Navaisha, Kenya—The grace and poise Veronika Wangeci radiates is truly misleading.
She stands tall and self-confident. Her thin, wide smile is that of a movie star, not of dirt-poor, sick and dying woman in the Kenyan countryside.
AIDS has reduced this mother of three to skin and bones. Her sister is already dead and Veronika would be too had it not been for the miraculous availability of antiretroviral medicines at a local charity.
Upon arrival of visitors, Veronika pulls herself up from the bed, washes some fruit and insists that her visitors have some.
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Then walks in Veronika’s mother, Maryam, a big-boned woman of 56 with weather-beaten skin like leather and powerful arms and hands. This is the woman who supports the entire family, including her unemployed husband and a gaggle of grandchildren running around the mud hovels the family occupies in on the outskirts of this town two hours northeast of Nairobi.
She shows me how she earns a living: she sits down next to a pile of rocks she says she carried from a nearby hill that morning. She holds each rock with an iron grip and then proceeds to smash it into smaller pieces with a hammer.
A days worth of work brings in about 45 shillings or about 60 cents. That’s her job. Hauling and smashing rocks for 60 cents a day. It’s not a easy living, but one wouldn’t know that from talking to Maryam.
“It’s because of Jesus that I am able to live,” she says. “I’ve done this for 56 years and was able to survive. So I am content.”
She tells me of how she was “saved” in the Church of Apostles when she was 20 years old. And as she continues to smash more rocks, she tells me how so far she has lost 10 of her 13 children to various diseases.
I can’t stop myself from asking the obvious question: If you believe God loves you, why do you think he sends you so much pain? She smiles without looking up from her work.
“These [doubts] are just temptations. These are tests of a good Christian,” she says through a translator. “These events made me better Christian.”
But I can’t let go: Do you ever wonder why so much has befallen your family?
“No, because everything is God’s will anyway,” she says, now looking right at me. “Our faith is like gold and life gold, it is tested by fire. Nothing could ever stop me from believing that.”
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Story by Ali Torkzadeh
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Update: Veronika passed away a few months later.
