Mae Kierans Newsletters

January 2007.
December 2006.
October 2006.
September 2006.
August 2006.
July 2006.
June 2006.
March 2006.


January 2007, (Back).
Dear Family, Sisters and Friends,

May the New Year 2007 be full of rich blessings for each of you! That is my prayer.

A few of you tell me you cannot open these letters if they are sent as e-mails. One or two of you cannot open them if they are sent as attachments. Since I compose them “offline”, I will send them as both an e-mail and as an attachment. My brother Michael says that to open e-mails from Africa, you have to have your “view” setting for “encoding” set to “universal”. That’s all I know about that! My e-mail replies are short and infrequent these days because the café internet is soooooo slooooooow. This is my fifth day trying to send this e-mail. Also, my nephew Andy Kierans has been here from Prague for three weeks making a documentary of our work with the women in Kibera living with HIV/AIDS. More about that later.

Thank you so very much for your Christmas cards, letters, prayers, Mass offerings and your generous support of our HIV/AIDS infected and affected families in Kenya. I loved reading and re-reading your cards and letters! Nothing like “real mail”! Your Christmas generosity is so very much appreciated by our Momas and their children. This month, the start of a new school year, secondary school fees have been paid on behalf of several individual orphans and needy children. Asante sana! (Swahili: “Thank you very much!”).

Our “Action Speaks” group for widows and orphans (that is the name the Moma’s call themselves) are thrilled to have opened a nursery school in Kibera for their small children. They complained that their children are rejected by the other schools, so this is be their school. They found a small, dirt floor, two room, tin-sheets unit within a larger building, to rent for about $70 Canadian per month (see attached photo). They hired a “fundi” to repair the non-functioning electrical wiring. In the two small rooms, each about 12’ x 10’ they assign a total of 53 children each on rough benches and tables. The teacher they have hired will be paid $70. each per month. They plan to charge $2.50 Cdn (150 Ksh) per child per month to partially cover these costs. The children are excited about their own new school called St. Francis Mary!

The women are also expanding their fledgling candle making business. They have proved themselves on the one small labour-intensive mechanical candle making machine which makes 30 candles at a time. We have commissioned the “jua kali” for construction of a larger gas powered metal machine which makes 60 candles at a time. The Little Sisters of St. Joseph, a Kenyan community, have given the women space in a shed on their retreat center property to set up production. Retreatants have become enthusiastic supporters. Sr. Juliana and Sr. Luciana work closely with me and with our women who are also out marketing their product in roadside stalls. Your generosity makes all this income producing activity possible. Thank you!

As mentioned, January has been very busy as we filmed a documentary in Kibera of our HIV/AIDS momas with their small businesses and the starting their nursery school! The women enthusiastically gave their written consent to promote their "Action Speaks" group and their photo is attached. My nephew Andrew Kierans from Prague, a young film maker, contributed his expertise and skill January 8 - 29. He used two Institute of Social Communications students from Tangaza College as film crew. The film will be a fund-raiser and awareness tool regarding the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This documentary project has also let the mothers know how important they are to their families, and how important is their message of hope for other persons living with HIV/AIDS. When the documentary is ready (estimated time: 2 - 3 months), Andy will post it on the internet for your viewing.

A few weeks ago, I asked a sister colleague at Tangaza how her Christmas went. I was surprised to learn she spent Christmas in Southern Sudan setting up several FM radio stations to help unite the many southern Sudanese tribes which the Northern based militia are trying to divide and conquer. Radios are so important in Africa where literacy cannot be assumed. Transistor radios are heard everywhere from every building and vehicle. Recall the |Rwandan genocide, where radio broadcasts played a key role in launching the slaughter of 800,000. I was very impressed with the practical response of this sister’s community to an urgent need in Southern Sudan. She will be leaving Tangaza College soon to oversee the development of this important social communication tool. She will also learn the Arabic language.

This past month, Sr. Regina Rousseau arrived from North Bay for a several week visit with Sr. Carolyn and me. When visitors come, we stop and take a break. Sr. Carolyn is recovering from a recent brief hospitalization. We started off with a weekend trip to Lamu, the oldest surviving Kenyan community, founded in 7th century on the North East coast and just south of Somalia. Access is either by bandit-plagued rough roads or plane, landing on a simple island airstrip and dumping our luggage into a dhow to reach Lamu Island. Andrew joined us for those spectacular three days on the Indian Ocean in our four story Arabic style rental house Mnarani/"Tower" House a few feet behind the two hundred year old Juma (Friday) mosque. We heard the call to prayer loud and clear 5 times a day, starting at 6 am. Buildings are crowded together, streets are narrow, and donkey is the only mode of human and cargo transport. Our thatched roofed house was breezy, open and airy – a relief in the stifling hot weather!

Lamu is a mainly Muslim community; Christians and Muslims intermingle easily. We joined in wishing them a Happy New Year on their Muslim calendar. I had some worry before our departure because of some recent US bombing in southern Somalia. It is high tourism season in Kenya but when we arrived in Lamu, the long clean coastal sandy beaches seemed pretty deserted. Only as we were leaving did the housekeeper thank us for coming. She told us that US bombs had landed on the Kenyan side of the border a few days before we arrived, and all UN and US staff had been ordered to cancel all their reservations in the hotels and rental houses in Lamu district. The owners of our house were afraid we would cancel our reservation if they told us upon our arrival. There is a lot of anxiety in the town over the disruption of their important high tourism season. Not a word of the bombing in the Kenyan media.

The World Social Forum Conference in Nairobi last week drew about 80,000 visitors from around the world. There was a large march through Kibera this past Saturday, and interviewees complained of over-consumption in part of our world, resulting in under-consumption and poverty in large urban slums like Kibera. One fact that has emerged is that African countries have no laws requiring multi-national companies extracting oil, diamonds and other natural resources to produce a balance sheet. Their profits are unknown to their national host governments.

