My Neighbors

June 2, 2012

Today we spent the morning in Korogocho, one of the worst slums in all of Nairobi.  I don’t know if I can even describe with justice what it’s like there.  There’s trash everywhere, dirty kids playing on the muddy, sewer laden roads, drunken men staggering about, and desperate women manning booths of vegetables and other odds and ends for sale.  If you dwell on your perception of sadness, you can be overwhelmed by the disparity between how these people live compared to how we live.  In reality, those dirty, “hopeless” kids often have friends, play games, invent toys, and enjoy life.  In contrast, they may not know what the next meal will be if it comes and they may not go to school because it’s expensive and they may face the darkness of witch doctors throughout their nights, filling their minds with nightmares and fear. 

This was the first thing that struck me of the day- I could not fix the problems of Korogocho, even if I had all the time and resources in the world.  What these kids and their parents need is the light of Jesus, and only then will their lives begin to change.  But what I could do, I did.  I gave the kids a smile for the day.  The joy of the Lord flowed through me, and I couldn’t stop the cheek-breaking painful smile that plastered itself on my face for the next couple of hours!  And they would laugh at us and cry out “Mzungu!” (white person!) as we walked by, but they LAUGHED!  And for that day, that’s what we could offer, so that’s what we gave them! 

As we walked through, we had the opportunity to pray over many people from the church and their neighbors.  We prayed against those nightmares, the sickness, the alcoholism, and the desperation of living in poverty.  We prayed in faith that God will use these people as LIGHTS to their corner of the world, just as we are called to be LIGHTS to our corner of the world!  Their small one room shanty’s barely allowed us to crowd in together, making it hard to believe that these people lived there with families of 5-8 people!  My heart broke especially over the desperation of my sister’s in Christ- their desires to see their husbands know the Lord, their ambitions to raise their children in the Lord, and their hopes for work and provision from the Lord were so humbling.  And each of the could rattle a list of other homes we should visit before leaving because their occupants had some need. 

Which brings me to the second lesson of the day- how many of us KNOW our neighbors?  How many of us know what they need prayer over?  How many of us even know if our neighbors know Jesus?  It’s amazing what sort of self-centered blinds materialism drops over our eyes.  I don’t even know all of my neighbors’ names.  What if we all went out of our way to just reach our neighborhood for Christ?!  Forget the rest of the world for a second- what if we followed the Great Commission right where God has us now, faithfully spreading His Words to the broken, dying people around us?  What if we dared to reach out?  How would our country change?  I guess it’s like a saying I saw on a t-shirt, “I need Africa more than Africa needs me.”