Bonde la Ufa

As I write this I am thinking of a man I used to know, a man who has recently died and about whose death I just have learned. This was a good man, kind and self-sacrificing, who was a missionary in Kenya. I was friends with his youngest son, and when I was ten years old, my parents (God bless them for this!) sent me to visit my friend and his family. I flew from Houston, Texas to Amsterdam in the company of a family acquaintance and from then on to Nairobi, a long, long flight.

Seriously jet-lagged when I arrived, I vaguely remember being bundled into a car and hitting the road for the long drive northwest to a town called Kitale, in the shadow of Mount Elgon. Sitting in the backseat between two other boys, I was rocked to sleep almost instantly by the thrum of the motor, the steady rhythm of tires on asphalt, the warm breezes that blew through open windows. I remember waking up after what must have been several hours and feeling a terrible pain in my neck; I had fallen asleep with my head leaning straight back. But I regained my senses immediately, as a sight that I’ll never forget seized me through the windows. Pain? What pain? I was staring at the edge of the world.

We were driving a narrow road that skirted the Rift Valley, a cleft that appeared, in the eyes of a ten-year-old, to have no end. Instantly, that green divide, dappled by shifting shadows from clouds overhead, burned itself into my memory as deeply as my own mother’s voice. In that moment a door opened that led me on to new thoughts. The world grew bigger in my mind and before my eyes. I began to realize that there was much more “out there” than I knew—maybe more than I could ever know.

And that view was only the primer’s first lesson. There were other introductions to this immense new world, too numerous to count—a swaying cobra, hood spread, that rose up in the backyard and made us run away screaming; “wood-borer” bees, black and about the size of my ten-year-old thumb; the tangy taste of edible clover and sweet nectar of tiny white flowers that we were introduced to by Kenyan boys who became our friends. I can’t forget the sight of a lake, far below the high road, literally covered by flamingos, glaring pink under the harsh sun—surely it’s no exaggeration to say that they numbered in the thousands. And earlier that morning, a valley whose floor was covered in mist, tops of trees floating in the fog like islands on a gauzy sea.

Toward the end of my stay, we made a trip to the Masai Mara Game Reserve in western Kenya, near the border with Tanzania. The savannah held species of animals that I had seen in zoos, in pictures, or in dreams, all roaming free—elephants, lions, Cape Buffalo, giraffes, hyenas, zebras, gazelles. I was mesmerized . . . and terrified. We saw all these animals and more. We saw impossibly tall, striking Masai men and women who walked with a regal bearing, swathed in red and brown cloth and carrying spears. We saw hordes of children our age and younger that rushed our car at a rural gas station, smiling and waving and speaking Swahili to us. And we prayed.

This family prayed to a God who was infinitely larger than I had known. They lived in a fantastically immense world. Visiting with them had begun a process of inquiry in me that I pray never ends.