A HISTORY OF MARYKNOLL IN AFRICA 1966 TO 2011

PART ONE THE GRADUAL MOVE INTO KENYA

INTRODUCTION Major decisions are not made hastily or haphazardly. They usually result from months or even years of analysis, discernment, and planning. Sometimes important decisions can be made quickly when a clear opportunity presents itself requiring a rapid response. Maryknoll’s decision to open apostolates in Kenya came as a combination of both, and probably falls in between the two types just outlined. Perhaps a better metaphor is evolution, eventually leading to a sudden crossing of a threshold. Maryknoll went to East Africa in 1946, with the prime objective of establishing a viable local church. In accordance with the missionary practice of that day, Maryknoll was given charge of an apostolic territory, called a Prefecture, after, of course, several years of tutelage in language, inculturation, and catechetical practice under the White Fathers, today called the Missionaries of Africa. This Prefecture was in Musoma, located on the eastern shores of Lake Victoria in Tanganyika, and which bordered the southwestern corner of Kenya. In the mid-1950s, as Maryknoll personnel greatly increased, Maryknoll expanded to the neighboring Prefecture of Shinyanga, to the southeast of Musoma and both Prefectures shortly after were elevated to dioceses, with Maryknoll Bishops in charge of both. By 1962, however, at the onset of the Second Vatican Council, there had been no mention of Maryknoll doing pastoral work in any other part of East Africa. A few Maryknoll priests had worked outside of Musoma and Shinyanga, but in Tanzania. Two Maryknoll priests, Gerry Grondin and Del Robinson, had been the Secretaries General of the Tanzania Episcopal Conference and stationed in Dar es Salaam (and later Fr. Bill Collins was Secretary General), and two others, George Weber and Mike Pierce, had been working at the Bukumbi National Pastoral Institute near Mwanza, Tanzania. It should be noted that these were not parish assignments, but what is referred to as ‘specialized apostolates.’ Likewise two or three Maryknollers were stationed at the Society Regional House, which had been built in Nairobi in 1953, but their presence was by definition not pastoral. The decision to put the Society House in Nairobi was made precisely to separate internal Maryknoll regional matters from diocesan and pastoral matters in the two Tanzania dioceses. But beginning in 1962, coinciding with the election of Fr. Joe Glynn as Maryknoll Regional Superior for Africa, changes in both the wider society and within the church gradually brought about new perspectives regarding Maryknoll’s purpose and mission in Africa. Twenty years may seem like a short time, but by 1965, the end of the Second Vatican Council, an amazing amount of excellent work had been done in Musoma and Shinyanga, perhaps in part due to the youth and energy of the scores of priests, Brothers and Sisters who were assigned there. In both dioceses there had been a ten-fold increase in parishes, a high school seminary had been established in Musoma (for both dioceses), an indigenous Congregation of Nuns was started, schools and hospitals were built, and

1 several catechetical and family life training centers were in full operation. Fr. Joe Corso (deceased 1989), who moved from Tanzania to Kenya in 1970, reflected on Maryknoll’s good work in Tanzania, saying, “Two huge contributions were the leadership programs and lay ministries. Even prior to Vatican II we were looking ahead, and talking more about lay ministries. The marriage programs at all these centers also made a lasting contribution to that part of Tanzania, and were the beginning of my involvement with marriage programs. Another big development was the emphasis on small Christian communities.” Great progress had been achieved, and there were still many more personnel coming out from America. The theoretical conceptualization of mission was also being changed by Vatican II. Dioceses were no longer to be called mission territories, to be administered by a European or American Religious Society, but were now called local churches. Already Africans were being made bishops of dioceses, and the local church was, at least in official terminology, to be fully responsible for its own ecclesial affairs. After Vatican II mission no longer meant quasi-colonial control of ecclesial territories by expatriate missioners (the three countries of East Africa – Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda – gained independence in the years 1961-1963), but assistance to young, local churches that were being led by native bishops and priests. In effect, this meant that Maryknoll as a Society was no longer, from a strictly canonical perspective, in charge of the two dioceses, even if in fact both dioceses were still totally dependent on Maryknoll. There was to be a transition, hopefully achieved as quickly as possible, to full authority by the local church. It also meant that Maryknoll no longer had to feel obliged to send personnel only to these two dioceses (even though both Maryknoll bishops were always asking Maryknoll for more personnel throughout these years.) By 1965 Glynn had already deliberated and talked with many Maryknollers about the value of expanding beyond Maryknoll’s traditional places of work. In June, 1964, he had written to the General Council in New York proposing that Maryknoll consider working in Kenya, either in Kisii or Kisumu, in response to a request from the Apostolic Nuncio in Nairobi. Two months later, in August, 1964, he again wrote to the General Council stating that Maryknoll had been asked to consider working in Zambia. At that time Bishop Comber, the Superior General, responded that Maryknoll was not able to consider working elsewhere in Africa, although in 1965 he approved Maryknoll’s move to Isebania Parish in Kenya. Apparently, Comber misunderstood the requests of 1964, thinking that Glynn was proposing that Maryknoll take on apostolic territories in those two countries, rather than selective parishes in certain dioceses. Glynn later reflected, “At that time we realized that we had to be more flexible. As a result of Vatican II, the word was out that Africanization of the hierarchy was imminent. So we were looking for alternatives. We began exploring opportunities in Kenya, such as Kisii and Nairobi Dioceses, and two other dioceses in Tanzania, Arusha and Dar es Salaam. Not all of our new endeavors came to fruition, but some did.” Maryknoll’s move into Kenya, and then into other neighboring countries, did not come in one startling stampede, but evolved gradually over the next fifteen years. In fact, even when the Kenya Region was started in January, 1979, Maryknoll was still viewed by most church people in East Africa as a missionary society working in rural Tanzania.

2 How ironic it is then that Maryknoll would by the year 2000 be the missionary society that opened more parishes in the ultra-urban city of Nairobi than any other missionary group, to say nothing of the many other apostolates it engaged in, not only in Nairobi but throughout the country of Kenya and in over a half dozen other countries in Africa. Beginning in 1962 Maryknoll embarked on a journey that would take it out of one relatively small corner of Tanzania to many, and very diverse, parts of Africa.

It is worthwhile to say a few words here about the history of Kenya and the growth of Nairobi, especially as Maryknoll was to stay in Nairobi right up to the present. Kenya’s modern boundaries were more or less formed at the infamous 1884 Berlin Conference, at which European colonial powers divided up Africa among themselves, without any regard for the peoples and ethnic boundaries already there. Kenya was granted to Britain. As there was a race between Britain and France to lay claim to controlling the source of the Nile River, Britain decided its best option was to build a railway from Mombasa on Kenya’s coast to Lake Victoria and then on to Kampala, Uganda. This was done from 1898 to 1901. Nairobi, which was not a place at all in 1898, was established as the main railway terminal just to the east of the escarpment overlooking the Great Rift Valley. To make the railway economically viable – the ‘lunatic express,’ as it was called, cost the British exchequer a colossal amount – the British decided to plant cash crops, such as coffee to the north of Nairobi, sisal at the coast, and a few years later tea in the western highlands. In 1920, Britain made Kenya a Crown Colony, directly under the rule of a British Governor. The Colony expropriated half of the arable land (arable land makes up only one quarter of Kenya’s land mass), and by the 1930s 100,000 British Settlers had migrated to Kenya, farming and ranching the Rift Valley and western highlands. The blatant inequality of this caused persistent conflict between Africans and British, even if some Africans benefited from and preferred British colonial rule. Finally, the Mau Mau revolt erupted around 1950/51, leading to the arrest of Jomo Kenyatta and other leading Kenya figures. In the 1950s, in reaction to the nationalism of the World War Two era, and in accordance with the values expressed in the United Nations documents on Human Rights, European public opinion turned against the possession of colonies. The British government began preparing to grant independence to the Kenya people, a prospect strongly opposed by the British settlers, who nearly revolted against the plan. They were assuaged by adequate compensation payments for their farms and permission to migrate to South Africa, Zimbabwe and other places. About 20,000 Europeans (of whom 2,000 were of Italian descent) and 50,000 of Indian nationality chose to become Kenya citizens. In 1963 Nairobi was a lush, beautiful, moderately sized city of 300,000, replete with tropical trees and flowers, excellent roads, and an unbeatable climate. It was already becoming East Africa’s transit hub and communications center, and Kenya had around eighty percent of East Africa’s manufacturing capacity, concentrated in Nairobi and other urban centers. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Dar es Salaam and possibly Kampala, Uganda, remained larger than Nairobi in terms of population. However, Nairobi’s population was beginning its rapid, inexorable climb, due to certain intractable national complications: lack of arable land, densely populated African reserves, and retention of

3 the colonial land-holdings by large farms, ranches and plantations, both foreign and local owned. The newly independent Kenyan government rapidly expanded education for Africans, and tried to increase manufacturing capacity, which remained urban based, with some decentralization outside of Nairobi. As a result, vast hordes of school-leavers migrated to the cities, especially Nairobi, to seek economic opportunity. Nairobi’s population in 2009 numbered over four million, and the city continues to grow by several hundred thousand every year. Two-thirds of Nairobi’s population live in informal settlements, better known as slums. After Independence in 1963 Kenya’s economy grew at an annual rate of four to seven percent throughout the 1960s and 1970s, spearheaded by the good prices of its agricultural exports and augmented by its manufacturing capacity and growing tourist industry. Despite several assassinations of outspoken politicians who were advocating greater social justice and more equitable distribution of land, Kenya was looked on by the international community as a stable, peaceful country. Unlike most African countries, it avoided coup attempts – until August, 1982. Its President, Jomo Kenyatta, made Kenya a one-party state, but he was still looked on as a mainly benign autocrat. However, his favoritism for the Kikuyu ethnic group, and especially Kikuyu from his home area of Gatundu in Kiambu District, just outside of Nairobi, angered many from other ethnic groups and inevitably led to some of the later outbursts of violence beginning in 1992. However, as Maryknollers began to move into Kenya in the late 1960s and early 1970s they had no reason to worry about political instability or insecurity. Their prime objectives were to help build up a self-reliant church and, if possible, participate in enabling the Kenyan people to advance economically. The Catholic Church in Kenya was greatly underdeveloped at the beginning of independence. There had been only four missionary societies in the country (Holy Ghost, Consolata, Mill Hill and Kiltegan), all from Europe, plus a few individuals from other religious orders, and Kenya was to a great extent a Protestant country (Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist and others). Joe Glynn noted that “for some reason, there were very few African vocations to the priesthood in Kenya, even as late as 1970.” In 1970 there were about 1,200 expatriate missionary priests and only 140 native priests in Kenya. Glynn felt that the shortage of priests in Kenya made that country fertile ground for Maryknoll to begin new pastoral ministries.

BEGINNINGS: THE NAIROBI REGIONAL HOUSE The first official mention by anyone that Nairobi would be the best situated locale to have a house for Maryknollers in East Africa, for the purposes of shopping, vacation and medical care, was in a letter from Fr. Gerry Grondin to the General Council in January, 1951. The dozen or so priests and Brothers working in Tanganyika came to Nairobi not infrequently, often staying at a hotel in downtown Nairobi. Later that year Grondin went to Nairobi for the express purpose of looking for a suitable location for a house. In December, 1951, the General Council agreed that Nairobi was the best place for the Africa Regional Superior to live, rather than within the mission territory assigned to Maryknoll. Fr. Tom Quirk had become Superior in 1951. In mid-1952 the General Council gave official permission to Quirk to look for a large plot of land, sufficient to build a large house for both regional administration and guest facilities. It was stipulated that the house would exist first-of-all for the Regional

4 Superior’s residence and office and secondly for Maryknollers to stay. Missioners would be expected to pay half a day’s viatique for each day they stayed in Nairobi, a rule that was lifted around the year 1970. In addition to Maryknollers, other missioners would be allowed to stay at the guest quarters by paying a relatively low price that would include all meals. One group that made great use of the house, which came to be known as the center house, was the De La Salle Christian Brothers, who were all American and worked in Musoma (plus other places in East Africa). In late 1952 land was given to Maryknoll by the Diocese of Nairobi. (On March 20, 1972, Joe Glynn wrote to the General Council, saying that the Region had obtained title to the Nairobi Society house and property, although it may have been merely an official letter of allocation from the government, not the title deed itself.) The plot was subdivided from an enormous plot of land that the Holy Ghost Fathers had obtained at the beginning of the twentieth century, in the Msongari area halfway between the Westlands shopping area and Kangemi, an area where Kikuyu owned private plots. The center house was just off the main highway heading to western Kenya and only five miles from downtown Nairobi. Holy Ghost missionaries had grown coffee on large sections of this land, in order to be self-reliant in catering for the needs of their ever-growing mission. Over the years, they built not only a church, rectory and center house for their congregation, but also two huge schools, one for boys and the other for girls, each from Kindergarten to Form Six. These schools became some of the most prestigious schools in Kenya. On this property were also sports fields, tennis courts, and a large swimming pool. (It took a polar bear mindset to swim in this pool; at close to 6000 feet in altitude, both the air and the water were quite cool.) There was also land set aside for a cemetery, mainly for Holy Ghost missioners, but other missionary societies, including Maryknoll, have made use of this cemetery. Plans for building a house were put on hold in 1952, due to the Mau Mau insurgency that had heated up that year. Some insurgent activity had taken place just a few kilometers west of the Maryknoll plot, and Maryknollers reported to the General Council in New York that British colonial settlers were traveling around armed with weapons. But by 1953 Mau Mau activity had abated enough for construction of the Nairobi center house to begin, which was completed in two phases. The first phase, which included the ground floor, dining room, living room and kitchen, was overseen by Quirk and completed by early 1955. The second phase was overseen by Fr. John Rudin, after he had become Regional Superior in 1956. This phase added a second floor, with eight additional rooms, more bathrooms, a chapel, and larger bedrooms and office space for those doing regional administration. The completed house had four rooms for residents and sixteen rooms for guests, with communal toilets and showers. A very spacious sitting room/dining room with a large fireplace made the sharing of drinks (called a sundowner) and evening meal always enjoyable. At that time the area was rural, and local farmers grazed cattle in the adjacent fields, right up to the early 1970s. Beginning in the late 1960s plots along Manyani Road, the street on which the Maryknoll house is located, began being subdivided. A number of mansions have been built on this street, owned by wealthy Asians, Africans and some companies to house their top executives. Several top Kenya government officials also own or live in mansions in this neighborhood. There are also other church buildings in the area, such as the official residence of the Archbishop, the residence of the Apostolic

