nairobi

Judith Siambe 6-01-2020

A public health mural in the Mathare Valley of Nairobi, Kenya / Thomas Mukoya / Reuters

“IN OUR COMMUNITY, the way homes are clustered and clumped together, there is no social distancing. There is poor water supply. There is a poor drainage system. What hit me so hard was that if this disease were to get in the areas where we are working, it would mean that the whole population of that area would be cleared out. Because if one person gets the disease, it would really spread so fast to other people.

People in Mathare [in Nairobi] depend on day-to-day activities for earning income—you wake up in the morning, someone will call you to wash their clothes, to do their household chores. So you can’t tell them to work from home because they have to go out and [earn money] for food.

Image via RNS/Fredrick Nzwili

"They want their supporters to believe this is a divine call, which is not. I think they are manipulating their supporters," said the Rev. Wilybard Lagho, the Mombasa Roman Catholic archdiocese vicar general.

Image via RNS/Fredrick Nzwili

Starting in the suburb of Ruiru, about 19 miles north of Nairobi, the train for the past five years has informally hosted a growing number of self-styled pastors and a makeshift, moving congregation eager to hear the gospel.

At least two coaches turn into “churches” each day, with Christians singing, dancing, and clapping as they prepare for a short sermon during the one-hour journey.

Image via RNS/Fredrick Nzwili

The drought in the Sahel — a region that forms a dry belt across northern Africa — has left millions without any water to drink, and is being linked to three deaths in recent days in Kenya, due to consumption of unsafe water.

“There are no drops to reduce, recycle, or reuse,” said professor Jesse Mugambi, of the University of Nairobi, who added that many in the region are spending World Water Day “praying for drops of rain to quench their thirst and that of their livestock.”

Image via RNS/Reuters/Siegfried Modola

Clutching a Bible in one hand and a walking stick in the other, Pastor Stephen Lenku Tipatet traverses the plains of Kajiado County, fighting female circumcision and propounding on the Christian gospel.

The region is the homeland of the Maasai, an indigenous community in Southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. The community has resisted modernity and Western influences, and clings to their traditional way of life, including the practice of female genital mutilation, or FGM.

Image via RNS/Reuters/Noor Khamis

Roman Catholic bishops in Rwanda have issued an apology for the role played by individual clergy and church members, in the 1994 genocide in which nearly 1 million ethnic Tutsis and Hutus were killed.

On Nov. 20, the apology was read aloud in all Catholic churches, in the local Kinyarwanda dialect. It came at the end of Pope Francis’ Jubilee Year of Mercy.

Image via Fredrick Nzwili / RNS

A Catholic priest has denounced the killings of two legendary lions, one violently speared by a Maasai warrior, outside the city’s famous national park. Lions and other wildlife roam freely in the wild in the 45 square-mile Nairobi National Park. A popular tourist destination, the park is only a short drive from the central business district and has earned Nairobi the distinction of the world’s wildlife capital.

Catherine Woodiwiss 12-17-2015

Amani Gardens. Image via Catherine Woodiwiss/Sojourners

The work of transformation — of land, or of legacy — is never complete. And for Western Christians, inheritors of a religion built and carried by ethnocentrism and economic exploitation, the work to detangle faith from the structures that continue to support it is an extra challenge. When survival of the church demands profit, what do you monetize? When community requires boundaries, whom do you leave out? 

Fredrick Nzwili / RNS

Community leaders, politicians and administration officers pour contents of an illicit brew during a crackdown in July 2015. Photo via Fredrick Nzwili / RNS

Clerics in Kenya are backing a presidential decree banning homemade brews, largely blamed for a recent spate of deaths in the East African nation.

The homemade alcoholic drinks, popularly dubbed chang’aa (“kill me quick”) or Kumi Kumi (ten-ten shillings), are popular with the poor, who cannot afford commercially brewed bottled beer, which is heavily taxed.

Until recently, most Kenyan homemade brews were safe and were consumed at traditional parties, but unscrupulous brewers in the last few years have been introducing industrial chemicals such as methanol to make the drinks stronger and to quicken the brewing process, turning the drinks into poisons.

Some church pastors have HIV-invited infected people to prayers and pronounced healing. RNS photo by Fredrick Nzwili

At prayer healing services in some Pentecostal churches, pastors invite people infected with HIV to come forward for a public healing, after which they burn the person’s anti-retroviral medications and declare the person cured.

The “cure” is not free, and some people say they shell out their life savings to receive a miracle blessing and quit taking the drugs.

“I believe people can be healed of all kinds of sickness, including HIV, through prayers,” said Pastor Joseph Maina of Agmo Prayer Mountain, a Pentecostal church on the outskirts of Nairobi. “We usually guide them. We don’t ask for money, but we ask them to leave some seed money that they please.”

But the controversial ceremonies are raising red flags as believers’ conditions worsen, and a debate has opened over whether science or religion should take the lead in the fight against the AIDS epidemic.

Trevor Barton 1-28-2013
Boys hands hugging globe in classroom / Getty Images

Boys hands hugging globe in classroom / Getty Images

I received a galimoto for Christmas. In case you didn't know, a galimoto is a toy vehicle created out of sticks, cornstalks, wire or anything children can take into their hands and make into a thing with wheels. Mine is a bicycle made of wire. There is a wire child in colorful cloth on the bicycle seat, a rider whose legs pedal as the wheels move. It is beautiful in its simplicity, astonishing in its complexity. It came from the hands of a child in Kenya. I love it.

I brought my galimoto to school and introduced it to my third-grade students. They held it in their hands, marveled at its design, and pushed it around the classroom. "A kid made this?" Matthew asked. "Amazing!"

We looked at a globe and located South Carolina and Kenya. We flew with our fingers from Greenville across the Atlantic Ocean across Africa to Nairobi. We wondered what it would be like to live there. What would the weather be like? What foods would we eat? What kind of house would we live in? What clothes would we wear? What would our school be like? What would our parents do? What would we play with? "I know what we would play with," said Syleana with a smile. "A galimoto!"

We took a picture walk through the book Galimoto written by Karen Lynn Williams and illustrated by Catherine Stock. "What do you notice when you look at the cover of the book?" I asked. 

"It looks like the little boy is poor," answered Zaniya. 

"Why do you think he's poor?" I continued. 

Kenyan churches are tightening security after a lone attacker exploded a grenade inside an evangelical church in Nairobi on Sunday (April 29), killing one person and injuring 15.

Meanwhile, a string of bombings in Nigeria during Sunday morning worship services killed at least four people in Maiduguri and 15 in Kano, with many others injured.

The Kenya attacks at the God's House of Miracles International Church occurred days after the U.S. embassy warned of an impending attack by al-Shabab, a militant Islamist group in neighboring Somalia.