Kings Family CMS Link Letter 4, Aug 1986
by Graham Kings
Date added: 24/12/2023
A couple of huge ostriches ambled out of our way, as we approached the manyatta. Daniel Sankete’s stepmother was not at home. His stepsister told us she had gone, with a delegation, to visit a famous Maasai laibon (prophet) near the Tanzanian border, to consult God about the infertility of several local women. After much sharing of news and drinking of boiled milk, we walked the two hours back home through the dry bush country.
I was staying with Daniel and his family for six days over Easter. He is one of our third-year students and the first member of the Maasai tribe to train for ordination at St Andrew’s Institute. He explained on the way back that a woman in his area had been infertile and was prayed over in the church. After two years she had given birth to twins, and then later to another set of twins and now she was pregnant again!
The Maasai are a nomadic, pastoral people who live in small low houses made of branches and cow dung, which take about four days to construct. At first, it seemed very dark inside and smoky from the wood fire, but I soon adjusted to it. I slept comfortably on a cow skin, laid over a raised bed of branches. Several houses of the extended family form the manyatta. It is surrounded by a wide thorn fence, which protects the people, cows, and goats at night from leopards and lions. I wasn’t too worried, because Daniel had killed a lion when he was in the warrior age-group.
Cows are the wealth of the Maasai and are milked in the early morning by the women, using long gourds as containers. These are cleaned by thrusting lighted olive twigs inside them. The milk and yoghurt (maziwa lala, ‘milk which has slept’) are kept in separate gourds and both have a tasty tang of olive wood.
On Easter Day, I baptised Samuel Kasaine, Daniel and Rosemary’s first-born son and my godson. The church, which is only two years old and already has twenty members, met in the primary school buildings. Returning from Maasailand in southern Kenya, I travelled by a series of five matatus, from Mile 46, near the manyatta. These privately owned vans, crammed with passengers, are the most popular form of transport. I passed through Kajiado, and then Nairobi, with its skyscrapers, computers and fast sophisticated life, and on to Kabare and the family.
Alison had two weeks in England with the children in May, to attend her best friend’s wedding. It was a great opportunity and encouragement to see relatives and friends again, especially our parents, despite the extra stress shown in Rosalind’s and Miriam’s sleep patterns. Alison has been busy recently making various dresses on her sewing machine for friends at Kabare. Rosalind is gradually picking up some of the Kikuyu language through playing with the children of other members of staff. In September, she moves from the nursery to the more structured Primary School course which Alison teaches her at home. Miriam joins them for a story at the beginning. She will see the sea for the first time in her life as we go to Mombasa for a holiday. At the moment, when she points to a picture of the sea in a book, she says, ‘pool’.
We have made a tape-slide presentation of our first year’s reflections here, which is going round our link churches during the next six months. Do write to us with your questions and reactions to it.
Currently, Africa and Britain are linked, and locked, in conflict over sanctions against South Africa. How do you perceive this from your situation? Our Bishop, David Gitari, had been invited to be the official Anglican chaplain to the Commonwealth Games and had prepared six talks for Scottish television. But after much prayer and the Kenyan boycott he also pulled out. What has the Church in Africa to share with the Church in Britain? Perhaps this call to active solidarity with the suffering people of South Africa, and a concern for the sheer breadth of the Gospel, which brings freedom and challenge to every aspect of our lives.
Thank you for your prayers for the Church here and for us. May our God, who comforts the afflicted and in doing so often afflicts the comfortable, give us his wholeness now and for ever.
The index page of our 17 CMS Link Letters, 1985-1991, is here.
