Testimony
My name is Carolyne Adhola. I am a priest and a widow ordained by the Anglican Diocese of Bondo, Kenya, but serving in the Diocese of Washington. I want to tell my story of how the faith of my mother helped me grow deeper in knowing God amid my widowhood and gender-based violence in Kenya.
I was born in 1979 in a small village in Western Kenya among the Luo, the fourth-largest tribe in Kenya. The Luo are known for their strict adherence to traditional culture. They teach their young to share their food, honor their elders, and show hospitality. Other Luo practices are oppressive and strip women of their dignity. I experienced this firsthand as a widow.
One of the more troubling customs is called “widow cleansing.” Custom says that if a married man dies, his widow becomes the property of her husband’s family. Widow cleansing refers to the family asking another man to sleep with her to “cleanse” her of her dead husband’s spirit. Until this is done, the widow cannot go to any gathering place or attend community events. With the advent of HIV-AIDS, this custom turned deadly because some of these agents of cleansing are sexually involved with many widows.
Widows are also forbidden to cultivate their farms, because of traditional beliefs that associate having sex on the first day of cultivation with the fertility of the soil. This often leads to dire poverty.
My father was a Roman Catholic, and he strictly adhered to Luo culture. My mother was an Anglican who denounced all Luo traditional practices that were incompatible with Christian faith. I was influenced by my mother’s faith and I became a church leader in my teens. My mother’s deeper faith in God and her prayer life influenced my faith formation. She was a member of the East African Revival fellowship. Members of the movement shared most of their belongings and prayed for each other. I listened to the testimonies of the widows who defied the cultural practices. These widows said they found joy, peace, and hope in their relationship with Jesus Christ. This testimony inspired me.
When I turned 19, my father began insisting that I should be married. For my safety and hers, my mother sent me away to visit a cousin. I felt disowned, but my mother kept praying for God to guide me. I spent several months helping as a teacher at a primary school, and it was there that I met the man who became my husband.
My husband grew up Roman Catholic, and we married in a Catholic church, but he kept a promise to convert to Anglicanism. My husband supported me when I discerned the call to be a lay reader in our local Anglican church. He would take me on his bicycle to attend lay reader’s meetings in distant places. He did not live long enough to see me serving God in this calling. He died after four years of marriage.
In 2003 my husband took a nap and breathed his last. Now the Luo tradition and gender-based violence closed in on me. My late husband’s younger brother used a stick to strike me on my head repeatedly. “I need my brother alive,” he said, as though I had the power to bring him back to life. At last my neighbors stopped him from beating me and drew him outside the house.
Because I was only 24, I thought I would be spared from the cultural practices forced on widows. But because I resisted, my husband’s family sought to shame me further. The younger brother destroyed most of our property. His mother took control of other properties we had owned. I was kept isolated at home because of the Luo belief that my husband’s spirit would kill any young men I would meet. By the grace of God, my faith prevailed.
After my husband’s burial, I felt lonely and isolated. But God provided two elderly women from my local church who supported me. These lay readers, Alberta Wasonga and Jane Mumbo, were also members of East African Revival fellowship. They showed me love and compassion. They brought food for my family and they stayed overnight to protect us from any attack. They encouraged me with God’s Word and we prayed together. They said life was not going to be easy but I was to trust God for a brighter future.
My life was so filled with suffering and loneliness that I contemplated lighting my house on fire, burning up me and my children within it. But the night I was to execute the plan, what I believe to be the angel of God appeared to me in a dream saying, “Do not do what you are planning, I have good plan for you.” The angel handed the Bible to me and told me to read. It was Jeremiah 29:11, “‘For surely I know the plans I have for you,’ says the Lord, ‘plans for your welfare and not to harm you, to give you a future with hope.’” This was the turning point for me. This dream saved my life and the lives of my children.
More suffering lay ahead; in the next three years I would lose my mother and two younger children. Over and over again, I was crushed in spirit, but the strength of Christ carried me in my weakness. The grace of God has been sufficient.
My experiences informed my discernment to ministry. Subsequently, I became the first widow in my diocese to attend seminary and be ordained as a priest. I devoted myself to advocate for justice for widows and orphans in my community. My advocacy led to launching the Daughters of Zion, which aims to empower widows through training them in basic business, agricultural, and microfinance skills. Our contextual Bible-study programs help the widows grow deeper in their faith as they learn from each other and relate the Bible to their context.
I have been refined and become stronger because of my faith in God and his son, Jesus Christ. There are good elements of Luo cultural practices that, if practiced with the love of Christ, can restore the ethos of our society. But most of the Luo’s cultural practices, particularly those that undermine the dignity of women, should be abolished. I call on the church of Christ to be a beacon of hope to the hopeless and speak for the voiceless in our communities.
The Rev. Carolyne Adhola is rector of St. Mary Magdalene Church in Silver Spring, Maryland.