That is our news these days. Once more, I thank you for your interest in, and support of the activities which brighten the lives and bring hope to our Kenyan families living with HIV/AIDS in this most beautiful part of our world! Blessings and all good to you and your families.
Love, Mae


December 2006, (Back).
Dear Family, Sisters and Friends,

Advent Greetings from Kenya as we prepare for the great feast of Christmas! Poinsettia trees are in radiant bloom! This year the image of Christ as Bringer of Peace seems most appropriate to me. Tensions are rising in Somalia, one of Africa’s poorest countries, on Kenya’s north east border. Islamists have taken over the elected government “to restore peace”, drawing in the Eritreans and Ethiopians on their border. Ethiopia still refuses to accept the border dispute settlement with tiny Eritrea. In Sudan on our northwest border, the suffering in Darfur deepens. In Uganda on our western border there are still problems with the Lord’s Resistance Army which kidnaps child soldiers. Students in my classes at Tangaza College are from countries all across Africa, some at war with each other. I am touched by their peaceful acceptance of one another.

On December 2, a dull rainy Saturday afternoon, while picking up my mail in the little hamlet of Karen, I noticed two suspicious looking men taking digital photos of the Barkley Bank, the post office and surrounding small shops. Then I watched with other bystanders as they quickly fled in their car. Nairobi was the site of the bombing of the US embassy in 1998, so such a scene made me jittery. Most of the bystanders, mainly hawkers, also expressed concern. I reported the event to the bank on Monday. There are times when the little rural plaza surrounded by the bank, post office, grocery stores, small shops, and petrol station is full of people going about their business; people from all parts of the world who make their home here or tourists visiting the area. Carolyn and I maintain our usual vigilant care and precautions for our safety.

Karen, on the site of Karen Blixen’s former coffee farm is a very tiny locale of forested farms and estates of mainly British descendants, intermingled with very poor Kenyans. Tangaza College of Catholic University of East Africa is nearby and so are many houses of religious formation; the area is also known as “The Little Vatican”. When I arrived in December 2004, Karen was no larger than say, Rutherglen and about the same distance from North Bay. Beneath the Ngong Hills mountain range and about 20 minutes west of Nairobi, Karen was literally the intersection of two rural roads lined with hawker’s stalls, hawkers squatting on the ground, sheep, goats and cattle grazing. A serenely rural artist’s delight. Alas…

There is now in Kenya, a Wal Mart type commercial corporation rapidly disfiguring the East Africa landscape. The government gives to “Nakumatt” tax breaks it does not give its smaller competitors. These huge modern western style multi-storied box stores are fringed for miles with billboards three stories high and wide, mounted even higher on huge metal frames; street lamps on all incoming roads displaying more huge commercial signs advertising western products. One of the largest as you enter Nairobi from the west proclaims: “Nivea cream is at the heart of Christmas”. Nivea product signs assault you wherever you go. Also Wheetabix. All this is against a backdrop of slow paced grinding poverty and litter everywhere, tin and plastic homes with no water, sewage or electricity; bicyclists delivering milk, cereals and other goods in poorly packaged recycled containers. Men hauling two wheeled wagons on rough pot-holed roads; women bent over double carrying firewood in loads heavier than they are, children playing barefoot in littered open sewers. Most Kenyans will never step inside a fancy upscale Nakumatt department store, with its mainly Chinese products. In spite of strong local resistance, Nakumatt plunked down such a huge box store in Karen between the forest and behind the “dukas” (Indian for “small shops”). It looks so out of place, towering over the little shops; gaudy greedy and commercial, destroying the rural atmosphere people came here to enjoy. With four petrol stations nearby, they set up a fifth. More unwanted traffic is drawn to the area. In the process they dispersed all the poor roadside hawkers, who now sneak back and get arrested. The young single mother from whom I buy flowers weekly has spent such a night in jail. Such blatant commercialism spreading from the West into impoverished Africa symbolized by oversized billboards towering over scenic rural dirt roads, is alarming.

For months now and in view of the world situation, I have been puzzling in my mind, the presence of our Muslim neighbours, some of whom are in my AIDS women’s group. Those I have come to know are quiet, friendly people going about their daily lives. On the other hand, aggressive Christian fundamentalists with their megaphones fill the air with loud religious harangues and rants. What to make of it? I don’t know… One thing I know is that Muslims appear to be alarmed at the commercialism and secularism spreading from the West into Africa.

Recently the Jesuit Hekima College sponsored a talk by the Nobel Peace Laureate and Member of Parliament, Professor Wangari Mathaai, so I made my first visit to the college to hear her. She recently turned down a cabinet post because President Kibaki would not promise to fight government corruption. Fresh from the Nairobi International Global Warming Conference, she gave an outline of the science and impending dangers of global warming. She then traced the often fatal, so-called tribal conflicts in East Africa, to the poor management of endangered natural resources, first by colonizers and now by corrupt governments, citing specific examples we could all recognize. She emphasized how the Scriptures describe the care God took over “five days” to create the environment. “If God had created humans on Monday, we would all have been dead by Tuesday”. She is a dogged but cheerful and courageous prophet.

Last Sunday afternoon, December 10, we enjoyed a delightful Christmas Concert presented by the Nairobi Mixed Choir and the Nairobi Orchestra in All Saints Anglican Cathedral. The main feature was Benjamin Britten’s Cantata: “St. Nicolas”. I had never heard it before; the drama and the music are enthralling; the children’s voices were very moving. The 31 year old talented British conductor, Damian Penfold, and the 25 year old gifted tenor (St. Nicolas) Alexander Cadden were flown in by British Air. Cadden, found on the internet was a last minute replacement for the original tenor who fell sick. Both these young men engaged us in a marvellous afternoon of superb musicality and on a warm summer’s day, launched us into the Christmas spirit.

Our HIV/AIDS group lost our only man, Christopher last month to AIDS. All the women surrounded his widow, also infected, with love and support insisting that I contribute food for her family at this time. We now have 20 women raising 78 children and orphans. These women have launched a candle making industry to add to their bead work. A welder in the industrial area of Nairobi made the mechanical machine, about the size of a desk, which takes skill and teamwork to operate. They hired a taxi (beat up vehicle with a yellow stripe on the side) to bring it to a small shed on the property of the Little Sisters of St. Joseph, near Kibera. The women walk the two miles to the shed and work from 7 in the morning till 7 at night. They have found markets for their candles and, before my eyes, they have straightened their posture and standing dignified, they smile. They are starting to support themselves and their families. Now that I can see they are successful we will get another machine. They cost about $500 Cdn each for the small ones, which I bought first. Our next group project is a nursery school for their children. They are pressuring me!

Last week one woman came to me, took me aside in the shed and said quietly, “Thank you for helping us. If you didn’t help us, we would be sitting at home doing nothing”. Out of my mouth, I was surprised to hear come the words “I’m not helping you! I have nothing to give you. People you don’t even know who are your friends are helping you! And you will never meet them”. She responded. “Tell them we are praying for them”. You have now been told.