5 Nuncio, where Pope John Paul II stayed on his three visits to Kenya, and the large convent of the Carmelite Sisters. Next to the Archbishop’s residence is the Hughes estate and imposing mansion; the Hughes family, long-time Catholics, owned one of the automobile distributorships in Kenya. After construction of the mansions was completed in the early 1970s, not much changed along Manyani Road until the installation of increased security provisions after the year 2000. Kenya Police now man closed gates at four places on this road every night, and in 2009 several speed bumps were put along the road after an Asian pedestrian was killed by a speeding car. In March, 1956, Fr. John Rudin was appointed Regional Superior, replacing Tom Quirk. However, major developments in the two Tanzania prefectures occurred shortly after that. In October, 1956, Edward McGurkin was consecrated the first Bishop of Shinyanga, and one year later, in October, 1957, Rudin was consecrated first Bishop of Musoma. On November 1, 1957, Fr. Paul Bordenet, who had come to Tanzania from Asia in January, 1952, was appointed Regional Superior. At this time, the arrangement of having two Maryknoll Bishops in new dioceses in Tanzania (still called Tanganyika at that time) and the Maryknoll Regional Superior resident in Nairobi, Kenya, was fully ratified. It was seen as beneficial for clarifying two separate roles: the Maryknoll Superior would deal with Maryknoll internal matters, personnel issues, budgeting, subsidies, medical care for Marykollers, and ongoing formation. The Bishops would concentrate on diocesan matters, such as priests, Sisters, catechetical matters, schools, medical institutions, parishes, and diocesan and parish properties. As of January 1, 1958, Maryknoll had established a large presence in East Africa, almost solely within the two dioceses of northwestern Tanzania. There were 55 priests and ten Brothers, and each year these numbers increased. In 1956 Brother Pete Agnone, who had been in Tanzania since 1954, was assigned to be administrator of the Nairobi Center House, and remained there until 1963. After his departure, Brother Ron Rak arrived to begin his long term as House Administrator and later Society Treasurer, remaining there until 1983. He was a perfect choice for this job, as the Regional house was often filled – by 1967 there were about 100 Maryknoll priests, Brothers and Bishops in East Africa. In fact, by the late 1960s the house was usually called the center house, as its guest functions had become more important than its purpose for regional administration. Rak strictly oversaw the work of a large staff, while treating the workers justly and respectfully, with respect to salaries, time off, decent housing on the grounds of the center house, and maintaining good interpersonal communication. The Maryknollers living at the Nairobi center house experienced the transition of Kenya from being a colony to full independence on December 12, 1963. In 1961, both Bordenet and Del Robinson, who was still living in Dar es Salaam, reported to Maryknoll, NY, that there was growing tension in Kenya, and especially in Nairobi, as progress towards independence moved forward. There was a very real possibility that the British settlers, who had been in Kenya for thirty to forty years and felt entitled to their large farms and upper-class way of life, would declare a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) and establish a Whites-only nation, similar to what White Rhodesians did in Zimbabwe in 1965. It was primarily British government aid, in the form of loans to the new nation of Kenya to purchase the farms of the British settlers at market price, which staved off this revolt and prevented what would have been an

6 extremely bloody conflict. In 1961/62 the settlers were also able to migrate to places such as Rhodesia and South Africa, unlike those in Rhodesia in 1965. There have been reports that former Kenyan British settlers living in Rhodesia in 1965 were the most intransigent in rejecting Britain’s plans for Zimbabwean independence in 1965 and tipped White political opinion towards the UDI decision. In any event, Kenya achieved Independence peacefully, beginning with internal self-rule in June, 1962. On December 12, 1964, one year after Independence, Kenya declared itself a Republic (Jamhuri in Swahili; this day is officially called Jamhuri Day), meaning that the Queen of England was no longer nominally Head of State in Kenya. Kenya, however, remained a member of the British Commonwealth. On September 1, 1962, Fr. Joe Glynn, who had been working in the Luo area of Musoma Diocese in Tanzania since his ordination in 1948, was appointed Regional Superior of Africa. He served two terms, up till 1972, at which time he was elected to the Maryknoll General Council. He succeeded Paul Bordenet, who announced that he was taking an intriguing assignment, that of Director of Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in Kenya. In effect, this made him the first Maryknoller to do mission work in Kenya other than Maryknoll Society administration. Bordenet informed the Maryknoll General Council that prior to 1962 there had been serious friction between the Kenya colonial government authorities and CRS, but that by mid-1962 the friction was satisfactorily resolved and that CRS should function well in the future. Bordenet was provided housing by CRS, since the Maryknoll rule was that only those doing Society administrative work in Nairobi should live at the Society house. Sadly, Bordenet died suddenly of heart problems less than a year later, on August 16, 1963, an event that shocked all Maryknollers living in East Africa. Maryknoll had not yet purchased a small plot at the cemetery next to St. Austin’s Church on the Holy Ghost compound in Msongari, where several Maryknollers are now buried. After a huge funeral at Nairobi’s Holy Family Cathedral, Bordenet’s body was taken to Musoma for burial. Although Glynn’s residence in the 1960s was in Nairobi, he in fact spent much of his time every year traveling in the two dioceses of Tanzania. He deliberated over two important matters in 1963; the decision to build a professional language school in Musoma that would be owned and run by Maryknoll, and completion of the construction of Mara College (i.e. secondary school) in Musoma, which would be run by the Christian Brothers. In November, 1964, he also attended the first meeting of the Religious Superiors of East Africa, held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The Maryknoll Africa Region was also affected in early 1964 by two tense moments in Tanzania history, the Zanzibar Revolution of January 12, 1964, followed a week later by an attempted military coup to remove President Julius Nyerere. However, peace seemed to have returned three months later, when on April 26, 1964, Zanzibar and Tanganyika formed a union, thereafter called Tanzania. Despite this, Glynn reported to the General Council that there was growing anti-American sentiment in East Africa, especially in Tanzania, and of China’s growing influence in that part of the world. The Region also became involved in an interesting discussion as to whether or not foreign missioners should become citizens of the newly independent nations in which they were working. In January, 1964, Bishop Guido del Mestri, the Apostolic Delegate to Tanzania, sent a letter to Bishop McGurkin of Shinyanga recommending that missioners become citizens of Tanzania. McGurkin informed the General Council of this, which

7 initially viewed this as viable and possible. However, when Glynn was contacted by the General Council he responded that he did not consider this a necessarily positive step. Apparently in 1964 some ecclesiastical officials still thought that expatriate missioners remained in their respective countries and probably within the same local area for their whole lives. By 1964, Glynn was already advocating that Maryknoll be thinking of moving from Musoma and Shinyanga to other places in Africa. In fact, in June, 1964, at the same time the Apostolic Nuncio in Dar es Salaam was recommending citizenship for missioners in Tanzania, the Apostolic Nuncio in Nairobi was requesting Glynn to assign some missioners from Tanzania to Kenya. (The Vatican State Department seems to be afflicted with a common human disease: the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing.) Although the Maryknoll General Council was not in favor of Maryknoll moving out of Musoma/Shinyanga in the years 1964/65, they did approve the private arrangement between the Bishops of Musoma and Kisii, Kenya, of two Maryknoll priests going to Isebania Parish to work with the Kuria people on the Kenya side of the border, which will be treated below. And on March 20, 1965, Maryknoll Superior General Bishop Comber informed Joe Glynn that, after further consideration, the General Council did approve of Glynn’s looking into possibilities for Maryknoll work in Kenya. This permission was rescinded in February, 1967, by the new Superior General, Fr. John McCormack, who stated to Joe Glynn that Maryknoll should expand to Dar es Salaam only. McCormack said that there would be fewer ordinations in the coming years, which would result in lack of personnel except to cover attrition. Already there was a reverse movement of Maryknollers from East Africa back to the U.S., for Society assignments or in some cases of priests leaving the priesthood. McCormack’s reasoning was based solely on numbers; a foreseen decline in numbers, in his estimation, did not justify expansion to new areas. Glynn responded that Maryknoll was too concentrated in the two dioceses of Musoma and Shinyanga and that Maryknoll, for its own good, had to move out. He stated, though, that Maryknollers in Tanzania were not cooperating (it is not clear whom he was referring to). In 1967 McCormack recommended to Glynn that he think of having lay people assist with mission work, presumably from the United States. There were already some European volunteers working in Ndoleleji Parish of Shinyanga Diocese, which could serve as a model for other Maryknoll missions. At that time Marie France Perrin Jassi arrived in Tanzania to do research on the Christian communities being formed by Maryknollers, particularly in the North Mara section of Musoma Diocese. She published a paper of her findings, “Forming Christian Communities,” in the Gaba Catechetical Center’s series, Gaba Pastoral Paper # 12 of 1970. A direct link can be made between the service of these lay people in Africa and the establishment by Maryknoll of the Lay Missioner Program in the early 1970s. On July 7, 1967, President Julius Nyerere issued a mind-shattering document, the Arusha Declaration, which stated his determination to implement an African form of Socialism, called ‘Ujamaa’ (Swahili for familyhood). All the values of the extended African family were to thereafter be incorporated into the nation as a whole, in order to build one united nation, overcome ethnic differences, serve the common good, and create an economy that could make Tanzania self-reliant. The government was ordered to begin a systematic nationalization of banks, companies, manufacturing capacity, plus transport,

8 wholesale and retail services. Within a few years it also nationalized all land in the country and in 1973 began a forced villagization program all over the country. In 1969, the government also nationalized all schools in the country. Although this document was in theory about political and societal policies, church leaders immediately recognized that it had repercussions for mission work in Tanzania. Both Maryknoll Bishops in Tanzania directed their priests and others to begin reflections on this document and how Maryknoll could cooperate in its implementation. In January, 1970, Joe Glynn scheduled a Regional Policy Meeting to deliberate about Maryknoll’s work in East Africa in light of the Arusha Declaration and the findings of the 1969 Church Study Year (c.f. below). In 1972, a seminar was held at the Language School on African Socialism. Far more analysis of the Arusha Declaration and its impact on Maryknoll will be detailed in the Maryknoll history in Tanzania. Here it will merely be stated that Maryknollers, all of whom came from the United States and whose formative years were in the 1920s to early 1960s when skepticism of socialism was strong in the U.S., received this document with mixed feelings. Maryknollers overwhelmingly approved of and supported Nyerere, who was a moral, church-going Catholic, and a personal friend of more than a few Maryknollers. They definitely supported his desires to forge a united nation that would be free of external neo-colonial control of its natural wealth, and that would provide necessary services, such as education, health services, clean water, electricity, and better agricultural methods to all the people of the country in an egalitarian way. Many, though, had serious reservations about the strict application of socialist economic principles, such as the nationalization of enterprises like bakeries, shoe stores, and soap-making industries (plus many, many others). Almost all thought the villagization program was a mistake, especially its forced nature, even though they supported the attempts to provide clean water and agricultural extension services to as many people as possible. Likewise, even though the priests were very happy to no longer be managers of schools, they questioned whether the Tanzania government was capable of both managing all primary and secondary schools in the country and providing quality education in these schools. Another initially controversial directive of the Tanzania government in 1969 was to make Swahili the language of education in all parts of Tanzania, supported by some missioners and questioned by others. Nyerere also firmly requested missioners, many of whom spoke only tribal languages, some very well and others only after some years of struggle, to use only Swahili in all liturgies throughout the country. Maryknollers, some reluctantly, expended great effort to observe this request. By 1980 the wisdom of this directive became obvious. Tanzania became truly one nation, unified by a common language, despite some sixty different ethnic groups each with its own language. It is a country that has been at peace within itself ever since the issuance of this directive. Maryknoll made the decision to offer only Swahili at the language school in Musoma, even though courses were offered in both the Kisii and Luo languages in 1970 (for missioners who would be working in Kenya). Many Maryknollers became expert in Swahili, and definitely more fluent in it than many Africans in Kenya, a country which preferred English. Expertise in Swahili was an advantage that Maryknoll priests brought to the urban milieu in Kenya, enabling Maryknoll to take on so many parishes in both Nairobi and Mombasa, as well in some rural parts of Kenya.

9 The Arusha Declaration also occasioned much internal soul-searching concerning ecclesiastical practices, particularly regarding the phrase ‘self-reliance,’ which became perhaps the most important catch-phrase defining Maryknoll’s own perception of its purpose of being in Africa. Self-reliance became the goal not only of Maryknollers working in Tanzania, but also of those who went to Kenya and to other countries. Furthermore, it was probably Maryknoll, more so than and maybe even alone among missionary congregations working in East Africa, which made this its goal. Maryknoll did not recruit overseas and vocations had begun dropping in the U.S. Thus, Maryknoll could not staff parishes indefinitely even if that was the goal. Whereas other mission groups sought vocations within East Africa and made the decision to staff certain parishes permanently with their native personnel, Maryknoll opted for a completely different mode of operation. It would contract (Maryknoll Superior General John McCormack clearly stipulated the requirement of a contract in a letter to Joe Glynn in September, 1967) with a diocese to staff a parish or other apostolic work for a certain number of years and then turn this parish or other specialized work, presumably self- reliant, back to the diocese. Maryknoll’s parish work in Nairobi would become the example par-excellence of this mode of operation. A crucial factor in this was the Special Study Year authorized by the Tanzania Episcopal Conference and carried out by Maryknoll Fr. Frank Murray and his staff at the Bukumbi Pastoral Institute near Mwanza, Tanzania. In December, 1969, it issued its report, titled “The Church in Tanzania Today: Its Tasks and Priorities.” The study examined fifteen topics for discussion on a national basis, published three articles in East African ecclesiastical journals, and issued two private papers to further explore sources. There were a number of general findings, of which Maryknoll leadership highlighted four: 1. The church in Tanzania should find areas in its doctrine that would deepen the Ujamaa ideas from a Christian viewpoint. 2. The Church should strive for self-reliance. 3. The Church should work with other agencies to bring about programs that are needed (i.e. in the social, economic and political spheres). 4. Church personnel should work towards a better understanding within the church.

It needs to be determined whether only Maryknollers took these findings seriously, or whether other missionary congregations saw value in these statements. Maryknollers who went to three dioceses of Kenya between 1969 and 1972 did not find church personnel there, whether African or expatriate, thinking along these same lines. Misunderstandings that arose in the mid-1970s were due not only to specific actions that Maryknollers did but primarily to radically different interpretations of the fundamental purposes of mission work. In October, 1967, Glynn was re-appointed Regional Superior of Africa for a second term of five years. By 1968, as already noted, there were about 100 Maryknoll priests, Brothers and Bishops in East Africa, and in that year Glynn requested Maryknoll to begin sending two seminarians to Africa each year for the Overseas Training Program (OTP). The first Associate Maryknoll priests for Africa, Paul Archhambault and Bill

10 Picard, also went to Tanzania in 1968. Tanzania at that time had 2.23 million Catholics out of a total population of 12.23 million (18.2% of the population), ten African Bishops, one African Cardinal, and 470 African priests. It was on the road to self-reliance (except in terms of finance). Finally in 1969 Joe Glynn’s pushing for Maryknoll to begin work in Kenya was accepted. Two priests who had worked in Tanzania for eight years were assigned to start Jericho Parish in Nairobi, and in 1970 seven priests and one Brother were assigned to Africa. Of these the four newly ordained priests were envisioned as all working in Kenya, two in the Luo area and two in the Kisii area. Later in 1970 this was changed; three studied Kisii and went to Kenya in 1971. The fourth studied Luo but remained in Tanzania. First, though, it is worth remembering an infamous incident in Kenyan history. Maryknollers who lived in Nairobi came directly in contact with what was undeniably the most traumatic event in independent Kenya’s early history, the assassination of Tom Mboya, the Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs, on July 5, 1969. He was a Luo, the second largest ethnic group after Kenyatta’s Kikuyu. MM Fr. Bill Madden, who was on the Regional Council and had just recently arrived in Nairobi to oversee the center house while Glynn was traveling in Tanzania, narrated what happened.

That was a very traumatic time in Kenya. Mboya was shot downtown on a Saturday afternoon, and taken to Nairobi Hospital. Hundreds of Luo people went to the hospital and were shouting and yelling, and then engaged in a destructive riot downtown. Several days later the state funeral was held at Holy Family Cathedral (Mboya was a practicing Catholic), and I went as Maryknoll representative. There were so many people that the doors were shut during Mass, and then the Luo outside, an enormous mob, started rioting again. The police used teargas to stampede them away. Teargas came in the church; we were all almost choking and had to lie down on the floor. Someone yelled ‘Don’t breathe. Don’t breathe.’ And I thought to myself, ‘I can’t breathe anyway.’ My car was parked about 500 yards away and I presumed it was badly damaged. The mob had smashed the doors and windows of the rectory and Catholic Bookshop. But the mob was chased so hard by the police and army that they sped right past my car, which was untouched. The sight outside the church was unbelievable; people had literally run out of their shoes. There were hundreds of pairs of shoes scattered about on the ground outside the church. Kenyatta, however, just remained sitting in his special chair in the cathedral throughout the affair, seemingly unbothered by the commotion and teargas. The next day a large photo of him was in The Nation (Kenya’s national private newspaper), showing him sitting on his chair with teargas-caused tears in his eyes. The caption said, ‘Kenyatta sheds tears for Mboya!’ So, that was my introduction to Kenya.

