Nairobi, 10 October, 2019 / 1:15 am (ACI Africa).
In a gesture aimed at demonstrating different life situations that characterize the world’s newest nation, South Sudanese Catholic women residing in Kenya last Sunday offered a variety of gifts to the Nairobi-based Holy Father’s representative to their country and explained to him the cultural symbolism of each of the presents.
“Each gift has a meaning,” the leader of the South Sudanese women living in Kenya, Lucy Juwa said as she invited the Apostolic Nuncio in Kenya and South Sudan, Archbishop Bert van Megen to receive the six items her compatriots had settled on.
The Catholic women from South Sudan decided to offer the Nuncio a hat, sandals, a t-shirt, a belt, groundnuts, and groundnut paste, their representative explaining the meaning and value of each of these gifts.
“This hat is going to give you a shade because South Sudan is very hot and that sometimes you don’t have (a) vehicle,” Mrs. Juwa explained referring to the hot weather that characterizes the landlocked East African nation.
“Since our visitor is going to work in South Sudan,” Mrs. Juwa said, addressing the hundreds of South Sudanese who had gathered for Sunday worship at the Jesuits’ Hekima College Chapel and amid ululations from her fellow women turned to the Nuncio and spoke about the sandals saying, “You need to put something that is (open) but if you put closed shoes, it might be hot, South Sudan is usually very hot.”