This afternoon, I am heading into Nairobi to SAPTA (Support for Addictions Prevention and Treatment in Africa) where I work as clinical supervisor, for our Christmas party. This important addiction counsellor training program and treatment center has been greatly helped by some of you! Thank you! It is gradually expanding, although it still survives “from hand to mouth”. There is now a campus in Mombassa, on the coast.

Tomorrow, December 16th, I will host a small Christmas barbeque in my “back yard” with Carolyn’s help. Sr. Loretta Brennan, Fr. Steve Payne and Bro. Russell Peters from ISRF at Tangaza and Sr. Luciana Ayienda who teaches at St. Aloysius Secondary School and helps me in Kibera with our HIV/AIDS projects are my guests. We will be two Aussies, one Yankee, one Kenyan and two Canucks!

You are each and all in my thoughts and prayers these days as we move towards Christmas. I pray this Christmas that Christ Jesus, the Bringer of Peace will bring peace to our minds and hearts and to the minds and hearts of our families. I pray with you that that each and all of us on our small planet becomes a person of peace in a world so desperately in need of peace. In the words of Charles Dickens’ Tiny Tim, God bless us – everyone!

Love, Mae


October 2006, (Back).
Dear family, Sisters and Friends,

Greetings from Kenya and Happy Canadian Thanksgiving! So much to pause and be deeply grateful for, especially for family, community and friends! Thank you God.

Last Friday morning at Tangaza College, we had a memorial Mass for Sr. Leonella Sgorbati, the 66 year old Italian Consolata missionary killed in Mogadishu, Somalia, Sunday September 17 as she was leaving a class she had just taught at the health clinic. Her body guard was also killed. There are several Consolata Sisters in the College. Sister commuted regularly back and forth the 1000 km from Nairobi, north east to Mogadishu, living in Nairobi with one of the young Sisters whom I see for spiritual direction at Tangaza. This sister told me Sr. Leonella had supper with them on Wednesday before leaving for Mogadishu, and was dead four days later. The Sisters are clearly hurt and shaken. Her three older companions in Mogadishu were instructed by their Superiors to leave immediately, so they removed the Blessed Sacrament and came to Nairobi with Sister’s body. They would rather be in Somalia where they have been for many years; they love the people they have been living among and helping. They say there is no longer any Blessed Sacrament in all of Somalia.

Each spoke simply and quietly at the Mass about their work in one of the poorest and most unstable countries in all Africa. At the moment, the Islamic Courts have overcome the fragile government which only recently returned to Somalia after several years in exile here in Nairobi. One of the priests from the US, teaching at Tangaza commented afterwards that one wonders what might have happened if US President Bill Clinton had left the US troops in Somalia to deal with the warlords in the early ‘90’s. The sisters say the people, mostly Muslims, suffer dire, dire poverty. The Sisters have lived among them since 1920 - never preaching, just living quietly among the people, setting up schools, orphanages and health clinics. All free. The people love them, they say, and depend on them for education, health care and other necessities. Sr. Leonella was a mid-wife for three generations of Somali women. She had recently set up a three year community nursing program and just finished teaching a class when she was killed. She died surrounded by the three sisters an hour and a half after she was shot “in spite of excellent emergency care”, but just moments before the flying doctors arrived. She was conscious to the end, they said, peacefully repeating “Pardone, pardone, pardone.” I forgive. Listening to these elderly sisters quietly relate this sad story moved us all very much.

Another event getting a lot of press here is the recent dumping of a shipload of toxic waste in the back of villages in Ivory Coast on the west coast of Africa. Apparently the Swiss company whose profits were in the billions last year, did not want to spend $300,000 to have a Dutch company dispose of it safely. They persuaded ($$$) corrupt Ivory Coast government officials to let them dump it in their country. At least 8 people are known to have died, and 85,000 are sick with no adequate emergency health services.

A young Rwandan wife and mother, survivor of the ’94 genocide was recently referred to me for counselling. She suffers from PTSD and lives reclusively. She was pregnant when she was gang raped, beaten with a machete leaving scars on her head, strangled with a chain so that her vocal chords are damaged, collected from a ditch and left for dead in a morgue for three days. In spite of all that, she is remarkably beautiful. She was reunited with her family many months after she feared they were all dead. Her son was born crippled. I have come to learn by her story, that many Rwandans like her who fled, live in Kenya and other nearby countries among the other Rwandans who tried to kill them and who have also fled to escape justice. They see each other on the streets. She is still traumatized and living in this “catch 22”. She still has periodic bleeding from her ears and some time ago doctors ordered a CAT scan, but she had no money ($150Cdn). Thanks to you, she will get her CAT scan next week.

Next week is the break week at Tangaza. I have a batch of reflection papers to mark! I like my students who are from all parts of Africa very much. Several are Don Bosco Brothers, a community well known in Kenya for their work with street kids. With your support, I have placed some boys in their schools for skills training. I have also popped in for tea from time to time, in their formation house on the same property. They are down to earth and have a great spirit! One of their confreres is now Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Bertone.

The AIDS support group in Kibera is moving forward! The women have figured out some crafts they can make to sell to support themselves: beaded jewellery, candles for churches, and sewing, etc. They have also identified a kiosk in the crowded Kibera slums that is available for rent for them to meet, make and store their products, and that has good security. These wood and metal kiosks are about 10’ x 10’. There are always one or more women missing from our weekly meeting, as they are vulnerable, with compromised immune systems, to opportunistic diseases. It’s a reality they accept.

Excitement is mounting as St. Aloysius Secondary School for AIDS orphans is getting ready to graduate its first class. National exams are in October and the students are nervous! Results are published in the national tabloid and schools are competitive. I had a class with them this week to discuss “Preparing for Exams”. Fund raising is going ahead to build a permanent school.

Carolyn and I are looking forward to several visitors in the near future: Jennifer Valenti and four companions from North Bay who are coming in November to monitor their work sponsoring an orphanage in Eldoret, a one hour flight north west of us. They will then visit us for several days which will be a treat! My nephew Andrew, living in Prague near his parents, will make a documentary film here in January. He and his co-worker will stay with me. That will be exciting! And Regina Rousseau is also coming in January for a month, so we have some nice sight-seeing lined up. Actually, when visitors come is when we pause and take a break, so it’s a good thing you/they come!

