Time for Chai

It’s been nearly a dozen years since I stepped on a plane for a journey halfway around the world that will never end.  I had just married my college sweetheart, Matt, and we were moving to Kenya.  If you had asked me two years prior to this moment if this is what I would be doing, I wouldn't have believed it!  However, with anticipation in my heart and excitement taking over, I was ready for this adventure, or so I thought.  Little did I know how this experience would change the core and future of my life.

Two years before stepping on that plane, I had traveled to Kenya on a mission trip with a team from APU.  We stayed in a remote village called Ilula where the majority of the villagers live on less than $2 per day.  As we drove to the agricultural training center where we were staying, the car bounced and skidded on the muddy road, the aroma of roasted corn filled the rickety vehicle, and my eyes were drawn to the children in their bright yellow school uniforms playing soccer with a ball they had made out of wire and plastic bags.

Every day I walked the roads of Ilula, taking in the sights and sounds. Wherever I went people would stop what they were doing, invite me inside their cozy homes, go to their kitchen for about 15 minutes and return with a pot of chai (Swahili for "tea").  At first my tastebuds were not used to it, and I found it difficult to swallow, but it quickly became delicious because of what it represented.  I was amazed...everyone would take time out of their busy days to stop everything just to spend time with me, a stranger. 

As the weeks passed, the sights and sounds of these home visits and the growing relationships impacted me in a way that began to move me to see the world through new lenses. 

The day our team waved goodbye, I knew I had left a piece of my heart and determined to return.  Exactly two years later I would be back.   In the course of those two years, I had finished school, and married Matt, who was on that team with me.  With congruent hearts, we packed our bags and arrived in Ilula where we would live for the next two years. 

In front of our hut when Matt's parents came to visit.

Our round grass-thatched hut awaited us, and I quickly began to decorate our home, which barely had enough room for a bed and a place to put the four gray bins we had meticulously packed.  There was no running water or electricity, so every day consisted of a splash bath in the morning after heating up the water over an open fire, and bathroom trips to the choo (outhouse) that often sounded like a Nascar race with flies zooming around my head.  The conditions contrasted much of what I was used to, but it was simple and beautiful.

While Matt worked with the men and youth to help create income-generating projects, my days were spent with the women and children. I went to help and to teach but very shortly I realized that I was the student in a land that had so much to teach me. 

Life became something that isn’t easily taken for granted. In my first 22 years of life, I had been to two funerals.  In the two years we lived in Kenya, we attended 12 funerals.  Yet in the births that I witnessed and the deaths we were there for, I learned that how I perceive every day I am given makes all the difference. 

If I wasn’t teaching, I would strap on my small backpack containing a water bottle, band-aids for open wounds many of the children had from climbing through barbed wire fences on their way to school, and my English-Swahili dictionary.  Despite the work needing to be done by the women (e.g. laundry by hand, walk miles to get a few gallons of water and carry it back in a jug on their heads, beat the millet they had grown to make porridge, resurface their mud and dung floors and walls, etc.), no one is too busy.  Everyone has time for each other and always time for chai.  I got used to the saying “Ngoja kidogo”—wait just a little.  That meant chai was coming.  Sometimes they would apologize because there wasn’t any milk, or sugar, but they would always come with chai. 

 I was humbled. They were teaching me grace, giving, and gratitude. 

One young girl that forever changed my life was Janet.  She was 12 years old, and she had never been to school due to the inability to use her legs.  She could go to school only if she was carried, but no one would or could.  As I walked the lush, green hill to her home one day, she left the laundry she was scrubbing and crawled to greet me with a smile so bright it made the sun look dim.  Despite her circumstances, she had gratitude and joy which taught me to appreciate the things that I have and to not take anything for granted.  Matt and I knew we had to do something. 

About six months later after fundraising by Matt’s mom in the States, we were able to accompany her to the other side of Kenya where there were doctors who were willing to take on her case and see if they could help her.  She went through numerous extensive and painful surgeries in her legs and hips and began for the first time in her life to hope and believe that one day she could walk and go to school.  Before we left, we witnessed the miracle of her walking with braces on her legs, and her attending school for the first time.  The name of her new school was: Joyland Academy. A perfect name and place for this sweet girl. What we were able to provide for her was a mere drop compared to the beautiful waterfall she poured into our hearts.  

It’s been a decade since we left Kenya and returned to Southern California, and there are some days I long to walk those dusty roads again.  Janet’s smile remains in the forefront of my memory, and my heels are still rough from those daily walks from one home to another.  I hope they always will be.  The dust of those roads will forever remain on me as I went as a girl with expectations of adventure and returned a woman who became so much more.

In society’s eyes, it seemed we made sacrifices when we were in Kenya; we didn’t move up the corporate ladder, buy the newest cars or get a big house, or expect anything under the Christmas tree.  However, for us not to go would have been the sacrifice.  It was entirely a privilege.

For most of us, life is busy.  I’m now a mother of young children who are active in sports, work outside the home, and help run our business, yet the pace of Kenya beckons when the freeway pace of life overtakes me. 

 
Once again, I am reminded to slow down, to realize we only have one chance to live, and to make choices based upon how, when all is said and done, what matters...how we love, serve, and give. This is a journey, a daily reminder.  

Now I know there’s always time for chai.