It is Sunday in Nairobi and I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t make it to Church this morning because I scheduled myself to meet with a youth group in the Lunga Lunga Slum of Nairobi. About 40 youth organizing a trash pick up and putting the pieces together for a waste management business. I often go to slums and work in urban environments that are horrific in poverty, disease and crime. But this morning was different. I walked the narrow walkways between corrigated huts interviewing the youth leaders. The smells were so bad that three times I had to fight the gag reflex and I found myself not wanting to breath the toxic odors.
In these situations I become both angry and empathic. I go there to feel what they feel and try to understand their experience but I often leave like Amos outside the city gates of Jerusalem shouting at the oppressors. Huge multinationals surround this slum but they contribute little to its development. People I know and people I have become close with live in these huts. In my meetings they share their experience and each time I find they speak with a voice of hope and redemption. They are not defeated nor do they grow angry at their predicament. Rather, they work hard and struggle to make their place clean, safe and industrious. They don’t ask for handouts, they ask that we come along side and help them think through solutions and create opportunity.
I found Christ this morning and it wasn’t in a mega structure with all the trappings – I found him in the gentle smile of a child walking along the polluted Nairobi river trying to make sense out of his life and knowing that no amount of poverty or despair can remove his hope.
You walk through the streets and alleys of Huruma Slum in Nairobi and you quickly realize you are in a world once marked and scarred by violence. The post election violence in Kenya that captured the world’s attention in 2007 and 2008 found its way to the slums of Kibera and Korogocho but nowhere was the violence more intense, more tribal and more debilitating than in the Huruma and 
In Manzini, Swaziland a Christian and a member of the Church of the Nazarene works daily in the Ministry of Natural Resources providing valuable and important technical expertise to the leadership in this government ministry. His biggest challenge is the corruption that runs rampant in various mid-level bureaucracies, a characteristic that has come to challenge many governments in Africa. He has choices, he can close his eyes to what is going on around him, he can confront the institutions that seem to breed corruption and subsequently lose his position, or he can engage by creating a faithful presence in the midst of corruption and abuse. He can choose to live his life as a living witness to the power of his faith. He can create a “faithful presence.”