I remain grateful for my experience here, especially the witness of deep faith and trust in God in the midst of grinding poverty, disease, and suffering. Very humbling.

Special Birthday prayers and good wishes to my sister Teresa! Congratulations and many personal blessings on our CSJ Jubilarians! And prayers and all good to each of you! Love, Mae


September 2006, (Back).

Dear Family, Sisters and Friends,

Greetings from Kenya, in springtime! Birds sing here year round of course, but in spring they sound different. I asked Maltese Jesuit Fr. Victor, retired zoologist and now retreat guide, if there was much migration of birds in Africa, and he opined that there was not much migration but that after the rains, the birds got very chirpy and busy building nests in the trees, hence the different noisy cacophony. Another recent regular environmental, but man-made sound is the steady chipping away at huge quarried rocks to make stone bricks for nearby construction of buildings and roads. Men seated on the ground, day after day with hand chisels, hammering the blocks of stone into rectangular bricks, or gravel for the driveway. And also amazingly, small groups of women nearby, bent over, planting tiny blades of grass on ½ acre hand raked spaces to make a lawn, before the house is even finished, lawns; not from seed, but from these painstakingly planted tiny shoots. There is more home construction on large multi acre plots near where I am now living, just off Ngong Road which runs into Nairobi. Some people in Kenya have money! I hope you are all well and enjoying pleasant autumn weather and a rich harvest of blessings!

I just finished working on an 8 day retreat team at the nearby Jesuit retreat center for East Africa. It felt like Guelph in its quiet atmosphere and approach to Ignatian retreats, and we were an international team, so it was an unexpected blessing for me. I have made my own annual retreats there, site of Karen Blixen’s former coffee farm, and love the setting surrounded by forests below the beautiful Ngong Hills. The Kenyan Sisters I accompanied on their retreat were impressive in their deep spirituality, three still in formation, and very dedicated. But it took concentration to follow the thick English accents. I am humbled that typically, these Sisters speak several local languages and English is often a third or forth language.

During the week, I found the July 2006 issue of the British Jesuit periodical “The Way” in the library and read the article by Christian Salenson on the seven Trappist monks murdered by Muslim extremists in Algiers in 1994. I read it twice, it was so unusual. The author emphasised that the foreign born Monks really didn’t “do” ministry as such, but had decided just to live and farm as neighbours among the Muslims, witnessing to God’s desire that in our diversity, we all be one. It resonated with my feeling often, that in the face of so much that needs to be “done” here, I have only my small finger in the dyke. Poverty, filth, illnesses, hunger, AIDS, orphaned kids; at times it is overwhelming. The article helped me to see that perhaps just “being in solidarity with” the women, men and children may at least be a comfort to them; that at times, the solidarity and quality of presence may be more important that “what gets done”.

Yesterday morning at Tangaza College, in my mailbox was a handwritten note from Hesborn, a young maintenance man I have befriended. Last year I helped his widowed sister send her small child to school – I should say, some of you helped his sister! All my tangible outreach comes from donations. Hesborn’s wife just gave birth to a baby daughter Dorca, who has been sick. Last week I gave him money for medication and food. This morning his note read, “…The reason I am writing this letter to you is to let you know that you are my only friend and mother to my family…Please Sister, I need some money to buy food and supplies, Ksh 2000 (about $33) and I will refund you at the end of the month….” Kenyan families are always helping their kin beyond their immediate family and it is burdensome. Hesborn’s father is on three expensive medications.

Carolyn and I just learned that the small duplex cottage in Langata where we lived last year from February to August 2005 was robbed this month by three men with guns. After we had moved in, the Kenyan landlord living next to us sold off surrounding fields of property and a lot of construction began around us. Young workers were watching our comings and goings. We were alarmed that the landlord, living singly at the time, was lax about the security which we were paying for and ignoring our complaints, so we moved over to Oloolua Ridge in Karen. The landlord was robbed at gunpoint of his fancy 4 wheel drive, mobile, digital camera, laptop, his girlfriend’s laptop, and cash. Then the armed robbers came to the attached unit we had lived in, and pointed the gun through the window at the tenants. No one was injured, thank God. At times I feel badly that we must be so focused on our own safety and security – which costs money of course – but there are enough events like this to keep us on our toes.

When I returned from Canada in June, I discovered that some of my Kenyan collaborators in my work in Ngong had been stealing money I entrusted to them for the women with AIDS’s small business projects; a discouragingly, all too common problem in Kenya. Reluctantly I have withdrawn from that village to immerse myself in starting a small AIDS support group near the AIDS orphan school where I work in Kibera, the huge urban Nairobi slum – 800,000 to one million poor people in appalling conditions, many without water, toilets or electricity. I have no regrets about my work in Ngong when I think of the dozens of women and children who were helped, but sadly, it seemed wise and safer to move on. Lately I have concluded that it doesn’t accomplish much for me to keep grousing, mostly interiorly, about the corruption so imbedded in the culture at all levels which keeps the poor, poor; corruption is a world-wide problem. So I have tried to step out of that square, and just be a positive and effective loving presence in the here and now wherever I find myself.

In Kibera, I work closely with a nearby community of Kenyan Sisters, the Little Sisters of St. Joseph who have good antennae for local corrupt opportunists – better than mine! The HIV positive women in this support group want to include men with AIDS. In Ngong, while it was a “women’s group”, we also assisted the several men who approached us for help. In Kibera we gather in a rickety Catholic Church outpost accessed by jumping very carefully over a wide open sewer. So I am getting to know more of the dwellers in this infamous slum! Last year I heard on a CBC program that today, 40% of the world’s population lives in urban slums. In 20 years it is predicted to be 60%.

In the midst of all of this, I moved to a small apartment attached to the back of the well built stone home of a Kenyan family. I chose it for its security: it is a gated compound with watchmen, guard dogs, and radio alarm security backup. I have a radio alarm at my bedside. This is the most security I have experienced, and it is because the landlord lives in the house with his family and has some livestock on the nicely maintained property. (Most homes have their own “shamba” (kitchen garden) chickens, and goats. This landlord also has geese and some cattle, all inside the compound.) I feel like a parasite in a way, latching onto this family’s security, but God knows, with the rising poverty-related crime rate, it is safer. The article by Salenson on the Trappist monks noted their precarious living as a deep expression of their vowed evangelical poverty. While we take every precaution here, it is not hard to think of our precariousness as also part of our poverty, a precarious poverty also tragically experienced by all the victims at Dawson College in Montreal this past week.

