Ministries Globalization of a different sort
By PATRICIA LEFEVERE
The journey from St. Cloud, Minn.,
to Homa Bay, Kenya, takes a minimum of 20 hours under the best conditions. Once
inside the country, Kenya offers few attractions -- other than its safari parks
-- for travelers.
The nine-hour ride from Nairobi, Kenyas capital, to Homa Bay
-- a new diocese on the western shores of Lake Victoria -- bumps along some of
Africas roughest roads. Despite the jarring ride, a group of St.
Cloud-area Catholics has made the journey twice in two years, and another group
will depart in February.
In between, a number of Kenyan Catholics, indigenous to the Homa
Bay diocese, have visited St. Cloud, staying with farm families and with local
Catholics in small towns in central Minnesota. Other Kenyan Catholics plan a
second visit in 2003.
Together the two groups are partnering each other in what Catholic
Relief Services calls its Harvest for Hope program. The program links rural
U.S. dioceses with those in other countries so they can share resources, ideas
and friendships to the mutual benefit of both. Similar relations are underway
between the Trenton, N.J., diocese and Catholics in Uganda, and between the
Madison, Wis., diocese and a group of Ghana Catholics.
Emily Maeckelbergh was only 20 when she journeyed to Kenya last
year. She has not stopped talking about it since, she told NCR. A junior
at the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minn., Maeckelbergh said she
brings her Africa experience to all of her classes.
She enjoys telling about the vibrancy of Kenyan liturgical
worship, the sight of sugar cane becoming brown sugar or women weaving baskets
and selling them in local markets. Her stories have religious, economic,
feminist and cultural contexts. She is preparing to become a secondary school
teacher and said she will continue to inform students wherever she goes about
the problems and the promise of Africa.
Maeckelbergh keeps in touch through letters with an African mother
and her children with whom she developed a special bond during the
two weeks she spent in Kenya. When the delegation from Homa Bay visited St.
Cloud in August, Maeckelbergh received more letters and prepared news and gifts
to send back with the Kenyans.
Similar exchanges have begun between Ron Pagnucco, director of
peace studies at St. Johns University in Collegeville, Minn. -- one of
Maeckelberghs teachers -- and Peter Kimeu, who helps coordinate the
Harvest for Hope partnership from Kenya. Pagnucco and Kimeu are collaborating
to develop an African Learning Community that would take place in Kenya and
would include three-week-internships and longer stays for St. Johns and
St. Benedicts students.
Pagnucco called the endeavor one of the positive sides of
Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the 1990 papal document that called for a
strengthening of Catholic identity in Catholic higher education. Currently
three young Kenyan religious are studying at St. Benedicts, and
Kimeus son is enrolled at St. Johns. The St. Cloud diocese is
looking at longer-term links between the two sees.
Planting the seeds
Although the relationship between the Minnesota and the Kenyan
diocese began in 1999, St. Cloud Bishop John Kinney planted the seeds years
before. As bishop of Bismarck, N.D., Kinney set up a commission, whose members
traveled to East Africa in the early 1990s to establish Bismarcks own
missionary program in Kenya.
When Kinney became bishop of St. Cloud in 1995, he continued his
interest in and support of mission links. Bishop Kinney believes that
mission is an integral part of every local church, said Fr. Bill Vos,
director of St. Clouds Mission Office. Contemporary missiology
demanded we look at our relationship with the world church, Vos told
NCR.
Vos and Kinney studied ways in which twinning could
occur on the parish and the organizational level between St. Cloud Catholics
and those in Africa.
Vos interest in Africa may have preceded that of the bishop.
A longtime friend of Mill Hill Fr. John Kaiser of Perham, Minn., Vos worked 19
years in Tanzania and Kenya. John Kaiser was the single most important
person in my decision to work in East Africa, Vos said, adding that he
visited Kaiser several times before seeking release from the St. Cloud diocese
to work as a Maryknoll mission associate.
Kaiser died of gunshot wounds to his head on Aug. 24, 2000, a
death many believe was a political assassination aimed at silencing the priest
who was a strong critic of the Kenyan governments abusive human rights
record. The violence of Kaisers death has meant that nearly every
Minnesotan knows where Kenya is and is acquainted with stories of its crime,
government graft, famine, poverty and disease.
But thousands also know about the spirituality of African people,
their vibrant styles of worship, devotion to family and village life, their
hospitality and hard work in the face of hardship. Those returning have
enthusiastically shared their stories, Vos said. This is a ministry to
St. Cloud as well as to Africa. Both sides are sending and receiving.
In their November 2001 statement, A Call to Solidarity with
Africa, the U.S. bishops encourage dioceses to help Catholics educate
themselves about Africa in much the way that St. Cloud and other sees are
doing. Twinning happened when St. Cloud expressed a desire to work with an
English-speaking diocese, preferably one that was largely rural as is St.
Cloud, which stretches across several counties and counts some 148,000
Catholics in 140 parishes. In addition to English, Homa Bay Catholics speak Luo
and Swahili.
