Mar
4
2008
Orthodoxy in Kenya (Part II)
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The following photos constitute the second and final part of my photo essay on Kenyan Orthodoxy (for Part I click here). They were all taken in Western Kenya, mostly in remote Luo villages in the tropical forests around Lake Victoria. Although Western Kenya’s principal city, Kisumu, had a reputation even then for being unsafe at night, and although the Lake Victoria region of Western Kenya is hardly prosperous, the region’s slow paced village life, rolling tea fields, tracts of fertile farmland, and tropical lushness all conveyed a sense of peace and relative abundance (although the same cannot be said of Western Kenya’s Rift Valley, a vast flat arid plain dotted with Masai communities living in abject dirt-and-flies poverty). This bucolic impression may have been exaggerated by the fact that I had spent so much time in the Nairobi shantytowns, which make for miserable living from any perspective. Nevertheless, whatever truth there may have been to the idyllic picture of Western Kenya was shattered in recent months when the region, especially Kisumu and the Rift Valley, experienced some of Kenya’s goriest bloodletting in the post-election bedlam. There was no hint then of what was to come, at least not to the transient visitor’s eye. The only violence I had experienced was from an Anopheles mosquito, which injected me with a dose of malaria and soon had me curled up in a trembling, feverish heap just in time for the seven-hour potholed drive back to Nairobi.
SLIDESHOW OF PHOTO ESSAY (part II)
-Constantine Markides
Feb
4
2008
Orthodoxy in Kenya (Part I)
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IN 1922, a young woman named Hadley Richardson thought she would surprise her husband, who at the time was in Switzerland on assignment as a war correspondent, by bringing to him almost all of his fiction-all unpublished-from their Paris apartment. It turned out a surprise all right, but not the sort she intended. While her train was still stationed in the Gare de Lyon, she briefly left the compartment to buy some mineral water. On returning she found that the valise-which contained not only the manuscripts, but also the carbon copies, duplicates, etc.-was gone. In hindsight the traumatic loss seems only appropriate, even fortuitous, for that young writer-Ernest Hemingway-who would develop a ‘less is more’ credo and whose mascot, if we might ascribe him one posthumously, may as well have been a scalpel.
For this month’s essay I had intended to write about my experiences shadowing the Orthodox Archbishop of Kenya as a journalist for two weeks last July through Nairobi and Western Kenya as he toured a group of Cypriots (on their yearly “Holy Mission” to Kenya) around Orthodox churches, schools, orphanages and clinics that they had helped finance. But when I sat down to write I realized I’d unwittingly discarded or lost all of my notes. No traumatic loss of the young Hemingway variety, but still a downer.
ONE of the premiere comedy spots in the world lies in an imposing neo-Byzantine building in the old town of Nicosia, Cyprus, bearing the unjustly sonorous title ‘The Archbishopric.’ It is where the Archbishop, the head of the comedy club known as the Cyprus Church resides, and where the bishops and other higher clergy convene to ensure a ceaseless supply of spiritual hilarity. The heart of the Cyprus Church may seem an unlikely place for top-class comedy, but anyone who has witnessed any of the latest ecclesiastical acts, whether live or on television, will agree that it’s the best show running in the Eastern Mediterranean, on par with South Park, Eddie Murphy’s Delirious, or the best clips from The Daily Show. 
