closer to Ongata Rongai, the town where Beacon of Hope stands, shanty strip-malls unfold from shacks: furniture, vegetables, even tombstones. It isn’t until Friday that we notice that a slum forms the backdrop for these strip-malls. I’ve never seen such hard-working poverty before. But that, too, is for another post.
They are fixing the road in Ongata Rongai, and so this means that road itself must be accessed from excavated shoulders that tip our matatu at a precarious thirty-degree angle. Goats and donkeys and dogs nose for food on this shoulder. Legitimate store fronts stand back from the street, so that there is room for produce markets and shoe stalls and the myriad pedestrians.
And there is Beacon of Hope.
We join the women in worship and devotions. The devotion itself is more like a sermon, and the sun streams into the weaving room all the while, our backdrop formed by woven rugs hung like banners. We stand and clap with the women and wish we knew the words, but sometimes they sing in English.
After devotions we have a short meeting. Discussion of the day, plans ahead, who will go where…. And we are off to participate in and around Beacon until tea-time at 11. The tea is served with milk and biscuits in the back room, but these are British biscuits: sweet and crumbly. And then it’s back to work until lunch time.
Beacon is a noisy place. The children move through the hallway and head out into the courtyard/playground for games and songs. They chant as they pass by us, their eyes wide because of all the mzungus around. The women sometimes chatter as they work, and these sounds echo along with the slam of the “beater” as they pound the yarn of their weaving into place. Beacon is noisy, and I love it.
We have lunch in the back room again. Always it is beans and some kind of vegetable. Always we are passing around water to share, and hand sanitizer. And we are sharing the stories of the morning.
And then it’s back to busy-ness again. Maybe today we have home visits, and we cross that under-construction-road into Kware, the slum that is home to many of the the Beacon women. Or maybe it’s other work in Beacon, or a tour of the kikoi shop– another of the types of weaving that Beacon produces.
All of this, of course, is punctuated by laughter and photos, harrowing visits to the potty, and sweet interchanges with the women and children of Beacon of Hope.
We finish our day there by four, piling into our matatus for that long drive home, where the operators of the shanty strip-malls are still hard at work. We arrive at Musmark for showers and walks and dinner. We follow our dinners with meetings about the day: what we saw, what we think of it, what it might mean. And we’re finished with this by nine.
So we pull down our mosquito netting, and we sleep like stones.