Once part of the large Kisii diocese, Homa Bay became its own see
in 1995. More than 2 million of Kenyas 30 million people live within the
borders of the diocese. Some 380,000 of them are Catholic. They hold membership
in 23 parishes and are served by 27 diocesan priests. Each of the parishes has
many subparishes, where Mass is celebrated once a month at best, sometimes only
once in five months.
In the early 1990s the East African Conference of Catholic Bishops
made the development of small Christian communities its top priority. Groups of
five to 10 families meet regularly to pray, study scripture, talk together and
to see how they can evangelize themselves. The diocese trains lay leaders, who
include catechists, parish councilors and youth ministers.
Making grain storage bins
Homa Bay Catholics speak of holistic evangelization,
by which they mean the development of the Kenyan people socially, economically
and spiritually. One novel way in which St. Cloud Catholics participate in this
development is by working with the Harvest for Hope program to help local
people manufacture metal grain storage bins.
The six-foot tall containers look more like water heaters than
like a Minnesota silo. They provide storage and prevent spoilage of the grain
used by families for their food.
Crafting the bins has also created jobs and income in a nation
where a quarter of the labor force is unemployed and 60 percent of the
population lives below the poverty line -- the majority existing on less than
$2 per day.
While subsistence farming -- sugar cane, coffee and tea --
provides a meager income for most Homa Bay-area families, recurring drought and
government neglect of the land has threatened agriculture. The once fish-rich
waters of Lake Victoria have been choked by a water hyacinth plant, bringing a
sharp decline in the local fish industry.
Amidst such difficulties, Minnesota Catholics said they found
great hope and gratitude among the Kenyans. They learned how Homa Bay parishes
are working with Catholic Relief Services and other groups to set up irrigation
systems, develop sustainable agriculture, care for the sick and elderly,
provide for orphans of AIDS victims and prevent malaria.
The Minnesotans traveled to Kenya with backpack crop-sprayers,
soccer balls, quilts and jump ropes to give their hosts. When the Kenyans
visited Minnesota, they bestowed several handcrafted gifts on their American
friends.
The $70,000 annual commitment that St. Cloud provides to Africa
comes from all sectors of the far-flung diocese. Schoolchildren and parishes
collect funds, and farmers sell their grains and give some of the profit to
Africa, Vos said. Last year the money went to help train artisans, provide them
with materials and get them started in the manufacturing of the storage
bins.
In 2002 the funds will go toward microeconomic credits, said
Roseann Fischer, who coordinates mission education for the St. Cloud diocese.
She led its second tour to Kenya during Holy Week last year, and has found that
the twinning ministry with Homa Bay has really impacted on St.
Cloud.
We know were on the right track when people say,
Wow, we never knew anything about African life before this trip.
Now when we talk about the Catholic church, they know were talking about
a big Catholic church in which we all share, Fischer said.
She recalls Kenya each time she hears: May all of us who
share in the body and blood of Christ be brought together in unity at the
time of consecration.
Praying along with Africans and attending their rich liturgy of
music and dance proved the most favorable aspects of the trip when St. Cloud
Catholics returned home and were debriefed, she said.
When Homa Bay Bishop Linus Okok, Fr. Gregory Ombok and six other
Kenyans visited Minnesota, they too felt enriched by saying the rosary and
attending Mass in St. Cloud area homes and churches. On a visit to the Catholic
Charities Family Services food pantry, the Kenyan delegation was surprised when
one client filled a shopping cart with a five-day supply of groceries. The
Africans thought it was a months supply.
Another surprise came when Ombok went into the basement of a
farmhouse and noted with wonder: Can you believe it? Theres another
full house underneath the one above!
Big river but no crocodiles
Ombok canoed the Mississippi with Fr. Gregory Mastey, who pastors
three parishes just west of St. Cloud. Ombok said that every schoolchild in
Kenya learns about the river, but many would be amazed that it is surrounded by
so much greenery and yet has no hippopotamuses, crocodiles or big snakes like
in African rivers.
It was that kind of human contact that enriched the
mutuality for both parties, Vos said. Both dioceses benefit
from the partnership. Its a sister thing. Its not a case of the
haves giving to the have-nots.
Although the returning St. Cloud parishioners complained that the
least favorable part of Kenya was its roads, they also learned from Ombok to be
grateful and not to take for granted things like driving over good roads and
having the freedom to preach on any topic.
At a welcoming liturgy for the Kenyans, celebrated by four
Minnesota bishops and attended by hundreds of area Catholics on a farm near
Spring Hill, Minn., Kinney described the day as a wonderful gathering of
faith and global solidarity. It shows that we are truly a universal church and
one human family.
Patricia Lefevere is a special report writer for NCR.
Related Web sites |
Harvest for
Hope www.catholicrelief.org/what/us_programs/harvest/index.cfm
St. Cloud, Minn.,
diocese www.stcdio.org |
National Catholic Reporter, January 18,
2002
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