Last week from 6th to 8th December, a group of women gathered in our parish for a 3-day semina. These were none other than the wives of our chatechists.
In our parish we have 25 catechists who help us in the outstations. The parish is made up of 25 outstations and more that 100 small christian communities some of which are semi autonomous.
Being only 3 priests it takes us more than 2 months to cover all the outstations, visiting on Saturdays and Sundays and some times on weekdays for masses and other sacraments.
Due to this, the catechists are very important to maintain faith of the people at the outstations. They preside over Sunday services and prepare the faithful for sacraments until we visit.
The majority of our parishioners are of Maasai culture and this poses a big challenge due to some hard and fast cultural practices such as men marrying more than one wife, widows who are not allowed to remarry, marriage of young girls, discrimination of women, among others.
This and many other cultural practices have made it very difficult for them to embrace concretely Catholicism and christian values in general.
Since the Divine Word Missionaries took over ther Parish 17 years ago, many strides have been made towards growing the faith. However, we have still a lot of work to do. In some outstations for instance, we do not have even a single couple married in the church, even some catechists have many wives.
Slowly we are doing our best to educate them on Christian values that go against their long standing practices. This has to be done very cautiously so as not to repel them from the Church.
The semina was meant to encourage the catechists wives, majority of who are married in the church to be the salt and catalysts in the preaching of the new way of life.
The Semina was facilitated by the Pariah Priest Fr. Lawrence Muthee, svd and Sr. Edith, fms.
We hope that in the near future, more Maasai people will embrace the Christian culture and allow it to inspire there own.
Fr. Lawrence Muthee, svd
JAMBO KENTAN 
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