On Thursday this past week we attended our first Kenyan funeral. While we sometimes moan about “Africa time”, referring mostly to late starting times of events, this funeral was on time. The sad event was the death of the wife of a friend who is a member of a peace forum, along with MCC, and is also on the MCC Kenya advisory board. The funeral began at 9:00 a.m. at one of the larger churches in Nairobi, and the service ended at 12:00 noon. After a brief receiving condolences line, a convoy was formed, given a police escort to get through Nairobi traffic, and we left for the burial which was to occur on the “home place”. After some distance we arrived at the homestead to find a crowd approaching 1,000. The church service was mostly in English, but the burial service was mostly in the mother tongue, Kikuyu.
The burial service consisted of a tribute, some songs, and the lowering of the casket, and covering of the casket. There is a sense of finality as the casket is lowered and covered. Food was served to the mourners and we departed for home arriving home at 7:00 p.m. – a full day.
We had never heard a funeral sermon text from Exodus and were surprised to have the preacher use Exodus 28…. – the passage is about the vestments of the priest. He spoke specifically about the ephod and the breastplate. The service included several choir pieces and the MC made sure that choirs only sang the allotted number of songs – even if it took an interruption to make the point.
We had our MCC Kenya team meeting this weekend and several of the observations were noteworthy. We often wonder what the hosting community for short term trips think about a group of North Americans who take one or two weeks to come and serve/work alongside local communities. We had the opportunity today to hear some perspectives from Kenyans. The first is that visits by North American groups help to break some stereotypes, such as: the prevailing view that North Americans do not do any physical work; that women, particularly, do not do hard labor. These were destroyed by what MCC calls a “Work and Learn” group. This group of 14, 7 men, 7 women, from southern Manitoba spent two weeks working alongside local communities doing the hard physical work of building, hauling water, mixing cement, pouring and using a trowel. It was a healthy experience by both the visiting group and the hosting community. Relationships were built, new languages – or at least words – learned, and new friends made. Oh yes, some buildings were erected as well.
This coming week sees us traveling to Kisumu, located on the shore of Lake Victoria, for some meetings. We look forward to eating fresh fish from Lake Victoria. (cooked of course)and meeting with potential “peace-building” partners.
We wish you all a good week.
Our work email is mccrep@kenya.mcc.org
Our personal email addresses are: martharatzlaff@gmail.com or ronratzlaff@yahoo.ca.












