Many of us are active in responses to the world’s needs, wounds, and injustices. We resonate with Frederick Buechner’s often-quoted phrase, “God calls us to where our great joy meets the world’s great need.” If we’ve stayed around awhile, we have found this to be true. To be sustainable, our presence in hard places cannot be spurred merely by dogged heroism in the pursuit of righteous causes. Or worse, an asceticism that imagines if there is deprivation somewhere, we have no business enjoying anything anywhere. We have found joy in our difficult places of need, and the joy sustains us.

We are not simply given to the world to be used up, consumed. We know people (and maybe even been people) who have “burnt out” in our settings and it’s not a pretty sight—no gift to anyone at all. Surely this is not the way of the meal of blessing. In the way of the Eucharist we are given in a way that nourishes all.

As important as Buechner’s observation is, there is a much deeper truth to our calling. Our most important formation is not around need. Rather, it is around abundance. It is around delight. It is around peace. It is around freedom. It is around beauty. It is around freedom. It is around fullness. It is around yes.

The Hebrew Scriptures refer to all this as shalom. Sometimes translated as peace, shalom carries a far richer meaning than simply the absence of conflict. In fact, its essence is not rooted by the absence of anything. Shalom does not come into being by correcting any deficit. It is more than simply a remedy. Shalom exists prior to lack, pain, injustice, or no. It is the Yes of creation. It flows from the I AM before anything was not.

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It was around 1 a.m. on March 15^th this year, when James heard his dad cry for help. When he woke up he found out that his dad’s house was on fire, but as he ran in an attempt to quench the fire he fell and hurt his knee so badly. But because he loves his dad, he got up and went on to try and put out the fire together with some other concerned citizens who responded to the  fire. As they were struggling to put out the fire they saw in the distance the group of young men who were responsible for lighting the fire, laughing as they walked away from the scene.

During a recent pastoral visit to James, he narrated this whole scenario to me and we reflected on the issue more deeply. In our discussion several questions arose that I thought are pertinent if we are going to be faithful to the context of Mukuru.

• What does Mukuru mean, and what does it mean to live in Mukuru?
• Where was the local authority in all this?
• How do we, the Mukuru community, respond to this situation?

The word Mukuru means “a valley” in Kikuyu, one of Kenya’s native languages. This translation has some significance because valleys in Nairobi are either places where slums are located or they are dumping sites. In this case, the village of Mukuru is a dumping site for factories in Nairobi’s industrial zone where James and many others live. The type of waste that is discarded in this valley is industrial toxic waste that is quite harmful. Indeed, some of the villagers have respiratory problems due to the type of waste that they interact with on a daily basis. To the industries, Mukuru is a valley for dumping. To the members of Shalom Kuchemba (a group of Mukuru’s residents who live and work in the Mukuru dumping site) it is a valley that they call home. So, for the men, women, and children who live in Mukuru, it means that they have to interact with industrial waste for the better part of their lives. (Kuchemba is slang that is used to mean scavenging. Initially the group called itself Wanakuchemba which means “a group of scavengers”. When I met them three years ago, we explored the whole issue of Biblical Shalom and then we formed the group Shalom Kuchemba which is still comprised of members from Mukuru slum who live by scavenging. The name implies that we are a group of scavengers who work and await the realization of Shalom in Mukuru slum.)

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