11 The surreal, almost absurd nature of the Mboya affair continued. The hearse carrying Mboya’s body to western Kenya for burial had a bad accident in the middle of the night on the very foggy escarpment above the Great Rift Valley. Several months later Kenyatta made a state visit to Kisumu, the large city on Lake Victoria and the de facto Luo capital. Luo started throwing rocks at Kenyatta (Luo thought he was involved in ordering Mboya’s assassination, although there has never been sufficient evidence to prove this), and the police responded by shooting live bullets. The official report was that fewer than twenty people were killed. All other estimates were that hundreds were killed by the police. Madden was supposed to stay for only three months at the center house in Nairobi, but stayed on as Regional Treasurer until 1973. In fact, he remained in Kenya for another twenty-five years, including two terms as Kenya’s first Regional Superior when the Africa Region was divided in 1978. Without doubt, though, the most important and long-lasting policy decision of Joe Glynn’s long tenure as Regional Superior was in his advocacy for Maryknoll to move out of the two dioceses in Tanzania. It took seven years before he was able to accomplish this, a momentous change in Maryknoll’s presence in Africa that resulted from a seemingly minor, insignificant step taken by two Bishops whose dioceses touched one another along international borders. The Bishops’ decision had nothing to do with Regional or General Council deliberations, but merely facilitated better pastoral practice in their respective dioceses. (What does it say about ecclesiastical bureaucracy that such a minor, common-sense decision seems so noteworthy.) Thus, we begin our history of the movement of Maryknoll to Kenya, and eventually to other countries, with the assignment of two Maryknollers to a parish on the border between Tanzania and Kenya.

ISIBANIA PARISH, KENYA In 1965 an opportunity for Maryknoll to work in Kenya presented itself, when the new bishop of Kisii Diocese, Maurice Otunga, asked Bishop Rudin of Musoma to assign a Kuria-speaking priest to Isebania Parish, which is located right on the border between Tanzania and Kenya. Ten or so Maryknoll priests spoke the Kuria language, and were organized together as the Kuria Deanery. The Kuria tribe straddles the border, with almost as many living in Kenya as in Tanzania – one of the absurd legacies of the colonial division of Africa. The Mill Hill Society (from England) had established Isibania Parish in 1935 but wished to withdraw, as it was the only Kuria-speaking parish and they wanted to concentrate on the two dominant ethnic groups in Kisii Diocese. (Ninety-five percent of the people in the diocese were either Kisii or Luo.) Bishop Rudin consulted with the priests of the Kuria Deanery and they agreed to this. Fr. Frank Flynn took up residence in Isibania, joined a short while later by Fr. Jack Manning. Manning stayed for only a few months, but was replaced later in 1965 by Fr. Joe Sheehan. Thus began Maryknoll’s move to Kenya, although it has to be emphasized that this was not in any way an official decision made by the Maryknoll Society. It was a personal agreement made between the Bishops of the two dioceses. The Maryknoll priests who worked in Isibania remained in much closer contact with Musoma Diocese than Kisii Diocese and in those days it was easy to drive across the border. But it was truly a move into Kenya: the Maryknoll priests resident in Isebania became Kenya residents and needed Kenya work permits.

12 Maryknollers remained at Isibania for ten years, to 1975, when health problems and shortage of personnel forced it to return the parish to the diocese. At some time or other the following Maryknoll priests were stationed there and at Kibaroti Parish, another Kuria-speaking parish founded by Maryknoll twenty miles from Isibania. In addition to Flynn, Manning, and Sheehan they were Frs. Joe Reinhart, Dave Stang, Joe Corso, John Wymes and Mike Bishop. Corso lived there from 1971 to 1974 and accomplished several things. The rectory had never been properly built in the beginning (mud walls) and had become very run down. So he spent much time building and repairing both the rectory and church. He also proved an able and helpful mentor to the indigenous Sisters Congregation who had a convent on the compound. The most memorable work done in Isibania was the formation of Cooperatives and Credit Unions by Sheehan and Stang, who were classmates, of the 1964 ordination class. Both spent endless hours talking with individuals, attending meetings, and looking after the operations of the cooperatives. The cooperatives ran maize-grinding power mills and other small businesses. The credit unions held interest-earning deposits for people as well as giving out small loans. In the 1960s, as a result of several papal encyclicals and the Vatican II document on the Church in the Modern World, socio-economic development had emerged as a priority for many expatriate missioners working in poor countries. In his 1967 encyclical, Pope Paul VI had stated, “Development is the new name for peace.” The 1969 Seminar Study Year in Tanzania strongly influenced the theological thinking of Maryknoll priests, particularly those recently ordained. The Church has an equal concern for the material welfare of the most impoverished people as well as for spiritual welfare. Cooperative formation in rural areas was envisioned as the best and most concrete way of implementing this concern. However, this aspect of mission did not come without controversy. Development work required the priests to spend almost all their time in such work, leaving little time for liturgy and catechetics. Secondly, development is done with people of all religions, and some of the older Catholics felt they were being short-changed by the priests. Additionally, not all missioners understood this concept, especially those ordained long before the start of Vatican II. In Isibania, at least, the contrasting visions of mission fortunately did not result in any serious conflict between the Maryknoll priests, as some did the development work and others did the traditional parochial work. Unfortunately, both Sheehan and Stang left East Africa in 1975, and did not have time to fully develop the theology of social development as a constitutive dimension of the Church’s concern for the whole person. The cooperatives also did not continue on for too many years after they left. But it was a legitimate attempt at what might be called holistic evangelization, and the values of this remain valid today. Maryknollers still work with the Kuria people on the Tanzania side of the border. Corso commented that “the Kuria Christians always seemed to me to have a very deep faith. They are loyal to their priests and church, and very good at attending Mass and receiving the sacraments. Those who attended marriage courses lived out admirable marriages all their lives.”

13 FR. JOE HEALEY, AMECEA, NAIROBI In 1961 the Association of Member Episcopal Conferences in Eastern Africa, more popularly known by its acronym AMECEA, was founded by the five original national conferences – Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia. Later three other conferences joined, Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea, and finally Djibouti and Somalia became Affiliate Members. In 1964, AMECEA opened an office in Nairobi, and four years later decided to open a Social Communications Department at its General Secretariat in Nairobi. Fr. Joe Glynn represented the Regional Superiors of Kenya at the plenary meetings of AMECEA and when the decision was made to start a social communications department, all at the meeting looked at Glynn, requesting that Maryknoll assign someone to be Director. Maryknoll was well known for its work in communications in the United States, and had already assigned several priests to help set up the Tanzania Episcopal Conference. As it so happened, Fr. Joe Healey was just finishing up his training in social communications in the U.S., and Glynn assigned him to AMECEA as of July 1, 1968. After ordination in 1966 Healey worked for the Maryknoll Magazine and began studies in journalism, which led to his being awarded an M.A. in International Journalism from the University of Missouri in 1968. With his assignment to Nairobi, he became the first Maryknoller assigned to Kenya for an original ministry, as the Isebania parish work had always been more connected with Maryknoll’s work in Musoma, Tanzania. Furthermore, said Healey, “My assignment perfectly exemplified the new approach for Maryknoll in East Africa. With direct Maryknoll work for AMECEA, Glynn was indicating that henceforth Maryknoll would be concerned about all of eastern Africa.” AMECEA had no residence at that time, and Healey says, “Although Fr. George Hagerty was living at the Maryknoll Center House, doing some regional accounting work, it was the policy in 1968 that no one doing apostolic work in Nairobi should live at the Center House. As a result, I looked around for a place to live, eventually settling on Our Lady of Visitation Parish in Makadara, in the eastlands section of Nairobi. I wanted to live with an African priest, and the pastor at Makadara was Monsignor John Njenga.” The following year, when Fr. Bob Vujs was assigned to start Jericho Parish, which was then part of Makadara, he also lived at Makadara with Healey. Healey jokes that “by living at Makadara I stayed with four future bishops. Njenga became bishop of Eldoret and later Archbishop of Mombasa. He was replaced as pastor of Makadara by Nicodemus Kirima, who became bishop of both Nyeri and Mombasa (prior to Njenga). Two priests from Machakos, Raphael Ndingi and Urbanus Kioko, stayed for some months at Makadara while translating all the new Mass readings into the Kikamba language, and they too became bishops, Ndingi first in Machakos and later in Nakuru and Nairobi, and Kioko was the long-serving bishop of Machakos.” His communications work also brought him in contact with another future bishop, the famous, or infamous, Emmanuel Milingo of Zambia, who was from 1969 to 1971 the social communications director for the Zambian Episcopal Conference. The Social Communications Department was located on Gitanga Road in Westlands, not far from the Maryknoll Center House, but across town from Makadara. However, unlike today in which paralyzing traffic jams are the rule in Nairobi, traffic was not a problem in the 1960s and 1970s. The cross-town commute only took about ten

14 minutes. In the 1970s, AMECEA built a permanent secretariat and residence in the Westlands section of Nairobi. Before he had finished one year Healey’s work with social communications took him to a six-month sojourn in Kampala, Uganda, for a momentous event – the visit by Pope Paul VI in July, 1969, the first ever visit by a Pope to Africa. AMECEA was commissioned to do the planning and organizing for the Pope’s three day visit, necessitating Healey to move to Kampala in March, 1969, along with the AMECEA Secretary General.

This was a groundbreaking event, with three significant happenings. First was the consecration of the shrine in Kampala to the Uganda martyrs who had been canonized in Rome in 1964. They were the first canonized saints from sub- Saharan Africa and this shrine symbolized that not only Kampala but all of Africa was sacred soil. Second were the official start and papal blessing of SECAM, i.e. the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar, which was begun that year, 1969. The third major happening was international in scope. There were many Heads of State there and representatives from almost all countries in Africa. These included representatives of Nigeria and Biafra, which were fighting a vicious ethnic war at that time. Pope Paul VI met with representatives of both sides, separately and together, usually late at night without public attention, and played a major role in facilitating dialogue between the two sides that eventually led to a ceasefire. I wrote an article for the international press, titled ‘Dancing Nuns and Midnight Politics,’ referring to nuns dancing at the airport when the Pope landed and to the late night diplomacy that the Pope engaged in.

The Pope’s visit to Kampala was a monumental event for Africa, cementing its rightful place in the world of nations and explicitly affirming the African church as a local church in charge of itself. “You are now missionaries to yourselves,” the Pope said at the huge outdoor Mass. Cardinal Rugambwa of Dar es Salaam, the first African Cardinal, was present, and the Pope ordained a number of African bishops at the Mass, including Raphael Ndingi to be the first bishop of Machakos, Kenya, which divided from Nairobi. Healey stayed in Kampala for another month, after which he returned to Nairobi. His most important function at AMECEA was editor of its monthly publication, which served as an indispensable source for priests, Brothers, Sisters and many other Church workers in the countries of eastern Africa, with regard to church documentation, updating and sharing of insights and new theology. That was the immediate post-Vatican Council era and there was unfortunately very little written material available in Africa to help missionaries and local church personnel understand Vatican II documents and how to effectively implement its teachings. AMECEA Communications filled this void. Healey remained Director of Social Communications up till 1974, and then transferred to Tanzania.

15 JERICHO PARISH, NAIROBI, KENYA Bishop Joseph McCarthy of the Holy Ghost Society was Bishop of Nairobi from 1946 to October 24, 1971, at which time Maurice Otunga became Bishop (and later Archbishop and Cardinal). It is not known who first broached the idea of Maryknoll opening a new parish in Nairobi, but in 1969 the diocese offered the newly expanding area of Jericho in Nairobi’s huge eastlands area to Maryknoll. Fr. Joe Glynn, the Regional Superior, had been living in Nairobi since 1962, and had established very good relations with many bishops, including both McCarthy and Otunga (who had been in Kisii from 1960 to 1969) as well as Raphael Ndingi of Machakos and then Nakuru, and John Njenga of Eldoret, who had been pastor at Makadara. These relations and Glynn’s desire to find places in Kenya for Maryknoll priests finally started coming to fruition with the opening to Jericho. Running a parish in Nairobi was going to be new for Maryknoll and not only because it was a different country. Almost all Maryknollers in Africa had worked only in rural areas, and it had been only two years since Maryknoll had opened an urban parish, in Dar es Salaam. One of them was Bob Vujs, and he was appointed by Glynn to be the new pastor in Jericho. His classmate Jim Roy (ordination in 1961) joined Vujs a few months later. Thus began a steady, constant transformation of Maryknoll in Africa from a society doing rural ministry to one that is today primarily engaged in urban work, and in Kenya exclusively urban. This transformation paralleled the enormous social changes in Kenya, from over 90% rural at Independence in 1963 to 50% urban today. Urban work proved to be initially difficult for Maryknollers, despite many of them being from cities in the United States. Vujs said that Maryknollers had easily adapted to work in rural Africa, due to the slower agrarian pace and the great hospitality of the African people. It was uncomplicated work, with duties well understood, and plenty of satisfying work to do in daylight hours. There was no electricity in rural Africa, and evening hours were for meals and relaxing. In the daytime, it was easy to visit people at their homes, have meetings, teach and do all the pastoral work. In the city, people worked every day, they were very busy, and didn’t need the priests to help with their lives – except for Sunday Mass. In an urban setting, the priest had to do serious reflection on what he was going to do every day, and throughout the week. The wonderful ministerial satisfaction of rural Africa was not to be readily gained in the city. Maryknollers also had to initially adjust to a more pre-Vatican II mindset of European missioners. This was most evident in Dar es Salaam, where Capuchin priests wore cassocks at all times, lived a monastic lifestyle – admirable in itself, but inappropriate for parish ministry – had little contact with the people, and engaged in a purely cultic ministry. Maryknollers were determined to dress in normal clothes, be out with and get to know the people, and transform their parishes in accordance with the new models enunciated by Vatican II. When Vujs arrived in Nairobi in September, 1969, he had had two years of adjusting to urban ministry in Dar es Salaam. He had a good idea of how he wanted to proceed. He has often said, “In my opinion African urban ministry has to be a priority for Maryknoll. This is where the growth is taking place. But I strongly recommend that any Maryknoller intending to work in Nairobi first work for two or three years in a rural parish in East Africa. That is where the urban dwellers have come from. We must know

