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Kibera Slum, Kenya
In 2004, Simon Peter Waite and Moses Musumba, without knowing quite what to expect, accepted the challenge put to them to move out of one of Nairobi’s more suburban areas and into Kibera, one of the largest slums in Africa. Here is a densely populated community of about 700,000 people living in a place which lacks the most basic facilities of roads, sanitation and electricity and has no permanent structures. This is a city of iron sheet, and mud and stick walls. It is this community that Moses and Simon Peter chose to enter in order to study at the Carlile College Centre for Urban Mission. From this small beginning they have worked with their local Anglican church, helped to plant a new congregation in Kibera and formed the foundations for a small experiment in community-living in the heart of Nairobi’s biggest slum.
Today Simon and Moses live with seven other students, inside Kibera, learning what it means to share in the life of this community and to form a small inserted community based at the Centre for Urban Mission. It has not always been an easy experience. At times the very idea of community living has ground to a halt when valued ideals become discarded around a pile of unwashed dishes. Five of the Centre’s nine resident students moved in this September. They are from different churches in Kenya and Ethiopia. Clearly this is no idyllic community retreat, away from the tensions of urban life. For the Ethiopians, Haile and Markos, the adjustment to this community has perhaps been the most demanding. An Ethiopian in Kibera is not a common sight. Markos thinks back to his first day in Kibera. “All I saw was a very dangerous place to stay, even for one day. Now it is different. Jesus spent time with the poor. He called us to love God and love our neighbour. I now begin to see that happening here and I enjoy being here.” As they struggle to communicate with the women at the roadside kiosks in English and fragments of Kiswahili, which causes no shortage of amusement, they also discover a friendliness and welcome they had not expected in a community like Kibera. “This has become like home”, says Haile. Sometimes it is our vulnerability in marginal places that becomes the very source of our strength.
All the students agreed that moving into Kibera had been tough and that it is the experience of community life in the Centre which enables them to survive. Together they share five simple rooms and study together in the evenings around hurricane lamps. Daniel is from an African Instituted Church where communal values are celebrated. He notes of life in the Centre, “We work as a community, as brothers.” Being community here is essentially practical, cooking together, lending the bus fare to get to college, helping each other in their studies. But this is not community for its own sake but a community with a purpose. For all its friendliness, Kibera also has the marks of a deeply divided community. To be a people from different communities who seek to live out a united presence in such a context is to be prophetic, incarnating the reality that in Christ the dividing walls of hostility have indeed been broken down. At the heart of this community is worship. On Wednesday evening other activities cease as the students and two staff families living at the Centre come together for prayer and bible study. “What unites us,” says Daniel, “is our friendship and common values.” On Sunday these students will go in very different directions. One student will be in the city centre at the Anglican Cathedral, with a congregation in the 1000s and TV screens on the pillars, while another, Daniel, will don his traditional hat and head for a small iron sheet hut where the African Holy Zionist Church meets. But in the midst of such diversity there lies the reality that true community finds its expression, not in the reassurance of similarity, nor in the congeniality of our shared surroundings, but in our convergence around the cross of Christ, seeking to live together a life that celebrates His presence in the heart of His world.
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