Musing on Litt-World 2009

Litt-World 2009 is over. Last week I:

• pondered the implications for my WIP (work in progress) of novelist Davis Bunn’s workshops on writing the breakout novel.
• took avid notes on the process of editing from a gifted Filippina editor, Yna Reyes.
• lined up three possible workshops where I can teach skills to Africans who want to write for the children in their communities, including one in Kisumu, Kenya, the heart of last year’s post-election violence.
• discovered interest in my HIV story “God Loves Me When I Hurt” from publishers in India as well as Burundi, Ghana and Kenya.
• found promising writers from Nigeria and Indonesia who are eager for on-line mentoring.
• enjoyed catching up with former student Nerea Thigo of Kenya (pictured).
• laughed at the ingenuity of Czech publisher, Alexandr Flek, who set up a web-based club of Beta testers and donors to raise funds and field test his new translation of the Bible—essentially the first in 400 years. 
• marveled at the faithfulness of the publisher who prints 2-500 copies of significant titles for the small population who reads Croatian.
• enjoyed the gasps of Africans seeing the Great Rift Valley for the first time.
• ate way too much, stayed up way too late.
• Wished I had a video camera to capture Robin Jones Gunn and Alice Lawhead really getting into it with the African singers and dancers who helped us celebrate the last night.

It was a stimulating and exhausting opportunity that won’t come again for another three years.

The sun sets over the Great Rift Valley as our bus returns to Brackenhurst Conference Center from an outing to Lake Naivasha.

Litt-World 2009

November 2004 I sat on a beach in the Philippines pouring out my passion for stories for children affected by HIV/AIDS to David Waweru of Word Alive Publications in Nairobi, Kenya. We were both attending the Litt-World Conference sponsored by Media Associates International. Litt-World is a bi-annual conference for Christian writers and publishers from the majority world. My conversation with David Waweru led to the first of three writing workshops in Nairobi. It also led to some pretty major changes in my life. I came home from the Philippines and told my husband that I wanted to move back to Africa to be in the right context to write for these children. He graciously said, “Lets go for it,” and we spent 2005 to 2008 based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

This week I am back in Nairobi for another Litt-World conference. I look forward to getting together with former students who have become friends and to meeting new people concerned with writing for children in cultures from Albania to Zimbabwe. I will be meeting with another publisher who has expressed interest in some of my stories to find out what the next step is. I don’t expect this Litt-World to be quite as life changing for me as my first, but I am praying that I would build relationships that God can use for the Kingdom.

Writing for Kenya's Children

 

Violence is an acceptable way of solving problems.
Those people are bad.
Friends can’t be trusted.
Those I love can’t protect me.

One by one we listed negative lessons that Kenyan children learned in the violence that followed last December’s elections.

I drew a line down the board. “What are the positive lessons we want them to learn instead?” I asked.

“Good people still exist!” two students practically shouted. “And some of them are from the other tribe,” someone added. We went on to talk about hope, trust, the power of difference and ways of portraying such themes in stories.

I was deeply moved as I listened to fifteen women, talking so excitedly about the needs of Kenyan children that they practically ignored me, their teacher. They came from different ethnic groups, some 'at war' with one another, but they shared a passion for Christ, for children, for books and for their country.

The next morning we prayed together for the God who heals the broken hearted, who is a father to the fatherless and a defender of widows to use us to share his comfort. As we broke for tea in the afternoon, one of the women received an SMS from her office to avoid Ngong Road—new violence had broken out.

I am not one to panic. I have lived in the midst of a revolution in Ethiopia and a civil war in Mozambique. I am well aware that the media plays up the most dramatic scenes, and Nairobi was probably not going to burst into flames that afternoon. Although the women all expressed the same sentiments in their words, more than one described her stomach twisting in fear. “Not again! Dear God, don’t let it be like before when bands of thugs went house to house asking what tribe you were from so they could decide whether or not to kill you.”

A good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end, I tell my students. But this story doesn’t yet have an ending. Kenya’s political problems won’t be easily solved. And what difference will a political solution make for the poor and the hopeless who blame other ethnic groups for their problems? I wonder about the personal ending for these women. Some are teachers; some work with relief organizations. One has HIV and came to the workshop only days after leaving the hospital. Will the refugee children still in the camps be able to unlearn the lessons their experiences have taught them or is Kenya doomed to repeat the cycle of violence in the next generation?

We don’t know the ending to the story, but we can talk to the One who does.