16 the culture and mindset that they are still very much a part of. When urban Africans say they are going home, they are not talking about the house in Jericho where they live, but their rural home where they came from.” Jericho had a very small plot on which to build a church and rectory. Vujs was an accomplished builder and viewed the small size as an opportunity to put some of his ideas into practice. The rectory would have two floors, the second floor being the private living space for the priests, and the bottom floor a public parish facility, with offices, storage, and small classrooms. The church would be a multi-purpose building, with retractable walls, which could be used as a large church on Sunday and then for many purposes during the week. The small area around the tabernacle would be reserved permanently for daily Mass, using a mobile altar. Vujs was assisted in building by Brother George Carlonas, who had overseen construction work in Tanzania. In 1970, Fr. Jim Roy was assigned to Jericho, after completing Swahili studies in Dar es Salaam, and lived with Vujs at the huge parish in Makadara, where the pastor was Monsignor John Njenga, who shortly after became the first African Bishop of Eldoret Diocese. Vujs and Roy were able to move into the new rectory on December 8, 1970, and celebrate the first Mass in Jericho’s church on Christmas, 1970. Since 1969 Jericho had been administered as a separate parish from Makadara, with Mass celebrated in the Jericho Community Centre. Vujs says, “While construction was going on we did house to house visitations and took a census of the parish. We discovered that our parish was a poor, suspicious, tribally divided group of people, with very little understanding of Vatican II. Liturgical singing was poor, so we printed a Kiswahili hymnal which sold 35,000 copies throughout Kenya.” Jim Roy was very accomplished in facilitating liturgical celebrations and in every place he went he worked diligently with the laity to create good liturgy and good singing, a skill he used in Jericho with positive results. In Nairobi, a multi-purpose church was a radically new idea, which other priests looked on with reservations and Catholics did not understand. Other parishes had social halls in addition to the church. Jericho had no room for a hall. So, everything had to be done in the one building: catechetical lessons, meetings, youth activities, technical training for primary school leavers, and seminars. Roy says, “Vujs and I decided to develop a nursery school system, in which local people would bring their children in the morning, and then pick them up in the evening. Several Sisters of the Immaculate Heart Sisters of Nyeri (central Kenya) assisted us, and we hired some qualified nursery school teachers. There was a very good response from the parents, and soon the school was full. Its great reputation ensured that the concept of multi-purpose church was accepted.” The school started with 40 children in 1971 and had grown to 160 by 1973. In 1974 Muriel Dwyer of International Montessori met with Vujs and volunteered to train the teachers in the Montessori method. Funding was sought for materials and a wooden house was erected as a workshop. The training program began in two classrooms on the ground floor of the rectory. Within two months the nursery school was converted into an accredited Montessori School. In the next five years this program was expanded to the new multi-purpose church centers in two parts of Buru Buru (cf below) and by 1980 there were 600 children in the three Montessori schools. Over half a dozen teachers

17 were sent to London for one- or two-year courses, so that they could become trainers in Kenya. In 1980 one of them, Jane Macharia, represented Africa-Montessori at an international Montessori meeting in the Netherlands. In 1980, just before Vujs took on a new assignment in the U.S. to do Maryknoll Promotion work, he phased total management over to the teachers themselves. He explains, “Each nursery became independent under its own trained manager, although they continued to solve common problems together. After three months I realized with joy that the training had paid off, and the program could continue on independent of the parish and the priests. They were also capable of starting Montessori schools in other parishes, which was done in Umoja and Dandora parishes shortly after I went to the U.S.” In addition to good liturgy and utilization of the multi-purpose building, another prime objective of the priests was setting up a good catechetical program. Roy was instrumental in bringing the Children of God religious education series from Tanzania to the schools in Jericho Parish. “We had training sessions for the teachers who showed interest in learning the methodology, and also taught them the songs that were in the books. This task took up much of our time. Additionally, we also started a program of home visitations and blessing of houses.” In February, 1972, Fr. George Pfister was assigned to Jericho, replacing Jim Roy who was going on home leave and then to the new parish at Burnt Forest in Eldoret. Vujs says, “Pfister took over the parish catechetical program and put it on firm footing. He taught the adults and directed the religious instructions for children who came everyday after school to prepare for First Communion, Baptism, and Confirmation or to continue with their religious formation. Usually about three hundred children participated in the program daily.” In addition to building and starting parish programs, Vujs spent much of his time in teaching and counseling. He taught the religious education course at local primary and secondary schools, especially at Aquinas High School not far from Jericho. (One of his former students later became the Provincial Commissioner of Nairobi.) In 1974 he began teaching a psychology course at Mater Misericordiae Hospital to students in the midwifery program. As he was leaving Kenya in 1980 he said, “That is the type of work I like to do as an outreach of the parish, giving it a missionary thrust. Teaching this course has been a joy for six years.” Vujs says that the need for counseling expertise is an urban phenomenon in Africa. In all his years in rural Tanzania this was not needed. But in the city of Nairobi there were many families with marital problems, plus individuals who were suffering from various psychological problems such as depression. He realized that counseling skills were a necessity in the city and he picked up these skills while living in Nairobi. In 1977 Vujs tried to start a Family Enrichment Program during the season of Lent. A dedicated group of people met each Wednesday of Lent from 8:00 to 10:00 PM for input and discussion on select aspects of being better parents and promoting healthier family-life. Vujs admits to mixed results: “The good thing is that those who attended were positive about the meetings. Unfortunately, very few came and those who did come were not able to motivate others to come. I continued offering the course up till 1980, and then handed it over to a group of laity in the parish. But the course did not continue. At that time African Catholics did not see a connection between religion and family life –

18 except for a series of prohibitions about sex. Priests were not viewed as capable of offering any advice to married people about marriage and family. So, it was premature to offer such a program in Nairobi at that time.” Fr. Tom Burke joined the Maryknoll pastoral group at Jericho in 1975, shortly after Fr. Laurenti Magesa, a diocesan priest from Musoma, Tanzania, had arrived. With four in residence, the house was full, although always very comfortable and welcoming. Magesa devoted most of his time to setting up Alcoholics Anonymous groups, starting in Jericho and branching out to other places. Burke originally did rural ministry in Shinyanga, Tanzania, and then urban work at Maryknoll’s parish in Dar es Salaam, the latter assignment from 1967 to 1975.

In Nairobi I was mostly involved in diocesan youth work. We had a diocesan youth team, usually eight of us, including another priest, two Sisters and four lay people. Our work revolved around organizing youth days in parishes, on average two weekends a month, and presenting seminars in secondary schools, once or sometimes twice a week. In addition to working with the team, I also taught religious education in two local secondary schools, Ofafa Jericho and Kausola. Youth work kept me very busy and was challenging, but rewarding at the same time. The nice thing was working with a committed team. We met ourselves one night a week, to organize the programs. Back in the 1970s the Church had a very good reputation and we were welcome in all types of schools, including Asian run schools. There was also a willingness to make sure religion was covered in schools and to make extra time available for the different youth programs.

In 1979 Burke became Director of the Overseas Training Program for seminarians and Brothers in formation, for the newly established Kenya Region. He moved to Buru Buru Phase Three, where two houses were rented by Maryknoll for this program. He continued teaching in schools, but said that “by 1980 the diocesan youth team had disintegrated, due to change of assignments and a new Archdiocesan Development Director who chose to emphasize a different direction.” The Eastlands section of Nairobi was expanding rapidly in the 1970s, especially in the Buru Buru housing estates (eventually five phases of about 1000 tenant purchase houses in each estate) adjacent to Jericho. These enormous residential estates were a joint development of the Nairobi City Council and the Commonwealth Development Corporation, and encompassed the putting in of roads and sidewalks, water, electricity and sewerage connections, and space for churches and schools. In 1975 Jericho Parish obtained a plot in Buru Buru Phase One, and in 1977 an even bigger plot (four acres) in Phase Three. In each of these plots Vujs built huge multi-purpose buildings, with a grant from Misereor for Phase One and money from Maryknoll for Phase Three. As there were often three or four priests assigned to Jericho, they began saying Sunday Mass at each of these centres. Montessori nursery schools were started in each centre. Vujs says that “we did a census in the houses surrounding the Phase One church centre and found about twenty-five percent of the households were Catholic. By 1976 there were 2000 people attending the two Sunday Masses at Phase One each Sunday. We

19 did not begin celebrating Sunday Mass at Phase Three until 1980, as we were waiting for the final two phases of Buru Buru to be completed. We began there in June, 1980, with 700 people the first Sunday. The cruciform building at Phase Three, with all sections open, holds 1500 people, and yet the church was completely full every Sunday.” There was an S.O.S. Village in Buru Buru Phase One, with 120 orphans in residence. As a result of a good relationship between Vujs and Tony Hernigger from Austria, the S.O.S. Director, and from training given by the parish to staff of the S.O.S. nursery school, this Village became in integral part of Jericho Parish and later at the new parish started in Buru Buru Phase One. Although the centres in Buru Buru I and III were being ministered as sub- parishes, there remained only one parish up till 1985. Vujs believes that staying together in residence in Jericho for the first ten years and operating the whole parish together rather than dividing it up into sections with individual priests responsible for their respective sections helped their ministry. “By sharing areas of responsibility, yet covering for each other, we were able to accomplish much more work. I was to heavily focus on construction and Montessori work because George Pfister and Fr. Laurenti Magesa were doing excellent pastoral work in Jericho and Buru Buru.” However, when Vujs left Jericho in 1980 to go on Promotion Work in the United States, specific priests became de facto pastors of the churches in Buru Buru: Fr. Paul Oshayo from Tanzania served Buru Buru III, replaced by Tom Burke in 1982; Fr. Laurenti Magesa ministered in Buru Buru I, replaced in 1984 by Fr. Jack Quinn, who lived at the Jericho rectory. When Vujs was leaving Jericho in 1980, he expressed appreciation for the contributions of the laity in the parish, particularly the Legion of Mary, which did a lot of house visitation and praying for the sick, and the women who became such dedicated, professional teachers in the Montessori Program. Vujs acknowledged two instances in which he had serious interpersonal problems in the parish, first the need to dismiss the first Head Teacher at Jericho Montessori School (not for anything criminal, but for her inability to relate positively to the other teachers), and later a public disagreement with the choir over allocation of funds they collected. In the latter case, Jericho’s parish council agreed with Vujs that extra funds collected by the choir should go for the needs of the new centre in Buru Buru III, rather than for choir uniforms and instruments. (All agreed that the original purpose of the collection, buying a new organ, was legitimate.) Unfortunately, many of choir members left Jericho Parish and joined the choir at a neighboring parish. These events were upsetting for Vujs and caused much consternation in the parish. Fr. Mike Callanan came to Jericho in 1979 and replaced Vujs as pastor in 1980. Pfister was advanced in age and had health problems, and so did not want to be pastor. Fr. Steve Scherer also came briefly to Jericho, in the last year or two before it was turned over to the Archdiocese. He had a degree in scripture and taught a scripture class to adults in Jericho. He also did a lot of visiting of the Small Christian Communities, and used this as a means to initiate deeper reflection on scripture in community meetings. In 1984 Callanan was going on home leave and a new pastor was needed in Jericho. The Kenya Regional Council searched desperately for someone to replace Callanan, without success. Fr. Joe Reinhart had been pastor of neighboring Umoja Parish for only three months, after coming from Zambia, where he had worked for five years (he

20 had previously worked in Tanzania for about twenty years). He had also just been elected to the Regional Council to replace Fr. Walt Gleason who had died suddenly in mid-1983. He decided to volunteer for Jericho, an offer immediately accepted. He then became the final Maryknoll pastor at Jericho Parish. Reinhart, who had worked with the Kuria people in Tanzania and spoke the Kuria language, later reflected on his two years at Jericho.

It was a very good parish, with a lot of people. I worked with the parish council, to make sure that was well set up. There was potential tribal friction, between Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, etc., but I had certain rules that every tribe had to have members on the parish council. We had a Kuria man on the parish council, showing how many tribes were represented. We also worked very well with the Montessori schools, not only in Jericho but also in the two Buru Buru centers and in Umoja. We made each one autonomous and encouraged each to seek separate self-reliance. Previously Bob Vujs had all the money put in one central bank account and the priests did much of the work procuring supplies for the schools. But the headmistresses were well trained and could do all this work. The other schools had no problem becoming self-reliant, but Jericho’s faced several difficulties. It was a poorer section of Eastlands and many families could not afford an expensive nursery school. Furthermore, many private nurseries had sprung up in the area calling themselves Montessori Schools and competed with the nursery school at Jericho church, which was losing students. We arranged with the school at Buru Buru III to give some help to Jericho’s when we separated them. I personally think this was the best long-term decision for the Montessori programs, as they had to become individually self-reliant and separated from priestly involvement.

All the priests who worked in Jericho had rural experience in Tanzania and all were fluent in Swahili, the normal spoken language in Nairobi. Their cultural and linguistic skills were a huge advantage in adapting to urban ministry, and made them very credible with the African people of the sprawling eastlands area of Nairobi. Pastorally, they worked hard to develop a self-reliant parish with strong lay leadership. The parish council members and the catechists all received extensive training for their roles, so that by the 1980s Jericho was a flourishing parish. Financially, income was considered sufficient to completely support two African priests, with no outside assistance needed. In 1985 the international Eucharistic Congress was held in Nairobi, attended by Pope John Paul II. In conjunction with this event, Jericho Parish started Small Christian Communities in each of the neighborhoods of the parish. As of 2009 there were nineteen SCCs continuing to meet on a weekly basis. In 1985, setting a precedent for religious societies in Nairobi, Maryknoll initiated a one-year process of turning Jericho Parish over to the Archdiocese, in consultation with Cardinal Otunga. At that time, Maryknollers were already developing several other parishes in the Eastlands area, and were confident that Jericho no longer needed Maryknoll assistance. It was the wish of Maryknollers that African diocesan priests take over Jericho, which Cardinal Otunga initially agreed to. But according to Reinhart “it did not work out

21 well. There were only two priests available, Frs. Dominic Kianduma and Joseph Wanyoike, who had just recently been ordained. Unfortunately Kianduma left very soon to take a program, and Wanyoike found it difficult to continue on alone. So, in 1988 the Cardinal handed the parish to the SVD congregation.” The SVD congregation stayed in Jericho for only four years, to 1992, and then moved out to establish a new parish in Kayole. The Society of Missionaries to Africa (SMA) then came and have remained in Jericho ever since. Several SMA priests have been pastors, from various countries, including Fr. Fabian Hevi, who in 2010 was the SMA Regional Superior for Kenya, and Fr. Frank Wright from Ireland, who was the pastor of Jericho for many years. In 2010, Jericho’s pastor was from India, Fr. Ranees Anbu Kumar, assisted by two priests, Emmanuel Mafumba from Ghana and Jacques Alain from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The SMA society has also sent a deacon from Ireland to assist in Jericho. Due to lack of space not much has changed at Jericho since Maryknoll left, with one major exception. The priests and parishioners came to a consensus agreement that the church building should be used solely for religious purposes. Over a five-year period parishioners collected twelve million Kenya shillings (equal to about $170,000 at the 2005 exchange rate) and a two-story extension was added on to the rectory. The bottom floor contains classrooms and offices, and the second floor is a large social hall. The Montessori school had ceased operation in the past, but there is now a small nursery school using the hall during the week, using the Montessori method. The new hall was blessed by Archbishop Rafael Ndingi on August 26, 2007. The Jericho area has not grown since 1986 and there are other parishes in the area today, unlike when Jericho was founded. Yet the numbers of people in the parish have increased. There are 2000 Catholic households registered in the parish, and Fr. Kumar estimates that about 3,500 people are regular church-goers. At least 2,500 are at the three Masses held each Sunday, all packed, and about 1,500 receive Communion each weekend. The latter is a very encouraging statistic, as most parishes in Kenya still have a minority of church attendees receiving Communion. One other statistic may help explain this: there have been 725 church marriages done at the parish since its inception in 1969. In 2009 Jericho Parish celebrated its fortieth anniversary and published a booklet listing the progress of those years, which included data on church marriages. Lack of church marriage is the chief impediment to adult reception of Communion, but Jericho Parish has done extremely well in encouraging sacramental marriage. The parish schedules group marriages each year, which enables couples to celebrate marriage without an expensive wedding ceremony. Additionally, in the parish’s forty years, up till 2009, 10,300 people have been baptized. Each year about 120 infants are baptized and another 200 to 300 school children come for the year-long preparation for either baptism or first communion. Sacramentally, the parish continues to grow and flourish. In addition to Sunday Masses and the SCCs, there are devotional services celebrated every week or month, retreats and seminars are scheduled at the parish during the year, especially during Lent, and several active groups engage in outreach ministry, such as the St. Vincent de Paul group which helps the poor and the St. Camillus group which visits the sick. The parish also has active Catholic Men’s and Women’s Associations. There have been several vocations from the parish, both to the priesthood and to Religious Sisters’ congregations.

