Sunday 25 January 2015

Br. David



I met Br. David way back in 2005. Looking at my receding hair now, I kind of imagine how this friar was 25 years ago. But at the same time I am so much aware of the Swahili saying that states akili ni nywele kila mtu ana zake! (a literal understanding of this is that the hair is the visible part of the head that represents the essential, invisible part of the head), and so I think akili ni nywele ukiona haipo kichwani kwa nje, ipo kwa ndani. Br. David’s hair is honestly not coming out and I somehow think it is very much concentrated inside the head. 
He has been my professor for a couple of years and I can attest to it that his hair is doing him justice not to come out because his knowledge of his area of specialisation is way above my comprehension and always supplemented by his never ending jokes. When I for the first time met him, he was very comical as usual. He kept swirling his index finger around the buttons on his well build stomach. Apparently I was coming from a generation addicted to six-pack tummies and here I was standing before a man with a one gigantic pack, yet unnerved by it. He introduced himself, “naitwa ndugu David Kamau, OFM cap.” This was the first time I was hearing about “OFM” and so he went on to explain, “OFM means – Order of Fat Men – like me!” I laughed because although I knew very little about OFM, I knew that that was not the actual meaning of the initials. Indeed he was still watering my naïve vocation and as he says “… the effectiveness of vocation promotion is based not on what a vocation promoter does but on what he/she is” (How to Become a Capuchin, 4).

Sunday 18 January 2015

Br. Sila



Seven years ago, I and my groupmates arrived at St. Bridget, our hearts lively throbbing with mixed feelings of both the uncertainty and the excitement of leaving Mpeketoni. You know mpeketoni had not been a very hospitable place to most of us who come from the highlands and so we somehow abhorred the place. If you add to that the amount of manual work that awaited us every morning as postulants, we had every reason to detest the “capuchin way of life”. It was with such an attitude of life we met the then vocations promoter Br. Sila. 

He did not say much and so the interaction remained very much minimal until somebody came over and said “jamani, Kimani has been arrested.” He had been arrested because of entering into the city with a smoke emitting land-cruiser. Sila looked around and laughed, which was quite funny. He wondered, “kama wamemshika kwa sababu ya hiyo, mimi si watanifunga miaka ishirini juu ya hii mkokoteni yangu” Apparently he was driving a small vehicle whose emission of gas would have made you think the industrial area is on the move! From that time everything else he said was hilarious. How easy it is for Br. Sila to see the humour in seemingly ugly events.