“Siwezi. When, in Africa, “can’t” becomes something else

On “People and Mission,” the word “siwezi,” which expresses impossibility

We will discover how in Africa the “I cannot” gives life to something else “Siwezi,” in Swahili, means ”I cannot.” But geographical coordinates give different nuances to words. With us, for example, it is a limitation. You want to be invincible, efficient, always on top, but sometimes you don’t get there (economically, culturally, etc.).

It is, moreover, the paradox of a society that runs “as fast as you can.” You are rushing to get more things done, but then the answer you find yourself giving most often (to children, to a partner, to friends) is, “I can’t.”

In Africa, priorities change, and so do possibilities and perspectives.

For Fr. Nicholas Kirimo, a Kenyan Cottolengo priest, “siwezi” is the “giving up in the name of a stronger value while having the right motivation.” There are indeed words that, even though they are the same, depending on cultures and opportunities, take on opposite meanings and trajectories.

In Kenya, for example, where health care is fee-for-service, “itʼs an expression uttered with a resignation and acceptance that in other lands would be unthinkable.”

So says from Cagliari Paolo Zanolla, 35, a 2018 mission doctor in Chaaria, at Cottolengo Mission Hospital where Prince Winner, just two months old, “slowly died after his father said, ‘I canʼt go to Nairobi to have my son operated on. Do what you can.”

And there is that heavy “sense of helplessness” that touches many: from the volunteer, due to the scarcity of means and structures, to the missionaries who have to deal with reality for years.

From nonprofits and ngos untangling projects, system and resources, to young people like Antony Puppo, returning from a brief experience in Mexico. Alongside his “satisfaction of having done something concrete,” one worry:

“You would like to change the world, but it is almost impossible. We built two houses, yes. But what about the other 20 million people in the suburbs?”

Questions that will remain unanswered or to which Africans reply “siwezi,” “humbly accepting that we are small and do not have power over everything,” says Paolo Zanolla. A challenge for Africa, for Fr. Nicholas: to struggle more (“Yes, wen can” and “All things I can in him who gives me strength”).

A challenge for us: to review the reasons for our “siwezi.”

And, in the meantime, as Claudia Favaro of the Turin Diocesan Missionary Center says, “the tire of a bicycle reminds us that a child, faced with this saying, thinks like this: ‘I can’t have toys, but I don’t give up the right to play, I develop my creativity, I am with my friends, I live, I am happy.’”

(Loredana Brigante – Popoli e Missione, May 2019)

Source

• Popoli e Missione

Image

• Photo by Gherardo Gambelli