22 Youth work is an important component of parish ministry, and one priest, Fr. Alain from the Congo, spends much of his time in youth work. He says, “There are four youth groups: Young Adults, Senior Youth Group, Intermediary Youth Group, and Junior Youth. We are working hard to promote unity among all four youth groups, and all are encouraging others from the parish to join the youth groups. The Senior Youth Group is one of the most wonderful I have ever worked with. They are talented and willing to serve. Two of them have been elected as among the parish leaders.” It is a source of pride and joy to know that the good work Maryknollers began in Jericho so many years ago carries on and has even multiplied.

Kebirigo Parish, Kisii Diocese In 1969, Tiberius Mugendi replaced Otunga as bishop of Kisii Diocese. Mugendi was also a good friend of Joe Glynn, as Mugendi had worked in Isebania Parish where Glynn and other Maryknollers regularly stopped. Mugendi approached Glynn in 1969 requesting Maryknoll to open two parishes in Kisii Diocese, one in the Luo area and the other in the Kisii-speaking area. In 1970, Maryknoll assigned four newly ordained priests to East Africa, with the original intention that they would join two older Maryknoll priests from Tanzania, for a total of three priests in each of the two parts of Kisii Diocese. However, the Luo-speaking Maryknollers of Musoma Diocese in Tanzania refused to release anyone for Kisii Diocese, because the Passionist Society from Italy had just agreed to send nine priests to the Luo-speaking area of Kisii Diocese and staff three parishes. Thus, three of the newly ordained Maryknollers, Frank Breen, Mike Bishop and Joe Morris, were assigned to learn the Kisii language beginning in September, 1970, and the fourth, John Eybel, studied Luo, but for work in Tanzania. Learning a tribal language and local culture takes a minimum of two to three years, and both Glynn and Bishop Mugendi realized that it would be at least two years until Maryknoll could open a parish. In March, 1971, after six months in language school, the three priests went to Kisii Diocese to live with African priests for the first year, while continuing to learn language. In early 1972 Fr. Dick Quinn was returning to East Africa after taking four months of core theology in New York, and was asked by Glynn to go to Kisii Diocese to open a new Maryknoll parish. Both Bishop and Morris joined him, and for one year the three of them lived with Fr. John Oseko, a native Kisii priest, at Rangenyo Parish, while the new parish of Kebirigo was being built. Breen continued to live with a Ugandan priest, Cyril Wandera, at the neighboring parish of Gekano for two more years. Some prior research about Kisii had already taken place in 1969, when Glynn asked MM Fr. Francis Murray to do an evaluation of Kisii. His report stated that Kisii District was the most densely populated rural district in Kenya (possibly in all of Africa; about 1,000 per square mile in 1970, even higher today), was twenty percent Catholic and growing rapidly, and had very few priests. Only four were native Kisii priests, and two of them were abroad for studies (on their return to Kisii, both left the priesthood). His report highlighted the northern part of Kisii District, the location known as North Mogirango, as being the most logical place for Maryknoll to open a parish. Total population was between 70,000 and 100,000, with no resident priest. It was served along with another equally large location by the one priest in Rangenyo Parish. Murray further stated that the Catholics of Kebirigo (actually a small part of Kebirigo called Ibara that was overwhelmingly Catholic) were ready to grant four acres to the Catholic Church to build

23 a parish. Although two other places were also looked at, Kebirigo Town’s central location in northern Kisii District, the large plot of land, decent roads, and proximity to electricity made it the most logical choice for a new parish. Despite the great advantages of Kebirigo, its choice proved to be the first of several disagreements the Maryknollers had with either the Bishop or other priests of the diocese. The latter had friends in those other two places considered for a new parish and they resented having an American mission society make the choice of where to live. It did not matter whether the other places were suitable or not. On February 6, 1973, Quinn, Morris and Bishop moved into the newly built rectory in Kebirigo. Fr. John Oseko had given them warm hospitality for a whole year, and remained ever after a good friend of all the Maryknollers stationed in Kisii Diocese. Kebirigo straddles a ridge 7,000 feet above sea level, with superb panoramic views of Kisii’s ever-green, steep hills, and of Lake Victoria thirty miles to the west. The climate is moderate, and the malaria carrying anopheles mosquito does not live at that high an altitude. Quinn later reminisced, “Kebirigo was so beautiful I fell in love with the place.” This rich agricultural area is gifted with an extremely fertile soil and an average rainfall of 70 inches a year. Kisii people are hard-working subsistence farmers, growing maize, tea, pyrethrum, coffee, bananas, and many kinds of fruit and vegetables. Most families had at least one cow in 1970, plus sheep, goats and chickens. Income varied, but with five acres of land a family could earn between $700 and $1000 a year, plus grow most of their own food. During the boom years of 1977 and 1978, caused by El Nino torrential rainfall and very high prices for coffee and tea, many families in Kebirigo Parish made over $2,000 in each of those two years. After 1979, however, as more persistent droughts set in, commodity prices dropped, and farms became smaller (less than two acres for most families), Kisii farmers found the rural economy more and more of a struggle. When they began living together at Rangenyo in 1972, the three priests conversed every evening about their ideas for developing the new parish, a routine they continued for all their years in Kebirigo. These evening discussions had both social and pastoral/theological purposes. Quinn, who had been in Tanzania since 1954 and had been the pastor at Komuge Parish in Musoma Diocesan where the catechist training center was located, was instrumental in articulating a set of goals and policies for the new parish. Additionally, he had been strongly influenced by both the Arusha Declaration and the findings of the Seminary Study Year. He helped the two new priests to decide on goals and actions to achieve their hopes for Kebirigo Parish. Their overall goal was to create a Self-Reliant, Self-Ministering, Self-Governing parish, in accordance with their understanding of Vatican II. Achieving this required three crucial pastoral components: parish decentralization, a strong parish council, and lay leadership training. Being young, energetic and highly motivated, the priests proved tireless in implementing their ideas. First was the decentralization of the parish into eight ‘centers,’ as they were called. Morris says, “There were eight clans in North Mogirango, so we set up a center for each clan.” Each center was to be situated adjacent to a road and near a small trading village, since, as Quinn argued, the commercial village is a naturally central location for the people and the church should be there as well. A major decision was made to develop all eight centers equally, with no one central parish center. (This proved to be another source of endless conflict with other diocesan leaders, who thought that a parish should

24 have a parish church with one or two Masses every Sunday.) With two priests doing parish work, and four Sundays in a month, each center began receiving Mass once a month, followed by a one-hour center council meeting. (Beginning in 1973, Quinn was fully involved in establishing a lay leadership training center. On Sundays, he said Mass in neighboring parishes or their outstations.) The church at Kebirigo, where the priests lived, was not looked on as the parish but as just one of the centers. In fact, the Catholics of Kebirigo were slower to build their church than most of the other centers, perhaps expecting that the priests would build them a large parish church as was the practice in all other parishes. In February, 1974, Breen replaced Bishop at Kebirigo, with the latter moving to Isebania Parish. However, there was no change in goals and policies. The single most effective action that empowered each center to be independently self-reliant was building its own church. Each church was to be a multi-purpose building, forty feet by forty feet (later some churches were expanded to sixty by forty feet), built with local materials and local labor. At times all the Catholics of the center participated in work days to accomplish non-skilled tasks. Morris and Quinn came up with the design and plan: the Catholics of each center were required to raise the initial money, which was used to put up concrete pillars reinforced with iron rods. Then the Maryknollers provided funds from abroad to put up a roof of heavyweight, galvanized iron sheets. After that the Catholics continued to raise money and put up the walls. Morris spent much of his six years helping them in church construction, and said, “Although by the time I left Kebirigo not one of the churches had been completed, it was a great idea, and the rallying point of each center. As soon as the roofs were up, we were able to celebrate Mass in the buildings, and there was no reason why the churches had to be completed in the first year or two.” The Catholics themselves organized Harambee fund-raising events to obtain money for the walls and floors, and at times huge raffles were held that attracted thousands of people. Later, though, the District Commissioner in Kisii Town informed Breen, in a very polite way, that the Kenya government had strong reservations about the suitability of holding raffles for very poor people. The raffle had 100 winners but over 5000 losers. (Ironically, Breen, who would buy 100 tickets for each raffle, costing about $15.00, would usually win something at each raffle. However, the item he won would be worth only about $1.00.) It was only the top ten prizes that were worth any significant value, with the top three prizes, a bicycle, short-wave radio, and record player, the main draws in the raffle. After 1977, raffles were discontinued. The second component of the priests’ efforts was creating a dedicated parish council that truly had deliberative power over many aspects of the parish. Seminars were held in each center about the role of the parish council, and then, once formed, further seminars were offered to the parish council representatives from each center. Each center had its own council, which included women and men, at least one youth representative, and the catechist(s) as de officio members. Each center then chose four representatives for the parish council, which met on the fourth Saturday of each month. The parish youth group also chose several representatives, and each trained catechist was a de officio member of the parish council. One important role for the parish and center councils was deciding how to allocate parish funds: sixty percent of funds raised went to the parish for priests’ upkeep and parish programs; forty percent remained for the use of each center, including paying their own local catechists.

25 Regarding parish income, two very important policy changes were made: sacramental stipends were abolished, and the Sunday offering was raised to one Kenya shilling per adult each Sunday (about 15 U.S. cents). At that time, most Kisii Catholics put in only five or ten Kenyan cents (about one U.S. penny) on Sunday, and only when the priest came for Mass. Other parishes received very little income from the Sunday collection. Conversely, they charged relatively high stipends (by rural African standards) for Baptism, First Communion and other sacraments – about $2.00 per sacrament and even more for Marriage. African priests were solely dependent on sacramental income, which resulted in their issuing very dubious decisions about sacramental suitability. They stated that anyone who was presented for baptism should be baptized – provided they paid the sacramental stipend, of course. In those parishes scores of infants were baptized, even though the parents, usually both parents, were neither baptized or members of the church. In most cases the father of the child would not be present for the Baptism, which was usually held during a weekday Mass at an outstation church or in a school classroom. The mother’s intention was to “get a name” for the child. A phenomenon unique to Africa is ‘getting a name,’ and in the case of Baptism it is getting a European name. Despite their poverty, Africans are willing to pay relatively large amounts of money to get a European name, by being baptized. However, this sacramental practice has nothing to do with incorporation into the church, and especially not into becoming an active member of the church community. Because of this, there are probably millions of people in the African continent who have been baptized but have nothing to do with the church – making the statistical growth of the Catholic Church in Africa very suspect. Along with abolishing sacramental stipends, Kebirigo’s parish council accepted the priests’ recommendation that the catechetical course for baptism and first communion be lengthened to one year. In other parishes, it was only three weeks, during each school vacation. As there were three school vacations in a year, April, August and December, there were scores of Baptisms and First Communions in each outstation of neighboring parishes in each vacation every year. The stipend was divided up between the catechist and priest, with the catechist receiving one-third. Since money was the main criteria for receiving the sacrament, some older men never went to any instructions but just came the day before, paid their money in full, and were baptized the next day. Contrary to what neighboring parishes expected, the dropping of stipends and change in the amount of the Sunday offering led to a huge increase in Kebirigo Parish’s income, with it going up significantly each year that Maryknollers were there. And with a full-year catechumenate, taught by trained catechists, there was confidence that those newly baptized would know their faith and continue going to church. While working in African parishes their first year, Breen and Morris discovered that almost all those baptized after a mere three-week course did not continue coming to church. These income-raising decisions of the Maryknollers were strongly criticized by African priests and the Bishop. The Maryknollers responded that they were creating a mature form of self-reliant parish, in which the adult parishioners recognized their responsibility to provide adequate income for parish programs and church upkeep. Dependence on sacramental stipends alone was not only theologically dubious but financially unsustainable. The third component of self-reliance was training. In the eight years that Maryknoll ran Kebirigo Parish, about twelve men were sent to the four-month course for

26 catechists in the Swahili language in Kitale, Kenya, and two or three were sent to the one- year course in English at Mumias, Kenya. By 1980, the number of centers had expanded to twelve, and each had at least one trained catechist, plus a church building at some level of construction. In the three Sundays when a priest did not come for Mass, a Service Without a Priest (called Ibada bila Padre in Swahili; the Swahili missal has a full rite for this service) was led by the trained catechist. For several years, they also distributed communion at the services, until Bishop Mugendi issued a directive forbidding the practice. Seminars on a variety of topics were held in each center, for all the Christians. Probably the majority of Catholics of the parish attended at least one course at the Lay Leadership Training Center run by Dick Quinn at Kebirigo, called Viongozi Center (viongozi means leaders in Swahili). There were also special courses on leadership at Viongozi Center for parish council officers, for youth group leaders, and updating for catechists. There were special courses for women, as women’s development and empowerment were national goals in the 1970s (breaking down patriarchal attitudes has turned out to be a multi-generational endeavor, however). Breen also began in Kebirigo what became a life-long primary interest, teaching the bible. He began first just telling the youth groups the stories of the Old Testament, as there was no bible translated into Kisii, and he used it as a language-learning exercise. He later refined this to interpretation of the meaning of select books and passages, and eventually into discussions of the relevance of biblical wisdom, albeit of an ancient era, to modern challenges. Breen also organized choir and drama competitions in the parish, and in 1975 Breen and Morris began an annual tradition of taking the winning choir to the national choir competition in Nairobi. This was seen as more of a reward and exciting trip for the youth of the choir, as rural Kisii choirs were not able to compete with the almost professional, adult choirs of Nairobi. For many of the youth (aged twelve to twenty, with a few in their twenties), this was their first trip to Nairobi, and an eye-opening experience. In 1973 and again in 1977, AMECEA, the organization of Bishops’ Conferences of eastern Africa, issued pastoral documents decreeing that Small Christian Communities (SCCs) be the priority for all dioceses in East Africa. The Maryknollers in Kebirigo gave seminars in each center about this, and encouraged each center to have SCCs. But they never caught on, for two reasons: rural Africa is very communal to begin with, and the Christians viewed SCCs as a superfluous form of community. Secondly, the whole focus of Kebirigo’s Catholics was on their center, which had great meaning in their lives. In fact, SCCs have been mainly an urban phenomenon in East Africa. The enormous city parishes were not conducive to forming community in the multi-tribal, urban setting. SCCs readily served the felt need that urban Africans have for greater community relationships. The smallness of the SCCs also gave African Catholics greater participatory control over how they would pray and reflect on their faith. In Kebirigo Parish, however, the centers served all these needs. As the years passed by, more and more centers were started, precisely because the existing centers were becoming too big and not adequately serving the faith needs of all the people. Parts of the neighboring Location, West Mogirango, were within Kebirigo Parish, and the Catholics of this Location were insistent on starting their own centers within their Location.