We have given up on a landline phone/internet connection which was repeatedly cut and stolen. I have installed wireless internet on my computer and now use only my mobile phone. The wireless internet should be high-speed but because 50% of the public broadband is currently usurped by the Kenyan army, it isn’t. So my SKYPE (free voice-over-internet) capability is greatly reduced and hit and miss. Sometimes it works, if “traffic” is light, but mostly it doesn’t. Today my sister Kathleen and later my Dad and I had sort of a chat. It was nice to hear their voices, even if distorted!

Carolyn and I are expecting Jennifer Valenti and her four friends from North Bay to visit us in early November during their trip to Eldoret north-west of Nairobi, where they are working on an orphanage. It will be great to see them! Eldoret was the city where I gave an addiction workshop to a group of religious Brothers and Sisters in August. As a result, two of the attendees have entered into treatment for alcoholism at SAPTA in Nairobi where I also work as clinical consultant. They will have copies of the Big Book, thanks to the generosity of some Michigan friends! All blessings that will make a big difference in the lives of these two men, I pray.
I am off this Saturday afternoon to meet two young women who have been recommended to me to be placed in a skills training education program. Thanks to your support, they will have the possibility to become self-supporting!

Thank you as always for your prayers and encouragement! It means a lot! God bless each one of you and keep you safe and healthy! Special birthday greetings to my brother Tom!

Love, Mae


August 2006, (Back).
Dear Family, Sisters and Friends,

Warm greetings from Kenya! Spring is around the corner. August is the primary/ secondary school winter holiday month, so on one hand, the pace is slower; St. Aloysius School in Kibera is closed. I miss my weekly counselling meetings with AIDS orphaned teenagers who come to me with their concerns. Their determination to succeed as students always touches me. I look forward to the resumption of the last part of their school year in September. This week I was reading in “The Nation” our national tabloid, that AIDS orphans are very frequently exploited for the sex trade and child labour in Africa. The children at St. Aloysius are spared that by being in school. Fr. Terry Charlton, S.J. is ploughing ahead with fundraising to get a permanent school building. We are bursting at the seams in our tin, wood and concrete structure with its crude benches and tables, and one rough wall painted black.

August is also the start of the new academic year at Tangaza College, so the pace there has picked up. Last week was the first day at the college, and I met my 25 new first year students, mainly from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Lesotho, Ethiopia, D.R. Congo and Nigeria. These priests, sisters and brothers are mostly preparing to work in formation in their communities back in their home countries. A few are preparing for final commitment. So, while I wish I had the courage and energy to undertake ministry in more remote and often war weary parts of Africa, I know these students will be returning to do just that. So I hope my classes, supervised practicums and group sessions give them a good foundation and encouragement. I attach a portion of a recent report from the International Union of Superiors General brought to my attention on the goings on in Southern Sudan on our northern Kenyan border. Sudan, I am told, is the home country of the beautiful Nubian Tribe referred to in the Old Testament. It is common knowledge here, that oil rich southen Sudan is at the mercy of many conflicting forces. China is everywhere in Eastern Africa, and as present in Southern Sudan as it is in Kenya. The west should take note!

As part of a larger three month renewal program, I presented a 2 day addiction workshop this month to an international group of religious brothers and invited local sisters in Kagamut, 15 km from the city of Eldoret (pop. 200,000) in central-west Kenya, just east of Lake Victoria. There were 35 participants; mostly from Kenya, but some from India, Papua New Guinea and Ireland. In the rain on a Tuesday, I took a 7 hour bumpy ride in a minibus over the teeth-rattling pot-holed “Uganda Road” which begins in Mombassa on the Indian Ocean, and ends in Kampala, Uganda. The driver had the radio blaring the whole time! Coming back on Saturday squished at the back of the crowded matatu in the sunlight, the trip was faster, only 5 hours, and no radio. Going up, we descended from 5,500 feet just outside Nairobi, drove north west inside the dusty Great Rift Valley and ascended to 8,800 feet at Eldoret. The poor pot-holed roads were made more hazardous by the steady caravan of decrepit but speeding lorries bulging with cargo, travelling from Mombassa to Uganda. Beside us was the famously British built 100+ year old, trans-national, narrow gauge railway - idle. At our lunch break, I asked the matatu driver why all the freight was tearing up the road instead of over on the track beside us. He replied that the Kenyan government didn’t have the funds to operate the railway for freight. The government also didn’t have funds to purchase the abundant produce from all the verdant farms I saw in this western region for the starving people in north east Kenya a few months ago. Fields of corn as high as an elephant’s eye, literally! The local farmers were forced to sell it to nearby Uganda and Tanzania.
Several of you, my friends helped me gather and prepare material for the addiction workshop. Thank you so much! It went very well and less than 24 hours after I got home, I got a call from one of the participants, a teacher. He recognized his alcoholism and came last week to Nairobi to talk to me about treatment at SAPTA, the addiction counsellor training center where I work as clinical supervisor. I gave him the first copy out of a box of “Big Books”, just sent to me by generous friends in Michigan and sent him off across the street to his first AA meeting. He called me afterwards and said he liked the meeting. The bumpy trip was worth it!

Earlier this past week, I was met in the little hamlet of Karen where I go to pick up my mail, by a young teenager, James, who washes my car periodically for 100 Ksh. There are always young beggars and hawkers around the post office. I buy flowers once a week from one of the young women, Eva. I don’t need the flowers, but she needs the money. James had a huge bandaged gash on his head and missing teeth from a robbery on the matatu, he said. He resisted and was slashed with a knife. This is a frequent occurrence around Kenya, and one of the reasons when I first got here that I was anxious to learn to drive a stick shift and avoid the matatus. He said his bandaged head was aching and begged for money for a recommended tetanus shot. I have been conned more than once by these street kids, but he did look desperate, so I gave him the money. I told him I wanted to see the receipt. I haven’t seen him all week. I told the other street kids yesterday, no more washing my car or handouts until I see James and that receipt! They all know me (“Sista”) and will produce James and the receipt I am sure!

