“You’ve changed”, my best friend tells me as we walk down the halls to our next class. “Really?” I respond, “How? “You’re just different, I don’t know, you can just tell; you’ve experienced something that has changed you forever.” I look in the mirror and I am still me, still the same, but inside there’s a whirlwind of new emotions and experiences. My senses have gone on overboard and my heart has experienced love and joy to a degree that surpasses this world. Where can I possibly begin? Every story I have read from other short term mission teams say that they can not put into words what they have racing in their minds and their hearts. Our human language has boundaries that can not possibly even scratch the surface of describing the divine.
But here I am again. Going down the same halls, into the same classes, and sitting in the same seat day, after day, after day. It is not the same; I am not the same. My eyes stare ahead at the chalkboard, but my heart is traveling back to Kenya. I am a senior in High School and it is unusual for someone my age to participate in a mission team. When I saw an email saying that team members were needed to teach English to our brothers and sisters in Kenya, there was no question, only a strong calling. I just had to go. I had no idea how to prepare, how I would be excused from school, or how I was even going to go because I was still underage. God had it in His plan. Every piece soon fell into place with my mother even joining me.
When we arrived in Nairobi, we had no idea what would await us. From the moment we stepped off the plane, we were swept into a completely new world. We came to teach, but instead we learned so much more and are still learning to this moment. During our time in Nairobi, we taught and learned at the St. Clement of Alexandria Primary School, the Orthodox College of Africa, and the Makarios III Seminary, where we spent most of our time. These schools were on the same compound, but surrounding them was the Kibera slum, the largest in Kenya and in all of Africa.
At the Primary School, my team member and I were put in charge of teaching a lesson on the cross and doing a craft. We crowded half of the three hundred children into the cafeteria and taught about the importance of the cross throughout the Old and New Testament, even teaching a song about how and why we do the sign of the cross. Then, we gave each child a cord, nine beads, and taught them how to make a beaded cross. The younger one’s struggled with a slightly more difficult step and we were bombarded with voices asking for help, “Te-cha! Te-cha! Te-cha! (Teacher), help me please!” Eventually all the crosses were done, but throughout the day the children kept coming back wanting to make even more, and to play, talk, and be with us. It was touching to see the children continuing to wear their crosses four days after making them.
Throughout our time there, we experienced genuine relationships that would take up an entire book, with a few volumes, so that every detail can be written. One experience that specifically stood out for me was when I was invited over for dinner, along with the long-term missionary, to a young woman’s home who had just finished her student teaching at St. Clement School. She lived a little deeper into the slums and we walked to her house as the sun was setting. We had to walk through hanging laundry and a narrow wet walkway to get to her door. She unlocked her simple wooden door and welcomed us in. When she plugged in her light bulb, I was at first surprised that she did not live with her parents and then at the tiny size of her home. None of that mattered when I saw all the icons adorning her walls. I was humbled in the fact that her home was smaller than my room and that she had had us over for dinner, especially me who was still a newcomer. Her prayer struck me most as she asked God to bless us her sisters, and thanked Him for her happiness in having guests for dinner. We remain sisters though we are half a globe away.
It was not the things we taught, witnessed, or learned, but the people themselves who made such a profound impact on me. Not a day passed without everyone having a smile on their faces and doing everything in their power to make us feel welcome. They would sing, dance, and share their life’s stories. In hearing those stories, it was difficult to believe that these people, in front of you, had experienced such hardships and are still smiling from ear to ear. It is because they have something we take for granted. Christ is their “strength and their song”, literally. Every breath, every word, every note, every moment is to the Glory of God. Each person was on fire for Orthodoxy. It was stunning. They had the Divine Love that you only read about in books, but it was fully alive. I will never forget the first vesper services we were blessed to experience at the Seminary Chapel. The floor was shaking from the voices that were so full of life and love, chanting the hymns of the next morning. And the children, who had very little, some even without parents, were always joyous and their smilies were contagious. They were so curious about everything; life, our Faith, and of course America. In the beginning we were strangers, but by the end of our time there, we were family. It did not matter what language we spoke, what we looked like, or where we were from. We are family because Christ is at the center of it all.
The hardest part of the entire journey was not traveling or taking in a completely different world, it was leaving those who I had come to love so deeply and fully with the knowledge that I might not ever see them again. The relationships we created and continue to foster, were friendship I have never made so strongly and quickly before, even at all the camps I have attended. It is because they are grounded fully on our Orthodox faith and life, overflowing and full of love, that nothing can ever break.
My first week back in school, my teacher asked me if I was “back to reality.” This question bothers me still. What I experienced is a reality, truer in many ways, in addition to the life I have here. Our English language limits our boundaries of love to only one word. “Love” can not possibly define the colorful dimensions of the infinite reality of Divine Love. Words give no justice at all to this reality. With these limited words, however, we must inspire each other to go out, and experience the richness of Christ’s Divine Love in every situation, with every person that we encounter in our life’s journey. We do not always have to step out of our own community or country to enter into such a profound relationship. Every moment, every single person around us, brings an opportunity to share the awesome love that has filled our own hearts and is waiting to flow into the hearts of those around us.
