Roka Secondary School

I suppose it was only a matter of time ‘til I found myself where my missionary journey began, on a construction site. Two of my Kenyan brothers and a pair of the village’s Mzee, respected older gentlemen, were commissioned to build a classroom at a nearby secondary school. Daniel, the older of my brothers, had ecstatically accepted his first contract in hopes of establishing his budding construction business. Every morning as I pushed a hot cup of tea into his hands and every night as we stared into the jiko’s coals, he regaled me with progress and problem solving of this premier job. At every meeting, he requested I go and see for myself how he is getting on.

Without much commitment, it became a biweekly behavior to travel with the men of my community to the construction site. The work itself was efficient, not wasteful and creative. We sang, danced and drank sodas as we re-shaped used nails, tap-tap-tap. We climbed trees and chatted as we leveled the tall columns. The men used their bare feet as hands while tying rebar and nailing. Slowly, slowly, they let me participate in the cement mixing, mortar laying and painting.

For now, we are a fixture of the school, just as the new classroom will be. The school day begins, we change into work clothes, and continues as a local Mama delivers steaming beans and mendazi (Kenyan donuts) for breakfast. I chat with the coy school girls in Swahili and begin to make friends. Even with my regular attendance and Giriama(the mother tongue) greetings, the students openly gawk at the white girl. “Even me, I have never painted like that”, one student admits. “You know! You can do…well?! ”, some say.

Daniel, Peter and Mzee Philip remind me, “You are changing the image of the white man. Most think Mzungu men don’t know how to work. And you…you are a LADY!”

My final day at the work site we are chattering about Dallas, Tx. So many questions arise from the group. My brothers have never seen a map of where America is in the world. I rustle through some classrooms to find a globe, we are at a school after all.

We huddled together to see the journey from Dallas to the Kenyan coast on the globe. I told stores of international air travel as I traced the distance from one home to another. Feeling a bit sheepish that I had the money to make such a flight, I looked up at my exclusively foot traveling Kenyans. Mzee looked back at me with such emotion in his face and urgency in his voice “Journeys are difficult and stress and costly. But you came here. Your journey preaches. Serious.”