War of the worlds?

Open sewers: Conditions in Kibera slum
[Photo: C Smith / CMS]

Picking carefully through the mud and open sewers of Nairobi’s largest slum, Colin Smith could be forgiven for wishing he was with his wife Anita in the luxury, air-conditioned house of one of her ’parishioners’.

Both ordained ministers in their forties, Anita and Colin work with very different groups of people - about as different as you can get.

Colin spends his days in the middle of Kibera slum, training students for mission to poor urban areas. A typical field trip might mean cleaning out drains or chatting to regulars in a dive bar.

Meanwhile, Anita might be taking tea with some of the richest people in Kenya.

“About four weeks ago Anita was on a balloon safari while I was conducting a wedding in the slum,” Colin laughs. “But I'm not jealous. It feels such a privilege to work where I do.”

“For both of us it's the relationships with people that we really appreciate.”

The people Anita works with belong to Nairobi’s expatriate and white Kenyan community. She is effectively a ’roving chaplain’ to them, on behalf of the mainly black African congregation of All Saints Cathedral in Nairobi.

Among this elite group, Anita says, a man over the age of 20 with no pilot's licence is something of an oddity.

Yet both Colin and Anita insist they are doing “mission at the margins”.

He has just sent three students from the slums of Nairobi on a six-week placement to the slums of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia - “from the margins to the margins” as he puts it.

“Connecting with people who don't really fit,” is how Anita describes her work.

While the families that live crammed into a 10-by-10 feet shack with no electricity or running water are obviously marginalised, Anita says the four-by-four SUV drivers with wraparound shades are equally pushed to the edges in terms of faith.

The community she works among is barely touched by the Church, though there may have been some Christian influence in upbringing or schooling.

“They come to the Church at the big moments,” says Anita. Births, deaths, and marriages are their only point of contact with institutional Christianity - as for many in modern Britain.

Anita sees her mission in very simple terms. “When they need us, we've just got to be there.”

This relatively small community includes many farm-owners, conservationists and people running tourist safaris.

However, it would be wrong to paint them as a rich elite making money off the backs of the poor, says Anita. “Some may fall into that category but many are working closely with people in rural areas so that money goes back into the community. Generally speaking they are putting something back.”

In contrast, the worlds of the urban rich and poor hardly ever touch. Anita thinks of herself as “a reminder of the other side” and says that among her wealthy friends there is always a genuine interest and admiration for the work Colin is doing.

Although they talk enthusiastically about each other’s work, Anita and Colin still struggle with how to bridge the gap between the two worlds.

“We often think about the parable of Dives and Lazarus,” he continues, referring to Luke's Gospel story of the rich man who ignores the poor Lazarus, covered in sores, at his gate. The divide is replicated in the afterlife, to the rich man's distress as he is in hell.

“In the story, a great chasm separates the two eternally. We feel like we’re in that gap.”

But Colin believes this is a crucial element of their work. “Part of the challenge of mission is to enter into the gaps - the places that divide communities, in a sense to refuse the gap.”

Admitting that they don't have answers as to how to make connections between the two worlds, Colin hopes they may be able to draw others into the “conversation” that runs through his and Anita’s lives.

“At the moment we have to represent two different communities in our life together,” says Colin.

A shared faith must provide the resources to do this, he believes. “We have different contexts and experience but a common Gospel.”