Focus: vocations and volunteering Chris Chivers


From war to peace “W


The most important way of helping the dispossessed is to listen, as a former US marine-turned-aid-worker discovered during a period in one of Nairobi’s largest slums


hy aren’t you guys


involved in your local churches?” I asked a group of entrepreneurial


late-twentysomethings in a bar in Washington DC the night before Barack Obama’s inauguration. I was in search of material about the gen-


eration of volunteers energised by the future United States President’s campaign and I was so impressed with what I was hearing about the ethical and spiritual take of this particular group – all of whom were defence or foreign- policy specialists – that it struck me that I was hearing a transforming Gospel that the Western Churches, at least, didn’t seem to be articulating themselves. I was reminded of something the Anglican theologian Tom Wright once said to me: “The Gospel doesn’t disappear, but it does some- times end up somewhere else.” Just then a voice pierced the room. “Sir, you wanna know why we’re not so involved in our local churches? Because, sir, no one perhaps thought to ask.” The speaker, tall and muscular with intense


dark eyes, was one Rye Barcott, a Christian, a former US marine and the co-founder of an acclaimed grass-roots-driven charity, Carolina for Kibera (CFK). Barcott set up CFK with two slum-dwellers in one of the poorest parts of Nairobi. I encouraged him to tell something of his story, and found a maturity he’d acquired in – on the face of it


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advice, resources to improve the way they live, healthy food and snacks, and a place for children to play. I was struck by the importance of the centre


to the local community, which is very ethnically diverse, in building relationships between old and new. I saw here how difficult it could be,


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– his somewhat conflictual service as a national and global citizen. Barcott, 32, had been deployed on counter- insurgency work in Bosnia, in the Horn of Africa and in Iraq. To understand what fuelled terrorism and inter-ethnic violence, he travelled to Nairobi for a six-week spell in the course of his studies at the University of North Carolina. His father, a sociologist, had also been a marine, “so it’s in the blood”, he says. “I always wanted to serve. But I knew that I needed to discover what fuelled the kind of context I’d be deployed in, I mean, what drives the ter- rorism we see.” His mother, an anthropologist, encouraged his decision to go to Africa. He had been to Kenya as a 14-year-old and had been shocked at the poverty he saw. Six years later, he was initially heading to post-genocide Rwanda, but he ended up in Kibera, the continent’s largest slum, living for a month and a half in a shack to find out what made young people there tick. He learnt Swahili and had a well-thought- through research plan involving interviewing many residents. But he was in for some sur- prises, especially through two friends he made there – Salim and Tabitha. Without formal education, slum resident Salim Mohamed, a Muslim who had been brought up in a children’s home and knew the rough side of life in Kibera himself, was running a project for local children.


especially for someone who was seeking asylum or had just been granted their leave to remain in the United Kingdom, to settle and to integrate into a new community. The Welcome Centre provides the support and friendliness that enables this to happen. These two experiences suggested to me that the process of giving other human beings some sense of future, direction and worth is part of the answer to the question of how to be a good neighbour. The other part of the answer has to do with beans on toast and football. Following my experience of the drop-in centre, I quickly signed up to volunteer on Wednesday nights at the emergency Narrowgate Night Shelter in the same building, the only one of its kind in Greater Manchester. Those using the shelter are provided with a bed, dinner and somewhere to sit and watch television or play pool until the


Rye Barcott of Carolina for Kibera (right) meets a young friend with a gota or fist bump. Photo: Jason Arthurs


Salim, a slight young man, Gandhi-esque in manner, “gave me a hard time”, Barcott acknowledges. “He was running a community soccer project, keeping kids off the street – a model that became central to our non-profit when we started it – but after he’d chatted me through what he did and how young Kiberans felt, he really challenged me. ‘So you get some great research out of this conversa- tion,’ he said to me. ‘What do we get in Kibera?’”


At that moment, Barcott says, an idea crys-


tallised – participatory development, the poor giving a lead in the projects aimed to get them out of poverty. “If we could get the financial resources together,” he remarks, a twinkle in his eye, “we could get Kiberan ideas to fly.” The charity, Carolina for Kibera (CFK), was being conceived. Then there was Tabitha, a trained nurse who had been widowed and left with three


evening curfew at 10 o’clock. That is how I found myself, a lifelong Liverpool fan, watching and, more worryingly, smiling as the group of homeless men I was sitting with cheered on Manchester United over beans on toast. We do not have a theoretical answer to the


problem of evil. But what we do have is the possibility of a personal response in the life of Jesus. This is the response of faith: our “transformation”, as Martin Luther put it, “into the other through love”. Faith presents us with the genuine possibility of becoming a good neighbour. That means sharing, even just a little bit, in the lives of those to whom you are being a neighbour – even if that is as simple as beans on toast and Manchester United. To read more about JVC visit:


http://www.jvcbritain.org/Jesuit_Volunteer_ Community,_Britain/Home.html


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