Home is where the Heart Is …Kenya Week 7: November 15-22

Sitting in my room at the St. Camillus Seminary in Nairobi, I caught myself off guard when the thought, “I want to go home!” popped into my head on Monday evening. But the “home” I imagined was not Lee’s Summit, Missouri or New Orleans, Louisiana. Suddenly “home” meant Karungu, Kenya. In seven short yet powerful weeks, my paradigm shifted once again: I live in Africa. I work at a hospital in the bush. My friends are Italian volunteers, Kenyan seminarians, and Luo nurses. For fun I play with my beautiful neighbor children, run on muddy cattle trails, write letters, and read books. And one week away from home was too much. I wanted to be back. I wanted to give vaccines to babies, to speak broken Duluo, to laugh with the seminarians and priests at dinner, to constantly scrape mud from my shoes, and to watch the sunset over the lake.

This unexpected Karungu-homesickness nestled down right next down to my America-homesickness. Undeniably, while in Africa I’ve yearned for the comforts and security of my America-home more than ever before. I miss the paved roads, warm showers, and the luxurious beauty of the developed world. I miss grocery shopping, cooking dinner for my family, going to the movies, and leaving the house after the sunset. I miss the Streetcar bumbling down St. Charles Ave in New Orleans and the parasite-free lakes in Kansas City. I miss the instant and reliable communication with my loved ones. I miss feeling safe enough to travel alone and I miss blending in.

Yet when I look around me, I realize most of the people in Karungu can barely fathom what it means to miss such extravagant homes. Gaston, Michael, and Mary were thrilled to return to their new jigger-free, concrete-slab, one-room home. Mary the Nurse Aid wishes her home had running water so she wouldn’t have to fetch it from the lake every morning. Emma the Cleaner wishes she had her own home so she and her children wouldn’t be at the mercy of her landlord when she can’t afford to pay the month’s rent. The children at Dala Kiye have a beautiful home, loving caretakers, three meals a day, and school fees so they can graduate high school. Although they’re HIV+ and orphaned, they may be the most blessed kids in all of Karungu. Meanwhile the other 5,000 orphans and vulnerable children around Karungu have no home to miss. Day in and day out they struggle to find a roof to sleep under, a decent meal to eat, and a relative to pay their school fees.

Back at home in Karungu, I still miss home. And since I miss Amanda while she’s at home in New York recovering from surgery, I wrote her a letter telling her to come home soon.

My home is Lee’s Summit, New Orleans, Karungu. My family and friends send me precious letters from California, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, Belgium, Swaziland, Chile, and Iraq. How blessed I am to have so many homes and so many loved ones. If “Home is where the Heart Is”, then my heart is scattered across the globe in countless pieces.

 

 

My beautiful neighbors back home in Karungu.