A communion.(social conditions of Ongesas)

Publication: The Humanist

Publication Date: 01-MAR-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 American Humanist Association

LYN AND I ARE SITTING in the house of Joshua and Raili Ongesa. This is in the East Africa village of Tabaka, in the Kisii area, not far from Lake Victoria. We've known Joshua and Raili for more than forty years, ever since we became friends when Lyn and I were Peace Corps volunteers in Kenya in the middle 1960s.

When we first met the Ongesas, Lyn and I were recently married, just out of college, both products of the New York suburbs; Joshua and Raili were about ten years older than we, peasant farmers with little formal education. At that time, they had a small income from growing coffee. They also sold maize grown on a rented plot not far from their own farm. In addition, Joshua was a soapstone sculptor who, over the years, specialized in chess sets that sold around the world.

Four decades later he and Raili continue to live on their plot of about two acres. They grow less maize than before since they can no longer afford to rent the extra plot of land. They do, however, tend a small hillside garden where there are greens and beans. They draw their water from the river below since they don't have running water. Their coffee trees are gone now, uprooted a number of years ago when the price of coffee had gone so low on the international market that it hardly paid to grow it any longer. The area once given over to the coffee is a grassy space between the road and the house and is used by children as a playground.

Something else has changed around his house. There used to be cows cropping the grass here and giving milk to the family. Today there isn't a single cow. Little milk is available.

Joshua has grown old. His eyesight is failing. Cataracts, we suspect. In the last year while carving he has cut himself several times. He owns a pair of glasses, but they aren't much help. So he no longer carves and his income is sharply reduced. He is also very thin. Recurrent malaria, something from which he has suffered for at...

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