My bedroom window and back door are separated from the nearby well travelled road by a high hedge and fence. I can hear through my windows, even now, cheerful banter as people walk back and forth on the dusty road and also when I step outside for chai masala (Indian spiced tea) if I am home in the afternoon. Makes me long to learn Swahili faster so I might know what animates their lively conversations!

This morning was a huge parish celebration of “Mary Queen Day”. Mary Queen is the patron of my parish in Karen, and the two hour Mass was celebrated by Archbishop Raphael N’digi in the large adjacent hall with a huge overflow crowd out into the parking lot. African liturgy is so much livelier than “Western liturgy” with drums, cymbals and dancing, wonderful dancing. It was a very joyful experience!

Thank you for your birthday greetings this month! I feel blessed to be so supported and healthy as I work in East Africa at this stage of my life. I learn much from the deep faith of beautiful people who have lived through grinding struggle, poverty and hardship, like the elderly “Mama’s” and “Mossai’s” at Mass this morning. (I am accustomed now to strangers greeting me politely as “Mama” – “Jambo, Mama”. Africans are great at greeting strangers!) Thank you for your prayers and support of me and our dear neighbours here in East Africa. God bless you with all with peace and joy, and that you need!

Love, Mae


July 2006, (Back).
Dear Family, Sisters and Friends,

Greetings to you from Kenya in the midst of a cold winter here on the central Kenyan Highlands, a mile above sea level. “Nairobi” means “Cold River”, and it was by this river 100 years ago that the British located a lonely railway stop on the way north-westward from Mombassa to Uganda. Now Nairobi is a sprawling chaotic mostly slum city of more than one million, many being refugees from Sudan, north of us, and other East Africa countries. With no central heating, nights and mornings here are very cold. Not everyone can afford the scarce firewood in this denuded country to warm themselves. Even my cat Misto has a cold.

One of my big projects this past month was to try and get reliable home based internet service. I have not been able to e-mail much lately; nearly the whole month of June, we had no landline – the basis of our internet service. The copper wire phone lines were cut and stolen twice, eliminating service for miles around for weeks. It is a common practice. I don’t know why Telkom Kenya, the phone company, does not protect their equipment better. It would be cheaper than having to bring in more cable all the time to replace the stolen line. So I have had to trek to the nearby small village of Karen to use internet cafes, terribly slow when they are working.

I am learning more about the internet than I ever wanted to know: here, high-speed (ADSL) is ultimately cheaper than dial-up, because dial-up is so slow, you get a huge phone bill at the end of every month for the use of the landline. It’s cheaper to buy an ADSL modem at around $250. Cdn and get a lower phone bill at the end of each month. But if your phone line gets stolen repeatedly, then this solution is futile, as we have learned. So now I am going to wireless ISP service, today I hope, if the stars are aligned! The problem with wireless is the bandwidth does not yet support SKYPE; a wonderful and free internet based free phone service my brother Michael introduced me to and which I was enjoying with my father, several of my family and friends on an almost daily basis. I am told that when internet traffic is light, late at night and early in the morning, SKYPE may be possible. We will see. Well enough complaining about internet service, but it has shown me how much I rely on regular contact with my family, Sisters and friends, as I make my way here in East Africa. I don’t know how the early missionaries managed the isolation. I don’t think I could.

With all the horrific problems in the Middle East, I have been more conscious of my Muslims neighbours here who have been living in East Africa, for the most part, peacefully for centuries. It has made me aware of how we Christians are being perceived these days. There are fanatics in every religious group, and I suspect Muslims are more often judged by the fanatics in their community than we Christians are judged by the fanatics among us, and there are plenty of Christian fanatics here in Africa! All of which makes me more aware of the importance of cultural knowledge and sensitivity. I hope not to make too many mistakes. In my ministry, I don’t preach words; I just try to be friendly and helpful with the resources given to me for the poor, vulnerable, young, elderly and sick. I have been privileged both to help and to be helped by Muslims.

I returned to Kenya at the end of May to discover that persons I had trusted in my AIDS work in the village of Ngong were not to be trusted. It was a huge disappointment. Corruption is so endemic in Kenya, as the local newspapers describe on a numbingly daily basis. Many people affected and infected with AIDS were directly helped in Ngong, but it seems wise to leave there and work more closely with a Kenyan community of Sisters living in Kibera, the huge Nairobi urban slum. We will start with the guardians and family members of the AIDS orphans in St. Aloysius School where I work every Wednesday as spiritual director. Many guardians of the students are also infected with AIDS. The poverty there is indescribable. In June, Ali Donohue, the chaplain from Regis High school in Manhattan stayed with us as she worked to “twin” St. Aloysius School with her school. The principal is a very good Jesuit friend of mine! Small world! That partnership will be a wonderful boon to that struggling but vital school, and hopefully, an eye-opener for the students, faculty and alumni of Regis High School. How farsighted they are! When she finished, Ali took a bike tour from Nairobi to Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania, mostly downhill thankfully, before returning to NYC! Oh to be young again!

Recently I placed two orphaned teenaged children of a widow brutally dragged from her home at night, raped and mutilated, into Martin de Porres residential vocational training school in Kiserian. The sister of their murdered mother showed me pictures of her battered body. I can only surmise the criminals were crazed on home brew. They have yet to be found; likely never. Several other children have also been placed in schools, thanks to your support. Education seems the best hope for the young. Two of the orphaned children of Paninnah are doing well; Hannah in class 3 at Ngong Government School and Simon at Don Bosco Home for Boys in class four. I recently took them both along with Ali, to Nairobi National Park for a picnic and to see the wild African animals. They are both blossoming and looking happy. Their teenaged sister, Teresia whom I also equipped and placed at Martin de Porres School has run away, back to the slums of Ngong. My admiration of parents and teachers of teenagers has skyrocketed, trying to look after her! If I can find her again, I will place her in a private home in Kibera and into a day school for sewing and tailoring. It requires little literacy which she was struggling with at Martin de Porres.

August 9 I will travel to Kagamut, near Eldoret in central Kenya to give two days of input on addiction to an international community of religious missionary brothers, based out of Ireland. The two days are only part of a three month international renewal program for their members 45 years old and younger. They are also inviting nearby Sisters, priests and brothers. Most of the input is spiritual, theological, and cultural, so I am impressed that they are knowledgeable enough about the risk of addiction among religious to want to include it in their program. I was helped in getting my input material ready by several of my AA friends and colleagues in North America. Thank you so much! You know who you are!