27 Rather than being weakened by decentralization, parish unity was enhanced by the establishment of many centers. There were enough parish-wide activities that the celebration of their faith in their own locations, clans and centers did not make people feel marginalized from the parish. The priests also went out to all centers on a very consistent basis, further strengthening the bonds between people and parish. Of course, they were all Kisii people, and it was the same Kisii language used in each center. There were no tribal barriers to break down. Furthermore, in Kisii custom marriage takes place across clan or even sub-tribal boundaries. A Kisii man can not marry a Kisii woman from his own clan. So Kisii people were very accustomed to having strong familial relationships with people from other parts of Kisii. At that time, some of the centers located near other tribes, such as the Luo and Kipsigis (neither of whom are Bantu, and so very different from the Bantu Kisii), arranged cross-over days on which Christians from one tribe would celebrate in the church of the neighboring tribe. Many Luo Catholics also came to Viongozi Center for courses and were always hospitably welcomed by the local Kisii people. In the eight years that Maryknollers staffed Kebirigo Parish the language used was Kisii, with the exception of Dick Quinn who usually spoke Swahili. Many Kisii men, some women, and many of the older youth could understand Swahili and even converse in Swahili to a certain extent. This varied according to the individual’s contact with Swahili. The national government radio station had all day broadcasts in Swahili (also in English), which many people listened to, either at home or in the fields while they were doing farm work. There were also local government-funded stations that broadcast in tribal languages, which many people listened to every day. Kenya has had a different policy than Tanzania regarding language. Some have alleged that the strong retention of tribal languages – within tribal districts, on government radio stations, and within church liturgies – has played a significant part in stoking ethno-nationalist sentiments that boiled over into violence in national elections beginning in 1992. However, even in 2010 liturgies are conducted in the Kisii language throughout the three Kisii districts, a practice common in the tribal districts of other large tribes in Kenya. Even in large towns with multi-tribal populations there is usually at least one Mass in a tribal language, if that town is the central town of a large tribe’s district. (Strangely enough, there is also at least one Mass in English at almost every urban parish in Kenya.) Liturgical celebrations in tribal languages have tremendous benefits regarding worship and faith development. However, Swahili celebrations are also extremely well done in those areas of Kenya where Swahili is common. (For example, the three Swahili Masses celebrated in Tudor Parish of Mombasa week after week are so excellent that they compare favorably to Mass celebrations in any language in any part of the world.) Kenya’s Bishops have not yet (as of 2010) begun deliberating whether or not the need to forge a national consciousness carries more weight than the local advantages of liturgies in tribal languages. One other major undertaking by the Maryknollers in Kebirigo, formation of a parish co-operative from 1978 to 1980, turned out to be an unfinished experiment. People from all over North and West Mogirango, not only Catholics but all religions, raised about $18,000.00 with the intention to open a wholesale co-operative store. The Kisii people themselves rejected the idea of a credit union, the original intention of the priests. The priests also surveyed the possibility of opening a petrol station in Kebirigo village, but shortly afterwards a local businessman recognized the value of this and beat the

28 parish to the pump. Thus, in 1979 Breen used the funds to buy a plot of land in Kebirigo, build a large wholesale store, and buy a second-hand pickup truck. In mid-1980, when Maryknoll was leaving, the co-operative officers started a wholesale business, which unfortunately never did very well. It needed far more capital. Three years later Breen visited Kebirigo and was told that the building had been assessed by Co-operative Officials from Nairobi as worth about $60,000.00. Breen advised them to sell the plot and building, and pay huge dividends to the hundreds of members, but he never found out what happened to either the building or the money. Morris left Kebirigo in 1978 to do pre-evangelization in the Turkana area of northwestern Kenya. When Quinn left in 1979, Breen was briefly alone in the parish, but Maryknoll soon assigned Joe Corso to Kebirigo. For health reasons, he did not go out to the distant centers, but concentrated on three local centers, which were also three of the largest and most self-sufficient. He also enjoyed going over to the government division headquarters in Nyamira (which was actually in Rangenyo Parish), and meeting with both hospital workers and policemen. His frequent discussions with them actually functioned very much like Small Christian Community meetings. At this time, he also began his involvement in Marriage Encounter, running courses for Kisii and Luo couples at Viongozi Center, and also going on weekends to other parts of the country. This eventually led to his becoming the national co-coordinator of Marriage Encounter. In 1980, Breen had already been asked by Maryknoll to return to the U.S. to do Mission Promotion and Education work, but asked if he could stay just two more years to consolidate what Maryknoll had done in Kebirigo. However, due to misunderstandings with the bishop about the concrete manner of implementing decentralization and lay leadership, Breen left in June, 1980. Corso’s health made it impossible for him to run the parish alone, and both he and Ed Schoellmann, who had become Director of Viongozi Center, decided to leave at this same time. The parish was turned over to the diocese, and two months later a Kisii priest was assigned there by the bishop. Kebirigo Parish continued to grow and flourish under the various priests who came after Maryknoll left. The most important change was the decision by subsequent priests to make the church at Kebirigo the central parish church. Beginning in August, 1980, two Masses were held there every Sunday, with the other centers receiving Mass only when the priest could go out to them. Various priests have also tried to build new churches at Kebirigo, and in 2009 the new pastor, Fr. Thomas Matoke, was trying to raise money to both repair and expand the current church, which is either the second or third church. The original church built when Maryknollers staffed Kebirigo Parish is now used by the Health Center. One pastor of Kebirigo who was there for three or so years at the beginning of the 1990s, Mill Hill Fr. John Kaiser from Minnesota, later became internationally famous. After leaving Kisii Diocese he went to work with the Maasai in the neighboring Diocese of Ngong. While there he documented abuses carried out by leading politicians, including of one who allegedly raped several schoolgirls. In August, 2000, Kaiser’s dead body was found next to the main highway to western Kenya, shot twice with his own shotgun in the middle of the night. Although the FBI from the United States did an investigation and concluded that he committed suicide, Catholic Church officials contend that he must have been waylaid and killed by professional assassins.

29 In 2006, Breen visited several of the centers which do not have a resident priest, and found that the churches had been completed, the number of Catholics had grown tremendously, and the faith was flourishing under their own lay leadership. The wisdom of starting lay-run centers, rather than on focusing solely on the priest-run parish compound, was borne out. Around the year 2000, the parish was divided into two parishes. In 2009, the current Kebirigo Parish had about thirty churches, still called centers but functioning more like outstations, and the other parish, called Magwagwa Parish, had about ten churches. There was only one Mass said at the parish each Sunday, and one or two Sunday Masses in outstations on a revolving basis. Despite attempts to make the parish the center of life for all Christians, they still consider their own centers to be their primary focus. Even with the division of Kebirigo Parish into two parishes and the opening of Nyamira Parish, only five miles away, Kebirigo is still too large a parish for only one priest, despite his youth and energy. Hopefully, as 2011 dawns, Fr. Matoke has been joined by another priest to be able to give full service to the Catholics of Kebirigo.

Fr. Dick Quinn, Viongozi Center In Tanzania, Quinn was pastor of Komuge Parish, where the diocesan catechist training center was located, and had witnessed the great value of training local people to take over the many tasks of creating a self-reliant African church. Thus, even when he accepted the assignment to establish a parish in Kisii, he already had desires to open a lay leadership training center in Kenya. The large plot, to which he added another two acres by direct purchase, and central location of Kebirigo in northern Kisii District made this a suitable place to put the center. As soon as the rectory was completed in early 1973 he began construction of the much larger training center, which took on the name of Viongozi (Swahili for leaders) Center. The center opened in April, 1974. (Another place that would have been very suitable for building a large diocesan pastoral center, in or just outside of Kisii Town itself, was never considered.) Unlike the catechist centers in Kitale and Mumias, Viongozi offered only short courses, such as weekend courses, or three to five day courses during the week, or in some cases a full seven-day course. Decent, clean rooms that could accommodate as many as four people were provided, with about fifteen rooms each for men and women. Three nutritious, filling meals were provided each day, plus breaks for tea and bread at mid-morning and mid-afternoon. The daily fee of five shillings (62 American cents) was only a nominal fee for what was received, and for most Kebirigo parishioners even this fee was paid either by the parish or the center. The variety of relevant courses, the great meals, and cheap cost resulted in Viongozi Center becoming well known throughout Kisii Diocese and even in neighboring dioceses, and thousands flocked to the center every year. Quinn said, “I built up a very, very good staff, and the real success of the center was that we programmed courses, tailoring them to fit the needs of the diocese and western Kenya’s nation-building needs of that time. We eventually developed forty courses in all, twenty were pastoral courses, and twenty were socio-economic courses.” The latter included chicken and bee-keeping courses, courses for shop-owners, many courses for women which eventually became formalized as Development I and Development II, and even courses for Chiefs and Assistant Chiefs. Viongozi Center was

30 used once for priests of the diocese in a week-long course in Social Analysis, led by an outstanding African priest from Mombasa Diocese. Quinn later reflected that “we made a tremendous impact in the northern part of Kisii, and we broke down all sorts of prejudice that had existed against Catholics, because we offered so many types of courses.” The majority denomination in Kisii District is Seventh Day Adventist, which had a history of denigrating the Catholic religion. In 1972, Kisii Catholics felt intimidated by SDAs, but by 1980 Catholics were knowledgeable and proud of their religion, and were no longer worried about SDA propaganda. The SDAs themselves continued with their own faith, but pernicious attacks directed at Catholics were no longer made, as everyone could see with their own eyes what the Catholic faith was about. In 1979, Quinn returned to the U.S. for further up-dating in pastoral theology, and then went on for courses in video production. He handed over administration of Viongozi Center to MM Fr. Ed Schoellmann, who continued to mid-1980. Several African Sisters, trained at Catechetical Centers, then took over as directors. While no longer offering hundreds of courses every year, the center still functions today.

Brother Jim Fahy, Diocesan Youth Director, Kisii Diocese Fahy came to East Africa in 1971, and after two years of language study and pastoral learning in Musoma, Tanzania, he requested the opportunity to come to Kebirigo Parish to do youth work, arriving in June, 1973. For three years he confined his youth ministry within the parish, trying to set up a good organizational structure so that youth work could become self-reliant. He had two major tasks: “First I tried to build up the youth leadership in the parish, both in the centers and the secondary schools. Secondly, I was made Director of the parish-sponsored Village Polytechnic (a vocational training school for eighth-grade leavers), with the main objective of organizing it to the point that the government would assume funding for all its operations.” The second goal had been achieved by the time he moved to Kisii Town in January, 1976. Within Kebirigo Parish the Young Christian Student (YCS) program already existed in at least some of the secondary schools. Fahy visited these and other schools, firming up the YCS where it existed and starting it in the other schools. When Viongozi Center started, he made sure that there were good courses there for secondary school student leaders, and encouraged the YCS leaders and other YCS members to attend the courses. In the parish, he felt that a similar organization was needed. After discussion with youth leaders in each center, the decision was made to call this the Young Christian Volunteers (YCV). This name caught on immediately, spread to other parishes, and soon after became the diocesan-wide name for parish youth group members. The term ‘volunteers’ implied that the youth were to give of their time to help build up and maintain their churches, whether at the parish center or the outstations. The youth readily and energetically responded to this call. Special ceremonies were held in each center after Sunday Mass to confer on each YCV member a badge and card. Their names and volunteer activities were kept in registers at each center. In 1976 Fahy moved to Kisii town to become Diocesan Youth Director. He visited all parishes in the diocese, formally starting the YCV organization. This was so

31 successful that by 1979 there were 400 YCV groups. On weekdays he went round to secondary schools, visiting the YCS groups. This was also very successful, complemented by the courses held at Viongozi Center. He was also joined by two Maryknoll Sisters, Perla Laurel and Becky Macugay, both originally from the Philippines. The Sisters started a revolving fund to assist school leavers to start income-earning businesses, such as small shops, bakeries, or other such group enterprises. Instead of giving money directly, the Sisters gave materials to the group and paid rent. These were loans which the groups were to repay, but that usually was the most difficult part of the program. Some projects completely failed, while others continued for many years. Successful enterprises were those taken over by one man in the group, who continued it as his lifelong occupation. A man from Kebirigo Parish, John Momanyi, was sent on for training in Ireland, and in 1979 he became Fahy’s assistant. When Fahy returned to the U.S. to take a Clinical Pastoral Education course, Momanyi became the Diocesan Youth Coordinator. YCS is still very active in secondary schools, and there are still many YCV groups in parishes.

Mike and Mary Mantey, Lay Missioners In 1973, Maryknoll began the Lay Missioner Program, and in 1975 the priests of Kebirigo requested a nurse to help open a dispensary/mobile clinic at Kebirigo Parish. The Manteys arrived at language school in September, 1976, and during this time Frank Breen oversaw construction of the dispensary buildings on the parish compound. Mary was a Registered Nurse, but due to lack of experience in Africa she first went to Kitale for six months to work in a busy health center run by Maryknoll Sisters. This was a rewarding experience for Mantey. Late in 1977 she returned to Kebirigo, although it was several more months before everything was ready to open the dispensary. A Kisii woman who was a community health nurse was hired, plus other staff, and a driver. The dispensary was open most days, and two days a week Mary and some of the staff went to center churches to run mobile mother/child clinics. Education of the mothers was one of the prime goals of the clinics. Mantey received assistance from a Sister of the Medical Missioners of Mary, who regularly visited from Kisii Town. The dispensary charged only a nominal fee, ten shillings, about $1.50, per patient. This was for all medical costs – diagnosis, treatment and all medications, plus follow-up. This paid for much of the operational expenses, but the dispensary had to be subsidized by Maryknoll, especially the mobile clinic. The low charge and excellent service made the dispensary and clinics very popular. For two years Mary worked hard and cooperatively with the Kisii staff and people, and earned a great reputation. When the Manteys returned to the U.S. at the end of 1979, a second Kisii community health nurse was hired and the dispensary/clinics continued on with no difficulties. However, when Maryknoll left Kebirigo in 1980 the clinics lost their subsidy and had to be discontinued. The dispensary remained open, but struggled to provide service. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the local congregation of St. Joseph Sisters from Asumbi (within Kisii Diocese but near Homa Bay on Lake Victoria) managed the dispensary, but had to charge high prices for treatment. This resulted in relatively few

32 patients coming to the dispensary. Eventually, after many years, the government took it over, elevating it to a health center. Mike Mantey was very interested in spiritual counseling, for which there was little felt need in the Kebirigo area. As he had good college credits in math subjects, he taught math in a local secondary school. Finally, in 1979 he was able to establish a House of Prayer on the grounds of Nyabaruru Parish, the original Kisii parish on the outskirts of Kisii town. The Manteys were the first lay missioners in Kenya, and their good work paved the way for many more to come in later years.

Fr. Ed Killackey, Religious Education, Kisii Diocese In addition to those who worked at Kebirigo and Isebania Parishes, two other Maryknoll priests were assigned to Kisii Diocese in the 1970s, Lionnel Bouffard and Ed Killackey. The latter had already worked in Shinyanga Diocese of Tanzania, where he had been diocesan education secretary, and he spoke fluent Swahili. After a three-year stint in the U.S. doing Maryknoll promotion work, he returned to East Africa in 1969 and was asked by Joe Glynn to accept the assignment to Kisii Diocese for upgrading religious education in parishes, primary schools and secondary schools. He went to Nyabaruru Parish, on the outskirts of Kisii town, where he lived with two Mill Hill priests. He learned some basic Kisii language, but since he was to visit parishes in three different language groups, he did all his work in Swahili – or English, as Kenyan teachers generally speak English well. English is also the language of education in Kenya, from Standard Four (fourth grade) on. For primary schools, the Children of God series had been translated into a number of African languages, for Standards One to Seven, and Killackey ordered a large number of copies of each book. Parishes or schools which wanted to use them were required to purchase them, at very cheap cost. In addition, Killackey gave one-day or several day seminars to all teachers who would use the series, in either their school or parish. Killackey has always been a sought-after speaker for seminars or retreats, both in East Africa and in the United States, because of the great knowledge and insights that he imparts and for the humor that he interjects into his presentations. Shortly after arriving in Kisii, he began to receive invitations to give talks, workshops and retreats to religious groups in the diocese and then in neighboring dioceses. In 1972, he was made the Development Coordinator for the Maryknoll Africa Region, which necessitated his traveling to most Maryknoll parishes in both Kenya and Tanzania. Between 1973 and 1975, Maryknoll instituted a planning process for all Maryknoll apostolates and ministries throughout the world, and Killackey played a major role in enabling the Maryknollers in Africa to understand this process. As if these jobs were not enough, in 1973 he was requested to be the catechetical coordinator of the Kenya Bishops’ Conference, and to provide catechetical up-dating for the bishops and others who were going to catechetical programs. At that time there were eighteen bishops in Kenya, the majority native Kenyans. In collaboration with Brother Richard Keiley, who taught Catechetics at Gaba Pastoral Institute in Eldoret, Kenya, Killackey ran week-long seminars for the bishops three times each year. In addition to catechetics, they also ran workshops on Social Justice and Peace, and on Small Christian Communities, which AMECEA had declared the priority for the church. Fr. Joe Healey

33 later commented that “the whole conceptualization and rationale of Small Christian Communities actually came from Ed Killackey.” Much of this was new for the bishops, and it would be a decade or two before the Kenya bishops would start becoming strong advocates for social justice. Killackey explained how he and Keiley tried to help the Bishops understand their role in the Post- Vatican Church:

We used various models for the church, for example a pastoral model. We asked them whether their pastoral model corresponded with their realization of how the church was changing with its new, rapid growth. We also led them to reflect on how their pastoral leadership in each diocese was or was not representative of the pastoral goals of the Bishops’ Conference. We found that in the beginning they were not able to make the links between their own personal models and what was required of the emerging church. They each had a deep personal spirituality, but their theology was the opposite of this spirituality. The bishops also had difficulty at first relating with one another. One of the most rewarding aspects of these seminars was to see how they suddenly began to appreciate each other. By the second year they were very comfortable with one another.

