Letting hope in

Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi, author of best-selling novel The Icarus Girl, visits CAFOD-funded projects helping women in Kenya [Georgina Cranston]

Helen Olajumoke Oyeyemi, author of best-selling novel The Icarus Girl, writes about what livesimply means to her in light of her visit to CAFOD-funded projects helping women in Kenya

Moral imperatives are scary; they have the uncomplicated ring of high truth, but they make modern life even more complicated than it already is.

I’m 22 and I don’t have a plan for my life. But, through encouraging me to constantly seek my own growth and the growth of others as people, my faith implicitly nudges me towards engaging with a plan for my soul.

Pope Paul VI’s call to live ‘simply, sustainably, and in solidarity with the poor’ is not necessarily, I think, a call to give up wearing blue mascara and eating salted caramel milk chocolate – unless doing these things leads me to an understanding of myself as wholly separate from others; or to the conclusion that suffering, the raw side of the coin, is not my business or isn’t real because it isn’t present in my life.

Small but spirited changes

It can be so easy to reject fellowship with others, and the implications for our own lives contained within such fellowship.

We now live and work in such a way that the personal, the political and the spiritual reside in separate boxes so as not to bruise each other

It’s true that money is one of the most powerful forms of aid that people can give to each other, and it’s also true that it’s great to give money.

But the need to make other changes is becoming clearer to me, small but spirited changes that make a huge difference if a lot of people do them at once.

Still, it can be difficult to live with people who are following their conscience; my mum is recycling in a very serious way - this means that every bit of discarded packaging or paper needs to be put into separate bins.

Part of me can only say “argghh” to this peskiness on a daily basis, and part of me recognises and appreciates Mama’s real effort to maximise waning resources for times and generations that neither she nor I will see.

That’s simple, personally sustainable solidarity, a love that doesn’t question the reasons and benefits of its own existence.

Nothing can live

I saw this (and the need of more of it from the West) in northern Kenya, on a trip to see a gender development programme supported by CAFOD.

Among communities whose well-being is tied up in the prosperity of their livestock, climate change and the ensuing droughts and floods mean people starve.

In daylight hours the sun was relentless; I could barely lift my head under the heat, or see without squinting. I was dizzy from sweating out what felt like every drop of water I’d ever drunk in my life.

It got much better at night, but I couldn’t help imagining this harshness without the mercy of a full seasonal cycle; this without the promise of rain. Nothing can live in this for long.

Summers in the small, busy town in Nigeria where I was born don’t get as hot as it was in that part of Marsabit, Kenya. They might yet.

Marsabit doesn’t emit anywhere near as much carbon as London, Lagos, or even Ibadan, yet the weather there has been skewed; it’s like each individual waste of energy elsewhere is gathering into an environmentally jaw-breaking slap that is yearly delivered to this region and others like it. Our gift to the African continent.

Out in Kenya it became clearer to me than ever that minimising energy wasting and the emission of harmful gases would really be doing God’s work.

It would be slowing down the end of the world for nomadic peoples, and I wasn’t unaware of the bitter irony that the end of the world would come quicker to places like Marsabit district than it would to us in the artificial cocoon of our skills-based economy.

When life is on a knife’s edge like this, so is the status of women. Women in nomadic communities can be seen as burdens because they don’t own anything of great monetary value and so must be provided for by the people who do.

The gender development programme doesn’t come into villages to tell them that their way of life has got to change; rather the message is that if alternatives are desired, then alternatives are there.

At its best, sustainable development is instigated by the people identifying a problem or a goal and looking for their own solutions.

In looking for ways to generate income outside of trading livestock, women ask for, and receive, classes in small business management and the operation of communal savings.

These skills empower women by improving their economic status and, by extension, their social status - the meaning of their presence in their communities. These women are helping to protect the futures of their men and children.

It’s much more immediate than putting glass in one pile, paper in another and tin in yet another, but it’s a similar willingness towards erasing categories and distinctions between self and other, it’s a way of letting hope in.

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