In mid August, courses start again at Tangaza College. I am teaching again Developmental Psychology and available as a spiritual director, and as student supervisor for practicums. Last year I really enjoyed my contact with these priests, sisters and brothers from all over Africa in the Institute for Spirituality and Religious Formation. I learned so much about the many struggling African countries they represent. I look forward to teaching them again.

I still work weekly as clinical consultant at SAPTA (Support For Addiction, Prevention and Treatment in Africa) in Nairobi, a counsellor training program started by a former Dominican missionary from the US. Mostly I participate in case conferences and family conferences. Recently the Kenyan counsellors told me they overheard one of the young Ugandan clients warning another client: “You better go to those AA meetings they want you to go to here, or they’ll make you go and talk to that white woman!” I just learned that there were no “Big Books” in the Center. They are too expensive to import. So now, again, several of my AA friends in the US are remedying that lack! Thank you again!

My contact with Muslims here in the context of world events has heightened my awareness that we - Muslims, Jews and Christians, people of The Book are all descended from Abraham, and what our common kinship should mean. Once more, I am grateful for the opening up of my personal experience in that area. Besides being a steep learning curve, it is a great blessing.

And once more I thank all of you who support and make possible my presence and ministry here. May these summer days where you are, be filled with grace and blessing. Love and prayers, Mae


June 2006, (Back).
Dear Family, Sisters and Friends,

Greetings from Kenya on Monday evening in Pentecost week, the third anniversary of Sr. Anne Miller’s death. For some reason I was conscious of Anne today.

I was hoping to settle down just now, outside with a cup of hot ginger tea before supper, read The Tablet and listen to classical music on my small speakers and wind down. It is peacefully quiet as Carolyn has taken Raymond, his Mother Rael and baby Alfred down to Maasailand in the nearby Rift Valley for the night. Agnes’ husband and Raymond’s grandfather, Maronah will kill a small goat tonight to make a special soup for all to drink who have been sick or “doctoring”. I have been racing around all day over bumpy dirt roads. Joseph, our Maasai askari (watchman) is off by his supper campfire, reading his Bible aloud, as he is wont to do this time of day and as the sun is setting. Just the birds chattering away in the stillness. Alas, the flies have driven me indoors to my desk with my cup of hot ginger tea, and classical music still coming from miniature speakers. Apparently the flies are much worse down in Maasailand because of the cattle. Children’s eyes are always plagued with flies here, causing infection and sometimes blindness.

I have been home for a just week after a two month trip to Canada for our Chapter meetings, the completion with my sister Teresa of my Mother’s estate, some other family business, and as much visiting as I could get in. Mom’s second anniversary was Saturday June 3, also the anniversary for Good Pope John XXIII and the feast of the Ugandan Martyr’s. Uganda, where there is still civil strife is on Kenya’s western border. I have been feeling my dear Mother’s presence these days especially. I thank my family in particular, and my friends for such good visits with them! What a tonic that was! Unfortunately, I couldn’t get to see all my relatives and friends on my ambitious list. When I arrived in Canada April 1, the energy just drained out of me like air out of a balloon. I found out from my medical, that my blood count was low. I was forced to reduce my travel and visiting expectations. Next time I hope to do better!

Speaking of my family, my Dad has asked repeatedly about our house and security. We have made ourselves as secure as possible with our own two Maasai watchmen whom we supervise, and with a radio equipped armed security service who patrol the dirt roads of our forested and farmland rural hillside in their four wheel drive. We have three emergency alarm buzzers in the house in strategic locations and our watchmen carry a portable alarm buzzer. The patrolling security men are very quick to respond to an alarm and they are followed by the police. Our doors and windows are barred. We have two dogs we selected from the Kenyan SPCA: Patchy who is rather silly and immature and Benson who is very nervous and withdrawn; we think he was once abused. Both dogs hang out together on the property and make a huge racket when any stranger comes to the gate. That’s what we want. The askari takes over from there. We are inside our landlord’s 100 acre farm which also has its own security and fierce attack dogs. Our dogs are not attack dogs. Security is important and we have taken every precaution.

Anyway, my Dad thought there might be too much shrubbery around our doors and windows, so this past Saturday I took a walk around our ½ acre plot with my digital camera to show you how open our grounds, doors and windows are, inside our fenced enclosure. I hope I can attach the video clip to this email and that it doesn’t wreck your computers! The old herdsman in the first clip is friendly to me and we communicate in broken English and Kiswahili as you will hear. Tonight when I drove up the grassy lane to our gate, he came with a promised pineapple which he told me he would bring from his garden in Thika, miles away on the far side of Nairobi. I knew there would have to be a hitch, and there was: in broken “Swahilish” he asked me for school fees for two of his children in secondary school, 5000 shillings, (almost $100 Canadian). Pointing to my head, I said “I will think about it”. I know I will give it to him, but we never give money when it is asked for. We don’t want people to think we have money on the property. Secondary School fees for two children in exchange for a pineapple is a shrewd bargain! Smart father!

I am immediately struck once more by the jarring poverty in Kenya having just returned from North America. That many whites use Africa only for a play ground, seemingly oblivious to the grinding misery, arouses resentment. While two percent of Kenyans (and Africans in general) are absurdly rich, there is no middle class, just huge masses of people struggling without water, electricity, infrastructure, jobs, healthcare, or education. Staggering. One of my trips today was way out to a vocational boarding school in the desert countryside where I had placed two teenaged orphans this past spring. One of the teenagers is very disruptive and appears to be on drugs. I met to talk to all the adults involved with her to see what the problem is. There are few resources for such a girl here. Last night I listened on the BBC via shortwave to a panel discussion from South Africa about the hopeful economic future for some of Africa. Kenya was not mentioned among the countries making progress and the reasons are obvious. Since the World Bank, the UK and Germany have halted grants and loans to Kenya while corruption is rampant; the Chinese have filled the gap with 5 billion in investment! Ill made Chinese commodities are flooding Kenya. Africans could make them just as cheaply, but there is no infrastructure to get them to market. We expect to see more huge luxury cars on the roads soon, but not much else will change for the poor.