Killackey continued to reside in Nyabururu up till the end of 1976, although his original role in Kisii Diocese had been relegated to secondary importance. In 1976 he was asked to be Maryknoll’s Justice and Peace Coordinator in Washington, DC, and he accepted this assignment in the beginning of 1977.

Fr. Lionel Bouffard, Cardinal Otunga High School, Kisii Diocese Lionel Bouffard had worked in Tanzania from 1963 to 1978, doing pastoral work in the dioceses of Shinyanga and Dar es Salaam, and school chaplaincy at a secondary school and a development institute in Morogoro, 120 miles west of Dar. It was this experience that led to his assignment to Cardinal Otunga H.S., where he was both school chaplain and Religious Studies teacher for Forms Five and Six, the two years of university preparation after four years of secondary school (in 1984 Kenya changed to the American system of only four years of secondary school prior to university admission). Brothers from Netherlands had built up the school to one of the top ten secondary/high schools in the country. Officially known as the Brothers of Our Lady of Mercy, they were popularly known as the Brothers of Tilborg, after the town in Netherlands where their headquarters are located and in which this order administered all but one of the schools. All the Brothers were recognized as excellent teachers. Bouffard said, “The Brothers desperately wanted a chaplain at Cardinal Otunga, and as Maryknoll was already in Kisii I readily accepted this assignment. I got along very well with the Brothers, who are a very professional group and ran the school in a manner that all schools should emulate. I also got along very well with Bishop Mugendi and used to go into his house every Monday evening for a meal with him.” He also got along very well with the students, who always asked him to be the announcer at the sports competitions. At that time Cardinal Otunga H.S. produced some of the top middle and long distance

34 runners in Kenya, some of whom went to the Olympics. Bouffard’s proficiency in Swahili made him a logical choice for announcer at multi-tribal events. He taught a two-year course in New Testament that gave all the students a thorough grounding in scripture as well as applications to contemporary life and history. In addition to teaching, he helped the students and Brothers to produce great liturgies, training many students for a variety of roles in the liturgical celebrations. He also taught the catechetical course for those wishing to be baptized or confirmed while in secondary school. Bouffard was elected to Maryknoll’s Chapter in 1984, and on his return to Kenya in 1985 he became Chaplain at Kenyatta University in Nairobi. Several years after Bouffard left Cardinal Otunga H.S. the Brothers turned over the position of Headmaster to a local man who had graduated from the school in 1972. He had obtained a Bachelors Degree, taught for close to ten years at high schools in Mombasa and become a Headmaster at one of them. Through close friendship with Bishop Mugendi and his close relations with the Brothers of Cardinal Otunga High School, he was selected to be the first African Headmaster. Unfortunately, within two years he was discovered to have embezzled over $100,000.00 of school funds, a calamity that had many adverse repercussions for the school. One whole class of fourth year students was not allowed to take the national exam, since the exam money they had paid had been embezzled and never passed on to the National Examining Council. The school’s academic standard dropped precipitously and it ceased to be in the top one hundred schools in the nation. Because local Catholics consider this school to be the most important institution for Catholic Kisii people, their leaders have come together in subsequent years to ensure the school is properly administered. Cardinal Otunga High School is today ranked as one of the better high schools academically in Nyanza Province, but its former glory as the top school may have been lost forever.

Bouffard was the last of the Maryknollers to work in Kisii Diocese. Maryknoll was there from 1965 to 1984. This was in the immediate post-Independence period in Kenya, and the immediate post-Vatican II era in the Catholic Church, when rapid change was taking place in both church and society. There were many disparate attempts to meet new challenges in constructive ways, but also much confusion, uncertainty and even conflict. Despite their limited presence, Maryknollers had a lasting impact on Kisii Diocese. It has been thirty years since Maryknoll left Kebirigo Parish and Viongozi Center, yet both are still remembered as Maryknoll founded institutions. Those in non- parochial ministries left intangible marks on those they touched. Beginning around 1980 the diocese began to have many ordinations of local men, and in the 1990s it was divided into two dioceses, one for Kisii and the other for Luo. In the former Rangenyo Parish of 1972, there are now five parishes, with an average of eight to ten priests at any given time. The number of Catholics has grown tremendously (the depth of faith, as always, can not be adequately determined by numbers alone). Most importantly, the Catholics of North and West Mogirango have made the Church their own and are maintaining it as a self-reliant Church.

35 Burnt Forest Parish, Eldoret Diocese

In 1971 the former Msgr. John Njenga of Makadara Parish in Nairobi became the first African Bishop of Eldoret Diocese in the northwestern highlands of Kenya. This area straddles the equator, with slightly more of the diocese in the northern hemisphere. It also has the highest altitudes and coldest weather of any heavily populated part of Kenya, with altitudes ranging from 6,500 to 10,000 feet above sea level. It is renowned for being the home of Kenya’s famous long distance runners and marathoners, the Nandi, one of seven ethnic groups now lumped together as one ethnic group, called the Kalenjin. The cold and somewhat drier climate – dry only in comparison to other parts of Kenya’s highlands – is ideal for growing grain crops such as corn and wheat, plus raising British breeds of cattle, sheep and pigs. Tea as a cash crop does very well in some parts of Eldoret Diocese, where rainfall is greater. The agricultural potential made it a prime target for British settlement at the beginning of the twentieth century, but not without a very bloody war against the Nandi people, who put up stiffer resistance to British colonialism than any other group in Kenya. Nandi are a branch of Nilotic people, sometimes called the Mountain Nilotes, and practice a combination of settled pastoralism and subsistence farming. All Nandi were removed by the British from Uasin Gishu District, the largest, most productive district that also included Eldoret town, and were relegated to tribal reserves in more mountainous terrain. This district and town became one of the centers of the so-called ‘White Highlands.’ (Note: the pre-colonial history of this district, which has now been sub-divided into three districts, is disputed. Uasin Gishu is a Maasai term, and current non-Nandi residents of this district claim that it was never traditionally Nandi land. The British always claimed that most if not all the land was vacant in 1904, when they defeated the Nandi and began establishing British farms. Conversely, Nandi claim that all of Uasin Gishu was their traditional land. Finding the truth is part of the present post- violence reconciliation process going on in Kenya.) It is the history of this district that is most responsible for Kenya’s subsequent history of violent clashes between large ethnic groups in 1992 and 1997 prior to multi- party elections (read multi-tribal elections), and most horrifically in the post-election violence of January and February, 2008. After Independence in 1963 a land reform program was initiated, compensating British settlers for their land, and settling Africans on the former White Highlands. However, President Jomo Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, the largest ethnic group in Kenya, which traditionally inhabited central Kenya from Nairobi up to Mount Kenya, favored Kikuyu for resettlement in Uasin Gishu District. Later many Kisii and Luhya, both Bantu people similar to the Kikuyu, also bought land there. Kalenjin lost much of what they claim is their ancestral land east of Eldoret town. At each election, which usually take place in five-year intervals, Kalenjin politicians cleverly manipulate long-standing Kalenjin grievances about land and political power, to stir up anger and gain votes. They also organize and direct violent military attacks on the other ethnic groups. It was to this area that Bishop Njenga, himself a Kikuyu, requested Maryknoll to open a new parish in 1972. He had known Maryknollers in Nairobi, and knew that the Superior, Joe Glynn, was looking for new mission apostolates in Kenya. The parish is called Burnt Forest, and is located twenty-five miles east of Eldoret town, on the pan-

36 African highway, and at an altitude of 8,000 feet above sea level. Fathers John Grazer and Bill Knipe were the first Maryknollers to go there, living for the first year in a large farmhouse, formerly owned by an Italian, which had wooden walls and roof, and a cement floor. The farmhouse was at a place called Timboroa, fifteen miles east of Burnt Forest. At 9,000 feet above sea level it regularly had temperatures around freezing at night during the cold months, even though it was right on the equator. Several Maryknollers slept there on visits and all remarked how very cold it was. Grazer had received money from America, enough to build a rectory and church, and commuted in to Burnt Forest every day to supervise the construction. Maryknoll staffed Burnt Forest Parish from 1972 to 1981, and during that time there was no violence. Daniel Arap Moi, a Kalenjin, was Vice-President under Kenyatta, and assumed the Presidency in August, 1978, when Kenyatta died. Since Kenya was a one-party state at that time, and there was no contested election for President, Kalenjin land grievances were muted during Maryknoll’s ten years in Eldoret. Nandi farmed the outlying parts of the parish, employing Luhya to work on the larger farms, whereas Kikuyu were to be found running commercial enterprises along the highway, plus small farms not too far from the road. Being multi-tribal, Swahili was the automatic choice of language for the parish and all liturgies, even though neither ethnic group was deemed proficient in Swahili. (In an ironic twist, most Maryknoll priests who have done pastoral work in Kenya, especially those who previously worked in Tanzania, have been more fluent in Swahili than the Kenyan people, with the exception of Mombasa.) Knipe was ordained in 1958 and years later talked about his time in Burnt Forest.

This was the only parish where I did purely pastoral work in all my years of priesthood. For three years I rode my motorcycle up and down the mountains and valleys, visiting our various outstations. I enjoyed that time, and it was the only time I knew what it meant to be a missionary priest serving people in a parish. We didn’t always agree with Bishop Njenga, but I found him fair to work for. He pushed us, and always wanted more baptisms, more confirmations, more of everything. We could argue with him, for instance about policy, when to baptize or where to baptize. I enjoyed that and I liked him. He gave me permission to grant sanatio in radice, which is a dispensation enabling couples living together to have their marriages regularized without a wedding in church. They just needed to come into the office with a couple of witnesses. Well I was doing this in all our churches and the people thought it was great. I would bring the papers back to the Bishop and he was delighted. And the people were delighted, glad to be receiving the sacraments again, and to be seen by other Christians as Christians in good standing.

Knipe stayed in Burnt Forest for only three years, until late in 1975, when he was asked by Joe Glynn to accept an assignment to the new unit in Sudan. Knipe said, “Those were three good years for me, and I was in a good mood when Joe Glynn showed up asking me to transfer to Sudan. It was not only three years of really interesting pastoral work, but also the great camaraderie I had with the Kilteagan priests of the Diocese. We had many good times together, playing tennis and squash, and doing other things. So, my

37 experience of church in Kenya, in the Eldoret Diocese under Bishop Njenga, was a good one.” In 1973 Grazer returned to the U.S. to do Promotion work, and was replaced by Fr. Tom Donnelly, who was to remain there until 1981, and Jim Roy. Roy says, “This was an area that had been previously neglected by the Catholic Church. The dominant religion was African Inland Church, a branch of the Anglican Church. But we found success, and many people started coming to the catechumenate.” Donnelly said, “In the first year I did not have a motorcycle, and there was a lot of rain, so I found it very difficult to get around to most of the parish. Once off the highway, the roads and paths on the steep hills are very difficult to pass. But once the buildings were completed in November, 1973, we were able to really get started. There were three of us (Donnelly, Roy and Knipe), and we had a lot of energy. We divided the parish into three areas, and each of us took an area. That was possibly a mistake, but we each got to know our own areas very well. However, after Bill (Knipe) left and was replaced by Fr. Phil McCue, we each started to go to all sections of the parish and eventually know the whole parish.” Donnelly – eight years – and McCue – six years – were the two Maryknollers who spent the longest time in Burnt Forest. Both had previously worked in rural Tanzania for many years and spoke tribal languages in addition to Swahili – Luo for Donnelly and Sukuma for McCue. The first priority was to develop the outstations, and to set up a catechumenate in each one. There were sixteen outstations, and every year, in most if not all the outstations, there were adults and school children preparing for Baptism and other sacraments. This required a good catechetical program, and good catechists in each outstation. There were a few paid catechists when Maryknoll began, but they gradually put into effect a policy of volunteer catechists in each place. Here there was a difference of opinion with Bishop Njenga, who thought all catechists should be paid. But Roy says, “We proved that unpaid catechists can be very responsible and do a good job, because of their interest in helping the Church.” Donnelly adds, “Each outstation put forward the people themselves to be catechists, including women, people who were natural leaders. Some of them we sent to the four-month course in Kitale (fifty miles northwest of Eldoret). We also had people come out from the Gaba Catechetical Institute in Eldoret to give courses and seminars to all our catechists. Furthermore, our catechists were not completely volunteer; three times a year the parish council gave them a stipend, in gratitude for their work. But we never spoke of salary.” Although this led to conflict with Bishop Njenga, the Maryknollers were looking to the long-term sustainability and self-reliance of the parish. The Bishop wanted catechists to be paid a salary, but he expected Maryknoll to use American money to do this. The Maryknollers replied that the local church has to become fully responsible for continuing the catechumenate, not dependent on outside funding sources. Maryknoll’s contribution would be to provide training to the catechists, but refused to view catechists as parish employees. A similar policy of self-reliance applied to the church buildings. In the outstations, the people put up the walls made of timber off-cuts, and the priests put on the corrugated iron roofs and doors. At the big church in Burnt Forest, which was built completely with U.S. money, the parishioners were required to buy the benches. It took a

