by James Martin, S.J.; Maryknoll, NY; Orbis Books.
219 pp. Paper $18.00
Each of the
twenty-nine chapters in this book reads like a short short story, a vignette
in the two-year ministry of Jesuit Brother James Martin in Nairobi, Kenya.
We meet missionaries and refugees; we gain insight into the struggle of
refugees to survive and thrive; we travel to distant villages; we watch
Brother Jim’s spirit deepen and broaden.
Brother Jim
worked with the Jesuit Relief Service, with the assignment to help refugees
set up small businesses. Refugees came from Somalia, Rwanda, Burundi,
Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Sudan, Mozambique and Liberia. Assistance
consisted of supplying tools and raw materials, help in managing money, and
finding markets.
We share
Brother Jim’s initiation into the ways of the poor—searching through
garbage, for example, for useful or precious items. After throwing some
magazines and some Jesuit community newsletters into the trash, and lighting
the already smoldering garbage heap with eucalyptus leaves (for odor
control), he noticed the community’s watchman scavenging the burning dump.
Later, he found pictures of Jesuits torn from a newsletter on the wall of
Joseph’s shack. “I am so happy,” he said, “to be having your friends in my
house.”
This incident
reminded me of two learning experiences I had. One was in a rural area in
Nicaragua. I was with the women making tortillas, and thought to try my
hand at it. I failed, and we all laughed at the clumsy gringa. As I left, I
picked up the small squares of waxed paper used to separate the patties of
dough, and threw them into the garbage. In my peripheral vision, I saw a
woman retrieve them, wipe them clean, and place them with other squares for
future use. A second incident occurred in a street in Kabul, where garbage
was heaped up. I saw a man search the heap, and hold up a piece of
lettuce, which he ate.
Is it
important for preachers to read of these realities—or better yet, experience
them? Can they be reserves for preaching to us comfortable middle-class
citizens of the United States? Of course, there are plenty of similar
stories in pockets of our own country.
Brother Jim,
it seems, never stopped learning. On one occasion, he scolded Specie
Kantegwa, a Rwandese refugee, for selling the sewing machine she had
received from the JRS to begin a business. Specie explained that the
Maasai watchman of their slum, in a fit of rage, had slit the throat of her
sister, and she was left to care for her niece. She had no money for food,
and sold the machine to raise money. “After Specie finished her story,
she lifted her face from her nursing child and turned toward me. ‘Now
Brother,’ she said calmly, ‘That is why I sold my machine. May I have a new
Singer so I can be starting over?’”
The book
includes lush descriptions of Kenya’s countryside as Jim and three Jesuit
friends travel to Mombasa, an eight-hour, bumpy ride from Nairobi. And, in
contrast, it contains graphic descriptions of Nairobi’s slums, complete with
evocation of the smell.
This is a
good bedside book. The chapters are short, and their resonance remains in
a reader’s mind and imagination. Maybe best of all, James Martin has an
enviable gift for story telling.
Pat Chaffee, OP
Racine, Wisconsin
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