Upon my arrival in St. John’s on April 1, I learned that my Dad had set up a newspaper interview for me with Craig Westcott, a reporter for The Independent. His article generated an outpouring of generosity from people I don’t even know! Which brings me to the piece I was trying to read before the flies chased me in a little while ago. Daniel O’Leary writes in the Easter issue of The Tablet (a lay Catholic weekly out of the UK): “Holy Saturday always seems a strangely empty day, yet it may be the time when Christ did his most amazing work, work that may be continuing today. Maybe on Holy Saturday, Jesus was not waiting to step out of the tomb, but went deeper into the broken reality of life, where death itself is so powerful, so as to redeem it from within….On Holy Saturday, Jesus began transforming the body of the world (into which he had entered) into his own body, so that when the one body was established in glory, the other one was too…There is a sense in which it is always Holy Saturday. And it will continue to be Holy Saturday until the last day when the world ends in the universal Easter Sunday. It has to be this way. It is always Holy Saturday whenever people push back the creeping boundaries of the world’s fear, making room for irrepressible hope; where people live in the long darkness of original sin while believing in the possibility of the deeper light; where people discover the touch of an invincible spring on the bare branches of their winter lives…We are free to imagine the Risen Christ, triumphantly bursting forth from the haunts of Hades, holding tightly the whole world to His breast with the great and jealous love of a mother for her child, nursing, nourishing and restoring it to its original unity in the heart of God.”

Those of you who use me as a conduit of your “nursing, nourishing and restoring to unity” among the poor of Africa participate in this divine and continuing Holy Saturday enterprise. I thank you so much! God sees what you do.
The birds have quieted and darkness has settled. Time to feed Misto the cat, Patchy and Benson and prepare for the night!

Blessings, all good and Easter Peace and Joy to each of you! Love, Mae


March 2006, (Back).
Dear Family, Sisters and Friends,

Greetings from drought and famine - stricken Kenya. I hope you are all well, and looking forward to the arrival of Spring later this month! While the winter may have been hard on some of you north of the equator, a hot dry summer has been very hard on the pastoralists and the poor here in Eastern Africa. Grasslands dried up and rural herders and shepherds drove their animal flocks and herds into populated areas looking for grass. They were on the dusty roads everywhere. You had to drive carefully through them as they got frailer week by week. There are very few fenced ranches in Kenya; pastoralists just drive their animals miles and miles through the countryside to wherever there is grass. We had been hearing about the rotting livestock “up-country” and “down-country”. It has been hard to see them myself recently along my way home: young dead calves in ditches, dead sheep and goats slung around the necks of the shepherds to be butchered. In the past few days, the rains have finally arrived to deluge some areas around us. But the sudden drop in temperature has also killed the lambs and kids. And the new grass on empty stomachs will make the animals sick. It’s been a hard year. Some of the high school students I work with in the Nairobi slum of Kibera say they have no food whatsoever at home. The school feeds them porridge at 10 and beans and maize meal at 2, Monday to Friday. That’s all they get. There is little coordinated food distribution in the country.

Towards the end of February, Carolyn and I took a summer weekend safari together with Raymond, our 7 year old protégé, to Massai Mara National Park, a 1,500 sq. km. northern extension of the 14,700 sq. km. Serengeti National Park in Tanzania on our southern border. Mara means “dotted plains” – dotted with isolated, lacy, flat-topped acacia trees, and Serengeti means “plains”, both Massai words. The Parks are on the western edge of the Great Rift Valley which extends all the way from the Red Sea down to Lake Malawi. We were very grateful to the three young mechanics who, on our first day’s drive, hitched-hiked over an hour out into the desert conditions where we were stranded when the driveshaft on my car broke down. They opened their tool box, found a CV joint and fixed it! As a result of the delay, we spent the first night at a safari campsite in the eastern end of the park, and the second two nights in the western end. The plains are truly magnificent, teeming with African fauna: elephants, lions, leopards, cheetahs, giraffe, zebra, and a wide variety of large and small antelope, e.g. gazelle. impala, hartebeest, wildebeest, eland, kudu etc. as well as water buffalo, rhinos, wart hogs, etc. I went out on a before-dawn organized game drive with three young couples. We could see for tens of miles in all directions. Imagine elephant mothers and their young framed by the rising sun over the vast plains! A mother lion cautiously leading her 5 young across a stream to a dead water buffalo on the other side in another pride’s forbidden territory! She posted one of her young as a look out. In that south west region of Kenya, just south of Lake Victoria, the farms outside the park were verdant. Unfortunately, the Kenyan Government didn’t have funds to purchase produce from these struggling farmers to feed those starving in the north east. So these Kenyan farmers sold to nearby Ugandan and Tanzanian buyers. The Mara was an unforgettable safari. I have attached some photos and a short video.

With your indispensable help, several children started primary and secondary school in January and February. That meant fees, books, supplies and being measured for hand made uniforms. Carolyn’s “Restore Hope Vocational Training School” sewing and tailoring students make and sell the uniforms in their class. The children belong to the mothers in our Ngong AIDS group for women. Three are orphans. Today I put a youngish and shy 18 year old orphan, Grace who had been wandering in the slums into a vocational training boarding school. She wants to be a driver and a mechanic. So she is now at St. Martin de Porres Vocational training Boarding School, a 20 minute drive south west of Ngong in parched and dry farming country. Our little nursery school still flourishes though the tin roof leaks.

Last Saturday we hosted three Quebec Missionaries, a French group founded by Canadian Bishops in 1921, at the same time as they established the English Scarboro Foreign Missions. These men live with their seminarians in Kibera. We had a delightful supper evening and a long lively discussion about enculturation and life in Kenya at the present time. I think an enduring friendship has been struck!

At supper tonight, I was explaining “Lent” to Raymond, the small Massai boy who lives with us and who has picked up some felicitous English phrases from Carolyn and me. After what I thought was a good spiritual explanation of Lent and Easter, I told him that for Lent I was going to give up candy (I have a very bad sweet tooth) and offer that for all those who were hungry in Kenya. I also told him that “to improve myself” I was going to work on not saying words like “Sh—t”, e.g. when the matatus nearly run me off the road. I have disedified him in the car more than once and I wanted him to know that I knew it was bad behaviour and that I was working on it. After this most serious lesson, and the disclosure of my Lenten resolutions, Raymond threw his head back and exclaimed “Good luck Charley!”

On that note, let me say, a heartfelt thank you for your prayers, encouragement and support! I look forward to seeing many of you, beginning with my Dad, in Canada in a month! In the mean time, may this spring time and Lenten season be rich in God’s fresh new personal blessings for each one of us! I wish you peace, joy and hope.

Love, Mae




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