38 while, but Donnelly says, “Slowly, slowly they started to contribute. This created a good feeling in the parish, that the church was theirs, and they were building it.” In addition, each outstation had an account at the parish, into which half of all the money the Christians contributed in offertory collection and church dues was put. The center council had full authority to decide how to use this money for their outstation church. None of the seven Maryknoll priests who worked in Burnt Forest mentioned in their interviews that they had brought the notion of creating a self-reliant parish from their experience in Tanzania, where all seven had worked in the 1960s and early 1970s. That was the time when President Nyerere had issued his Arusha Declaration calling for the country to be self-reliant, a call which was reiterated by the missionary Bishops and priests for the church. The Maryknoll priests working in Musoma and Shinyanga Dioceses were deeply influenced by the call for self-reliance and had already begun implementing a number of practical measures aimed at making their parishes sustainable without foreign assistance, such as having non-salaried catechists. The Maryknollers in Burnt Forest knew that they would not be there indefinitely, making it imperative that they start immediately instituting policies of self-reliance. Whether they were able to explain to Bishop Njenga the assumptions and goals of pastoral work that they were bringing with them from Tanzania is not known. Likewise, it is not known whether Bishop Njenga would have been open to hearing such explanations. Kenyans, especially Kikuyu, tended to deprecate Tanzanian ideas and actions, calling them socialist and impractical. All other mission societies working in Kenya recruited vocations locally and intended to keep their parishes and dioceses for as long as possible. Conversely, Maryknoll did not recruit locally and intended to hand parishes back to the local Church to be ministered by African priests. For the Maryknollers, self-reliance in rural East Africa, one of the poorest places in the world, meant minimizing on-going expenses. Kenyan Bishops have exhibited a belief that the universal Church is a wealthy institution that should be expected to provide unending financial assistance to the African Church. Kikuyu Catholics who lived in parishes and dioceses run by Consolata Missioners from Italy directly witnessed huge inflows of money from the European Church to fund everything – gorgeous churches and rectories, schools, hospitals, seminaries and diocesan structures. Misunderstandings about the meaning of self-reliance were probably at the root of the conflict between the Maryknoll priests and the Bishops in western Kenya. Another area that needed attention was religious education in schools. Donnelly says, “There were about forty primary schools, in which very little was being done in religious education. If baptized children did not come to the vacation schools in the outstations, three vacations a year, then they never received First Communion or Confirmation. We encouraged the Catholic teachers in the schools to teach the pastoral program, and provided them books, but we never had much success in this. Our parish encompassed a huge area, impassable in many parts during the heavy rains, and we were stretched too thin. This would have been a wonderful ministry for African Sisters, if we could have gotten some.” The Assumption Sisters Congregation of Nairobi had a convent in Eldoret and some of these Sisters did help Burnt Forest. They offered courses for the women’s groups, and gave retreats for catechists and Christians. The retreats were held not only in Burnt Forest but in several of the large outstations, particularly those easy to get to by road. The retreats would last two or three days in each church, and were one of the most

39 important ways in which adult Christian education took place. The Sisters also taught singing, both of set pieces for choir competitions (western style of singing) and of the hymns based on cultural ways of singing. The Burnt Forest Parish choir was not good enough to compete in diocesan or national competitions. Instead, the priests started a parish choir competition, held on the third Sunday of Advent each year, to which all sixteen outstations sent a choir. Donnelly says, “This turned out to be a great idea. Previously, Christians knew only those in their own outstation, but had no conception of the parish. Through coming together for the competition, they got to know people from the whole parish. Sisters, who had not taught the hymns, came to be the judges, and there would be a thousand people at the parish on that Sunday. We also provided some refreshment: rolls from a local bakery, tea, and soda. We also gave prizes, but every choir would win some kind of prize or other, even if we had to make up a category for the prize. This annual event was what really solidified the parish into one parish.” An outstanding contribution to the church in Kenya was made by Jim Roy at that time, the translation and publication of a prayer/hymn book, called “Tumshangilie Bwana,” (Swahili for ‘Let us praise the Lord’). He did this in collaboration with two other priests of the Diocese of Eldoret, Benedictine Father Peter Maynenburg and Kiltegan Father Ray Murtaugh. Roy says, “This was one of the highlights of my stay in Burnt Forest. We received funding from the Swiss Lenten Fund, which enabled a first printing in 1977 of 50,000 copies. It sold so quickly that it has gone to at least four printings, and sold a half million copies or more.” Roy returned to the U.S. for Promotion work at the end of 1976. Donnelly and Phil McCue remained in Burnt Forest up till 1981, and were joined briefly by both Bill Madden, who was elected Kenya Regional Superior, and Mike Callanan, who transferred to Jericho Parish in Nairobi. The Maryknollers had developed very good relations with priests of two local missionary orders in Eldoret, the Kiltegan and Benedictine orders, and of course with the people of Burnt Forest Parish. There had been only two African priests in the diocese the whole time they were there, but their distance from Burnt Forest prevented the Maryknollers from establishing close relationships with them. The Maryknollers had tried very hard to visit every parish in the diocese, and get to know all the priests. They considered this very important, and the effort to visit priests living at a long distance from Burnt Forest gave the Maryknollers a good name in the diocese. Bishop Njenga was never pleased that the catechists were not paid salaries and that the Maryknollers preferred to call themselves co-pastors, with each one responsible for what he did best, for example liturgy or accounts or parish records. In 1981, both Donnelly and McCue decided that it was better to turn over the parish to the diocese rather than engage in conflict with the bishop. Donnelly returned to the U.S. to do promotion work, and McCue went to Kenya’s coast, where Maryknoll had just taken over responsibility for the parish in Kilifi. In September, 1981, a huge celebration was held to bid a fond farewell to the Maryknoll priests. Donnelly says there was an enormous crowd, and that “there were so many gifts that I found it very difficult to speak the homily. I was just so emotional. That cemented the great relationships I had with the people, which last even till today. I would

40 say that my eight plus years in Burnt Forest were the most satisfying of any place I’ve ever been.” Burnt Forest Parish has been under a number of priests since 1981, and is still flourishing. Fr. Joe Corso, who had become the national coordinator of Marriage Encounter, lived at Burnt Forest for one year, till 1982. When he left, there was no Maryknoll presence left in western Kenya, much to the disappointment of Joe Glynn. A few other Maryknollers also think that this is a loss, since the majority of Kenyans live in the rural areas of western and central Kenya. However, to work in rural Kenya a priest has to learn the local language, unlike in Tanzania where Swahili is far more common. Each tribal language is very difficult. Maryknollers had become expert in Swahili and since the towns and cities were growing rapidly, where Swahili was necessary in the multi-tribal setting, it was in the urban area that Maryknoll concentrated, or in specific rural areas (i.e. in coastal Kenya) where Swahili was a common language. The only exception to this was the assignment of three priests to Turkana in the arid part of northern Kenya. A post-script: tragically the town of Burnt Forest has been a Kenyan version of ground zero in some of the tribal conflicts that took place. In 1992, Donnelly visited the parish after some terrible clashes and found hundreds of people temporarily living on the parish compound as displaced people. He found this very jarring. Likewise in 2008 there was horrific violence in Burnt Forest, and hundreds or more people had to flock in to the parish seeking refuge. This violence was unimaginable in 1981, even though the Maryknoll priests were aware of Kalenjin grievances regarding land. In 2009 Frank Breen visited Burnt Forest and found thirty to forty elders, half Kikuyu and half Kalenjin, engaged in dialogue that will hopefully lead to lasting reconciliation and peace. This group meets each Thursday morning, and talks for several hours. The ‘Peace Groups,’ as they are called, were started by Bishop Cornelius Korir, who became Bishop of Eldoret in 1990, and who has made the promotion of peace his priority since the first violent conflicts in 1992. Peace groups are active in several parishes, and Bishop Korir believes that all out conflict can be averted in the future. In a short visit with Breen, he made a point to mention that Burnt Forest was started by Maryknoll. Both the diocese and Maryknollers have good memories of one another, and the latter pray that the diocese will find what Bishop Korir calls sustainable peace.

Maryknoll in Uganda Two Maryknoll priests went to Uganda on special assignments in the late 1960s. Fr. Alden (Mike) Pierce had developed an expertise in catechetics while working at the Bukumbi Pastoral Institute near Mwanza, Tanzania. After Vatican II, he went to Lumen Vitae University in Belgium for a year, and on his return to Tanzania he resumed teaching at Bukumbi. AMECEA had recently started the Gaba Catechetical Institute in Kampala (Ggaba is the Bagandan name of a hill outside the city), and in February, 1967 Pierce was assigned there. He remained teaching at Gaba for seven years, helping to develop catechetical and teaching aids. After Idi Amin overthrew the Ugandan government in 1971, and as his murderous purges of educated people began to become known, the heads of Gaba decided to move the institute to Kenya. A large girls’ boarding school run by Sisters on the outskirts of Eldoret was made available. After renovations and additions the Catechetical Institute

41 moved to Eldoret in 1973. It is still called Gaba but around the year 2005 it was upgraded and made part of the Catholic University of East Africa (CUEA), offering a degree in catechetics and other courses. It has always had a pan-African focus, drawing students from most countries of Africa. Graduates are expected to work in diocesan offices, or at national bishops’ conferences, assisting the bishops in the work of catechetics. Pierce moved to Kenya, and joined with Christian Brother Richard Keilly in developing the Spearhead Series of religious education textbooks for secondary schools in English-speaking countries of eastern Africa. In 1974 he was assigned by the Maryknoll General Council to the U.S., to teach catechetics at the Maryknoll Seminary.

In 1970 Fr. Tom McGinn, who had been teaching philosophy at the Maryknoll college seminary in Glen Ellyn, IL, went to East Africa to teach in a university. Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, was the first public university to be established in East Africa, drawing students from all three East African countries. After Independence, both Kenya and Tanzania started universities in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam respectively, but Makerere still had the best reputation. Thus, McGinn went there. Things were going very well until Amin came to power in 1971. In fact, McGinn was the first one to inform Maryknollers of Amin’s savagery, at the Maryknoll Africa Regional Assembly held in Nairobi in January, 1972. He reported that most of the Nilotic soldiers in the Uganda army had been purged – i.e. killed by soldiers loyal to Amin. The Nilotic peoples were Christian, from eastern and northeastern Uganda, whereas Amin was Muslim from northwestern Uganda. Milton Obote, whom Amin had overthrown, was Nilotic. Amin gained support from the Christian Baganda, Uganda’s largest and most important tribe, by permitting the return of the Kabaka, the Bagandan term for the traditional tribal king, and by re-opening the Bagandan kingly court. Obote had abolished these institutions, in an attempt in the 1960s to modernize Uganda into a secular republic with a socialist economic structure. Whether the Baganda knew how murderous Amin was prior to 1974 has not been revealed. Apparently, as long as their traditional institutions were going to be allowed, they decided to overlook what Amin was doing. The Baganda, though, are Christian and the most educated group in Uganda, and it would not be long before they became the chief targets of Amin’s brutality. In 1972, McGinn was working with students of his philosophy class at Makerere doing research on a pineapple development scheme. Soon he started realizing that the students were disappearing, and not too long after he was shocked to see some of them being openly murdered by Amin’s security agents. Pineapples are an export crop. Multinational companies, like Del Monte, gain thousands of acres of prime land, use prodigious amounts of irrigation water, and pay local workers minimum wage. That Amin would not want anyone doing research that might be critical of the supposed value of such ‘development’ schemes indicates that there was a rational, economic element in Amin’s alleged irrationality. In the years 1972 to 1974 Amin’s security agents killed thousands of Ugandans, yet nothing was being reported in the international press, which highlighted only Amin’s clownish buffoonery. It was only when he expelled all Asians from Uganda in one month in mid-1974 that the truth of his regime began to be reported. But as repugnant as this

42 appeared to Westerners, Black Africans cheered this move, so deep was their hatred of Asians and their control of the economy in East Africa. In 1972, McGinn requested a transfer to Nairobi University. At that time all three universities were under the East African Community, and exchanged professors. McGinn was accepted at Nairobi to teach theology, and he remained there until 1975. After Pierce and McGinn left Uganda, no other Maryknoller has ever been stationed there. Amin was overthrown in 1979, and Uganda has had a fair measure of peace since then, except for the activities of the Lord’s Resistance Army in northeastern Uganda.

Three other priests worked in university education in Nairobi in the 1970s: Fr. Bill Collins came to Kenya at the beginning of 1971 and taught at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary in Langata, Nairobi, the national major seminary for Kenya. He was there for two or three years until terminal cancer forced him to return to the U.S. Fr. Bob Moore was assigned to Kenya in January, 1974, and taught at Nairobi University for several years. In 1977, Fr. George Putnam, who had previously taught at the Major Seminary in Kipalapala, near Tabora, Tanzania, came to Kenya and taught at St. Thomas Aquinas Seminary until 1980. He then went to China.

In 1972 Brother John Walsh was assigned to Nairobi, to work with the Nairobi City Council designing good quality, affordable housing for working-class and middle- class residents. The city’s population was growing rapidly, with the concomitant needs for housing, schools, roads and other infrastructure. Walsh had first arrived in East Africa in September, 1949, (he was called Brother Damien at that time) working in Musoma Diocese overseeing building projects up to 1963. During that time he obtained a degree in Architecture from the East African Institute of Architects, in September, 1960. In 1963, he was assigned to the U.S. to assist Fr. Norman Batt in major construction projects, such as at Glen Ellyn and Hingham. In 1965 he was re-assigned to Musoma, primarily to oversee construction of the language school in Makoko. On completion of this he was re- assigned to Maryknoll, NY, to supervise administration and maintenance of all the buildings on the property. He then went to Nairobi in 1972, where he would remain for twenty-eight years. In Nairobi he lived in his own apartment not far from the Maryknoll Center House. In addition to his work with the city council he also did drafting and architectural work for religious congregations for the building of residences, churches and other institutions. From 1972 up till the early 1980s various branches of the Kenya government engaged in a phenomenal amount of building, aided by the World Bank, the Commonwealth Development Bank, US AID, and other multilateral donors, plus from loans from commercial banks. One of the most important programs in that era was the Site and Service Scheme, in which the developing agency supplies roads, water, sewerage, and electricity connections, and demarcates the plots that individual owners can build on. These projects made it possible for Nairobi to provide housing to most of the new immigrants coming from rural areas, preventing the spread of squatter slums. Beginning in the early 1980s the U.S., Britain and Germany, joined by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, ushered in a new economic philosophy affecting

43 aid to developing countries. This is popularly known as Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs), in which private economic enterprise would take precedence over government development projects. Nairobi’s City Council stopped building housing. Private developers and entrepreneurs capitalized on the new policies, with very mixed results. Quality housing (not inexpensive, however) continued to be built, but in working class areas ramshackle housing proliferated and slums mushroomed all over the city. In 1986 Walsh was elected to Kenya’s Regional Council, one of two Brothers elected to this council (the Regional and Assistance Regional were priests, however, obviating the need for approval from Rome). In 1987 this Council decided to build the Gleason Residence and asked Walsh to design and supervise construction of the new building, which would have eight self-contained rooms plus its own kitchen, dining room and chapel. The purposes of the Gleason Residence (Fr. Walt Gleason, to whom the new residence was dedicated, had died unexpectedly in Nairobi in 1983) were first to be a residence for retired Maryknollers of East Africa, secondly for the Regional Superior and others doing regional administration, and lastly for Maryknollers doing specialized apostolates in Nairobi. So many were living in apartments that it was believed that one common residence would be a cost-effective way for the Region to accommodate the large number doing specialized ministries. Several Maryknollers retired and moved into the Gleason Residence, including Walsh, but most of those doing apostolates in the city continued to live in apartments or parishes close to where they were working. Maryknollers stationed in Tanzania could retire and apply to live at the Gleason Residence, but none ever did. In 1992 Walsh developed serious kidney, heart and circulation problems and believed that he had only months to live. His whole life centered around the circle of friends he had nurtured in Nairobi, particularly one other architect and his family, and Walsh decided not to return to the U.S. for treatment. He feared he would die in New York where none of his closest friends could visit him and preferred to die in Nairobi. He began giving away all his possessions, including his car, which he was no longer able to drive. Miraculously, or thanks to good medical treatment in Nairobi, his circulation problem was stabilized and he made a full recovery. He continued to be in good health up to the year 2000. Although retired, he continued to do architectural assignments for various church personnel or religious communities, not only in Nairobi but also for those who lived in other parts of Kenya. He had all the drafting materials in his office at the Gleason Residence. He was also re-elected several times to the Regional Council. Since he felt good he went back to Maryknoll, NY, in March, 2000. Sadly he was struck ill shortly after arriving in New York and died within a few days.

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