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2009-01-06 issue:

Maasai leader encourages West Africans

African-to-African initiative provides community development seminars.

by Jewel Showalter

Print Article

"All my life I’ve been waiting and looking for help. I’ve not found it yet. But when it comes, I’ll be OK.”

That’s what an old village chief told David Shunkur, a director for Compassion International and a Mennonite church leader from Olepolos, Kenya, during transformational community development seminars in The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, Nov. 15-26, 2008.


David Shunkur (right), joins (left to right) Tenig Mane, Gibby Mane and Lana Dafa, for a lunch of fish. Photo by Clair Good.

Shunkur and Clair Good, representative to Africa for Eastern Mennonite Missions (EMM), facilitated the workshops in West Africa in an African-to-African initiative.

“We, too, were hopeless and helpless—just like you feel,” Shunkur told the workshop participants. “We were a community that had lost its way in poverty, corruption, immorality and drunkenness.”

Then Shunkur told the story of how Olepolos, his Maasai community in Kenya that once couldn’t even feed itself, was now sharing food with others —how they’ve founded the “Village University” in Olepolos, are planting churches and initiating community transformation in the surrounding regions.

As Shunkur shared the powerful personal and communal transformation stories from Kenya with the West African community leaders, he asked, “Who is going to solve your
problems—the mission, the witch doctor, the government? No. Only you can solve your problems.”

 Shunkur and Good broke the group of about 30 leaders into small working clusters.

The groups, composed of both Christians and African Traditional Religionists from among the Balanta and Jola peoples of Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, worked to identify local problems and assets—and planned how they could leverage the assets to solve their problems.

“I could really see the lights come on,” Good says. “They started to get it, to think for themselves and problem solve. It was powerful for them to hear an African say these things, to explain how his community had been transformed from its ‘poor me,’ poverty mindset.”

Good remembers when Shunkur sat in the same hopeless, poverty-stricken state where many of the leaders from Gambia and Guinea-Bissau now sit. And that gives him hope.

Good says he believes that the people in these West African communities of Gambia and Guinea-Bissau have even more assets than the people of Olepolos, Kenya, did when he moved there in 1997.

“It was exciting to see David minister cross-culturally and even eat fish—something the cattle-loving Maasai would never do in Kenya,” Good says.

The EMM team in The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau consists of Gary and Denise Williamson, Lori Doll, Krystle Leininger, Eric Weber and Beryl Forrester.