Sunday encounters

Sunday mornings can bring unexpected visitors. In the quiet vacuum created by mass attendance at church, opportunists often try their hand. One Sunday I was reading in my bedroom when I caught a boy peering in at me through the mosquito netting, checking out who was at home. Another week as I was cooking Sunday lunch, I heard the front door open and found a young man in my sitting room. He wasn’t able to tell me why he was there or how he knew me, so I asked him to leave. Yesterday I confronted an enterprising boy who was lobbing stones at my avocado trees to help with the harvesting (remembering the apple scrumping my friends and I used to indulge in as kids, I couldn’t be too hard on him!).  

I was just settling down to some Sunday music making when a knock came at the door. It was a middle-aged man wearing a small, worn out shoulder bag and a weary expression. In a mixture of French and Swahili, he started explaining how he was a displaced person who’d fled Dungu, nearly 300km away, where he’d working, because of attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Apparently he’d walked many miles, hitched a lift from others and was now here in Bunia, but he was trying to get back to Goma hundreds of kilometres south, where his family was. He needed $20 for transport. He’d asked for help at various humanitarian organisations, and at my local church, which is where he saw me and followed me home. I was suspicious. I’ve had conmen pretending to be refugees asking me for money on Sunday mornings before now, and I don’t have much time for them. My colleagues have advised me never to give money to people I don’t know who turn up at my door. Somehow, though, this story had something genuine about it. I decided to stall. I asked him to come back on Monday morning, when I could talk to him with one of my colleagues who comes from Goma.

 I’m glad I did. He duly returned at the time we’d fixed. My colleague questioned him a bit about Goma, about what his name means in his language, which is very similar to my colleague’s, about his church community, and found that his story rang true. From his frayed shoulder bag he produced a precious piece of soap he’d been given by someone on the road. As for food, there wasn’t much opportunity for it. We realised that this was a case where help was needed. My colleague accompanied him to the bus park and helped him onto a lorry which would take him down south. It was a lesson to me that I need to be shrewd and vigilant on a Sunday morning, but open, too, to the good that God is wanting to do, whatever I might have experienced in the past. Blanket rules just don’t work.