Joel Seymour: Listening to the Prayer of a Kenyan Freedom Fighter I Never Met

“My father died when I was four years old.”

The room felt so silent after she said those words. At this point, we were well over 40 minutes into the interview. I had kept her busy with questions, but as she began this story, I didn’t dare make a sound.

Up until that moment, the only thing on my mind was my documentary. I had found out about a small non-profit in North Carolina called “Sister2Sister International”, a ministry bringing healing to women and children in Ngong, Kenya. Growing up there, Ms. Purity Ruchugo knows the pains that that community suffer daily: how women are mistreated and unsupported, how children are abandoned and malnourished, how desperately people need salvation. So, she had started this organization in order to give hope back to her home.

With preliminary research on her story and the impact the organization had had, I knew it would be a story worth telling. It was a story of good people doing good things; it was the kind of story I want to tell. With so much content flooding our senses, we need to actually see the people that are loving as people should. And as a content creator, I should take some responsibility to highlight those people as much and as best as possible. I had been up there to film a fundraising event in the Fall, capturing a glimpse of the goodwill they were creating. All I needed was the pathos, the human interest behind it all.

After some warm greetings and some b-roll, I started filming and let her talk. She told me about how Sister2Sister works with local Kenyan women, helping them find ways to become financially self-sufficient. They provide machinery and supplies to help them begin their business, and often buys crafts to sell at a storefront in Winston-Salem. I had plenty of b-roll for that, we were covered. She talked about how the ministry gets to feed 150 children every day, children who would go hungry without their service. She talked about a children’s home they had been building for years that was just completed, a home that would be able to house and care for children in need of safety. I didn’t have enough pictures of the building, so I would need to remember to ask her for more later. The interview was going great.

I looked back up to her as she finished sharing her heart while I finished jotting my notes. We had talked a good bit about what the organization was doing and how they were making an impact. But what had driven Ms. Purity to start this non-profit? To spearhead all this good? To live so passionately and faithfully for others? I knew this was the human-interest moment I had been looking for. I asked her, expecting she would jump straight into her experience growing up or her journey to America.

Instead, that’s when she told me about her father.

Her father had been a freedom fighter. He and his men protested the British colonization of Kenya, seeking to reclaim independence for their country. Unfortunately, the British asserted their dominance, and captured his cohort. Over the next several years, his comrades were only taken out of their imprisonment to be executed. They never knew which moments would be their last; they only knew that when they were called for, it meant the end.

Year seven, it was finally his turn.

The British commander put a sack over his head and escorted him out to the firing range. Mr. Ruchugo didn’t need to see to know that a multitude of gun barrels stared directly at him. The commander buckled Ruchugo’s knees, forcing him onto the ground. This was it. Goodbye.

“Before we execute you,” the commander recited. “We give you the right to your final words. Is there anything you would like to say?”

Mr. Ruchugo nodded. He knew his final words very well.

“I would like to pray.” He bowed his head low. The British had been trying to instill in him a sense of submission for years, but in that moment he knelt to God alone.

There, in front of his executors, he prayed for life. Not that his would be spared, but that his family, his nation, would be able to live in freedom, untethered to the rule of the British. He prayed that God would be glorified by the land of Kenya and the people in it.

Then, he waited.

He braced himself as he listened for the word “fire”, the last word he would ever hear.

He never did.

Instead, The commander, who was supposed to give the order, walked up to Mr. Ruchugo, stood him up, took off the sack over his head, and looked him in the eye.

“You will not be dying today.”

A year later, he was released from imprisonment to return to his wife and children. Three more years later, Ms. Purity was born.

“I was born from the miracle of prayer” Ms. Purity said to me. “God made me with a clear purpose. I cannot waste time. I cannot waste any time.”

She finished her story. But I simply listened.

I wasn’t concerned with making sure the recording was going, or that the audio had become staticky, or that her face was now halfway out of the camera’s view; I simply was concerned with hearing her words. Her stories. Stories like how her father had died of an illness a few years later. How her mother provided for her and her siblings single handedly. How her mother started her own business and used it to give generously to the families who worked for her. How those experiences in that far away country began to paint the portrait of the woman sitting in front of me. A woman with such an incredibly different story from my own.

In work, whether academic or professional, it is easy to lose the humanity of people. Even in productions such as these where my main goal was to highlight true genuine people, it’s easy to get caught up in the angle, the story, the drama. Pockets of heartfelt emotion are stored away as content to be used later; moments of silence between responses are filled with the question of “What should be asked next? What questions are going to get us the best interview?”. Genuine empathy is too often obscured when there is work to do. Even when that pathos is supposed to become product, even when deadlines need to be hit, even if it’s understandable, should we? Or should we look at the life of a Kenyan woman as more than just “human interest”? The pursuit of knowledge, of accomplishment, they can be excellent. But if they come at the expense of empathy–of genuine human connection–what good could a documentary really do?

In that moment, as Ms. Purity shared her life story with me, I listened. My content, my schooling, it all faded into nothing in my mind. I was no longer a documenter. I was human. So I simply listened.

* * *

Joel Seymour is a Mass Communications and Media Studies major who graduated in May of 2022. He produced multiple podcasts, documentaries, and experimental videos independently while at Lander University. Once complete, his documentary on Sister2Sister International will be available for free at joelseymour.com.