Peace Comes with a Smile
There’s the cloud in the sky, a line in the sand and a little picture in my hand. I am an awkward scholar of sight, a follower of roads and dreams, just a connector of all kinds of lines.
I try to find life’s essence in the linear connectedness of things and places and people. I hope that my moments and coincidences will last a little longer than just passing incidents. My work is simply a conglomerate of moments, such as what happened on flight SA 184 from Nairobi back to Oliver Tambo’s Place.
Next to me, in the window seat, sat Sister Helen Kagendo, a Kenyan of the Meru tribe and a member of the Catholic Missionaries of Charity. She was on a flight of belief and redemption, a flight to the other side of the Earth, to East Timor, an island north of Darwin, Australia. As we climbed through the cumulus thunderclouds beyond Mount Kilimanjaro, and the captain’s voice crackled a warning, she peacefully read her Bible.
Over the years, I have walked with some unease on religious paths, but on that flight on that day she smiled a blessing upon me, providence touched me, softly and almost unexplainably. When I mentioned that she wore the same blue and
