A wandering Aramean was my father...

"Where's home?"  a stranger may ask to initiate conversation at a party or seated next to me on the plane, or I may ask the same question, interested in knowing more about a person, because where one considers "home" helps me understand that person a bit more, at least theoretically.  And the people I encounter in day-to-day life have answers to this question; they're able to give a place, a specific location that each person claims as home, some more passionately than others, but home nonetheless.

Those who know me know that one of my favorite things to do is to host a dinner party in the home that Bob and I share, surrounded by material things that tie us to generations who have gone before, in a house that has seen over 200 years of activity, and in a little corner of the world where my family has lived  since before our nation even existed.  For me it is an extension of hospitality born of a rootedness and a sense of identity that I had nothing to do with, one inherited by luck and by grace, joined now by someone who has chosen to be a part of that with me, someone who offers the safety and intimacy of relationship.  We have a home, a home that forms and shapes as much we have formed and shaped it.  Home is where the heart is, they say. Home sweet home.  There's no place like home for the holidays.  Home, home on the range. Home is that place that each of us can identify as a place from where or a place to where we each go; the dwelling, the place, the land, the peple from which we come; the community that formed/forms us; ideally the thing that shelters us and provides for a sense of safety and comfort amidst the chances and challenges of life.  If the adage is true, then home is where we lodge the core of our being, our heart, the very organ that provides for the blood in our veins, the machinery of our life-source.  It is at the center of who we are.

And on this trip I have learned about the hundred of thousands of persons (580,000+ in Kenya alone) for whom a question of home is a difficult one, for, in truth, they have none.  I have learned (and written) of the people housed at Gihembe whom we visited, people who, because of political strife, are considered neither Congolese nor Rwandan, unwelcome in both places and housed in camps until resettlement for some, until death for others, but my heart has grown heavier as I pay attention to other human beings who also have an inability to call anywhere or anything home.

My heart breaks for the Somalis who were forced to leave their homes and villages as a result of religio-political battles in their homeland, just northeast of here, across the border from Kenya.   Persons who called South Sudan home and who have had to flee their homes and lands because of similar circumstances, raids on their villages at night, abuses of their women and children, murder of their men, unspeakable atrocities for the modern, Western mind, realities we dismiss as impossible in our comfortability of safety.  

And we learned today of the reality of life for the LGBTI persons who flee Uganda as a result of draconian laws enacted by the legislature (and later annulled by the high court, but only on a techinicality) with another draft of the law coming before the legislature this spring, not only  criminalizing homosexual acts, but offering execution as a way to rid Uganda of the scourge of homosexuality, all of this assisted by the involvement, both idealogically and materially, of American Evangelicals.  Men and women now flee for their lives from a hostile homeland as a result of their sexuality, men and women who have even more in common with me than simply co-participants in the human condition.

And in the midst of this I experience the most gracious hospitality and welcome from a Kenyan clergyman and his wife, who invited us into their home after church Sunday and insisted that we stay for not only tea, but also luncheon itself, followed by yet another round of tea.  This radical hospitality extended to strangers, foreigners wandering in a foreign land, was so humbling and comforting amidst my increasingly unsettled mind, disturbed by a dawning and dispiriting redefinition of homelessness.   

My mind has wandered, as it often does, into the holy text and especially to stories of the Israelites and the pre-Israelites, who shared much with the Sudanese and the Somali and the Congolese, all homeless tribes in search of a homeland.  Admittedly the Genesis accounts begin with Abram willingly responding to God, a new relationship in itself, but Abram left his homeland and went as a foreigner to a foreign land.  And his great-grandsons who, after a bit of double-dealing with their brother Joseph, fled to Egypt as a result of an enduring famine in their own Canaan, refugees like the first wave of Somalis that came across the border into Kenya.  And that the descendants of Jacob, those brothers who, like the Rwandans who fled into Zaire, multiplied and after a regime change ("there came over Egypt a new king who did not know Joseph") became unwelcome in their new country and left in an exodus, though the Hebrews wandered in the desert for the 40 years and Congolese went into refugee camps, the stark mixing of legend/legacy and brutal reality.

And that's just the Hebrew Scripture, not even touching on the Christian texts, which begin with Jesus' family itself as the very first Christian refugees, fleeing their homeland for fear of the death of the Christ Child.

Do we not all search for home? Do we not all yearn for a place, a people, a locale to call our own, an identity greater than individual self but which informs selfhood, even establishes it? Do we not also yearn, or take for granted, the place that shelters and secures us, both physically and metaphorically, emotionally and mentally, an oasis amidst the freneticism of reality? The tragedy for me this day, a persistent disturbance, is the inability for these groups of persons to claim home in any sense of the world, unwanted and rejected by other persons who believe themselves justified in their actions, justified enough to kill, rape, mame, torture, burn, extort, threaten, or any other dehumanizing verb one wishes to use.

For Christians, Jews, and Muslims, our father was indeed a wandering Aramean who found a home in a foreign land.  My prayer is the same for these children of the same Father, the very same God whose heart breaks for his children. My prayer is for a home for those who cannot claim home.

Eyes as windows

It was in the eyes. It was in the eyes of the children, the sixth grade boys, in the mud-floored classroom, sitting three abreast at their little desks on benches, their school uniforms soiled because of the lack of water in the camp with which to wash them. It was in their eyes, despite perhaps the four books that they had to share amongst the entire class, the flimsy sheet of a quiz that one boy held, creased and itself soiled like their uniforms, worn from the hundreds of times that that very quiz have been taken over and over and over again. And I mean that sheet of paper, that very quiz, that had been taken over and over and over again, written on top of by countless boys in the mud-floored classroom with one window and no chalkboard, the mud walls themselves used as a surface on which to write.

The thing that was in the eyes of those boys, a brightness, a spark, while they jostled on common benches, was in such remarkable contrast to their surroundings.  I feel cliche even writing it, but the vibration of energy from those boys, who have nothing else in the world but hope, was palpable. Our guides asked that we share things with the students, such as inspirational messages, through our translator, and we did, but as is par for the course, I said nothing, nothing, that is, until we were walking out the door. I decided that I could not leave without adding my own words. I told them, in all earnestness, that working hard in school was so very important. But I also told them never to stop dreaming, for I cannot imagine a life in which one cannot even do that. Later in the day, however, I saw that life.

I saw that life in the blank and faded eyes of older men in the town hall meeting, where we bright and scrubbed, well fed Americans sat in front of over 100 refugees, some of whom had been there for nearing twenty years, and some of whom had known no other life at all, in fact, though their faces belied chronological youth. I saw a hardness in some, a frustration in some, but in most I simply saw nothing at all, the emptiness of waiting for something, something at all.

Most of these men will be resettled somewhere on this great globe that hopefully welcomes them, the nation-less men that they are, supposedly Congolese but not really, supposedly Rwandan but not really, unwelcome by both and unable to live in either country, unable to call any place home.  Desperate for a better life, some, others simply seemed resigned to nothingness, forgotten, pushed out, discarded, barely having escaped with their lives, beaten, shot at, and having endured unspeakable atrocities. Or can I call this a life at all?

Somewhere between the eyes of a sixth-grade boy and a hardened man, the spark flickers. Perhaps it gets rekindled once he gets to a new reality in a new country, but on this afternoon, on this side of the Atlantic and on this barren hilltop above the eucalyptus trees in Northern Rwanda, the embers are strewn thin.