Br. David

I met Br. David way back in 2005. Looking at my receding hair now, I kind of imagine how this friar was 25 years ago. But at the same time I am so much aware of the Swahili saying that states akili ni nywele kila mtu ana zake! (a literal understanding of this is that the hair is the visible part of the head that represents the essential, invisible part of the head), and so I think akili ni nywele ukiona haipo kichwani kwa nje, ipo kwa ndani. Br. David’s hair is honestly not coming out and I somehow think it is very much concentrated inside the head. 

He has been my professor for a couple of years and I can attest to it that his hair is doing him justice not to come out because his knowledge of his area of specialisation is way above my comprehension and always supplemented by his never ending jokes. When I for the first time met him, he was very comical as usual. He kept swirling his index finger around the buttons on his well build stomach. Apparently I was coming from a generation addicted to six-pack tummies and here I was standing before a man with a one gigantic pack, yet unnerved by it. He introduced himself, “naitwa ndugu David Kamau, OFM cap.” This was the first time I was hearing about “OFM” and so he went on to explain, “OFM means – Order of Fat Men – like me!” I laughed because although I knew very little about OFM, I knew that that was not the actual meaning of the initials. Indeed he was still watering my naïve vocation and as he says “… the effectiveness of vocation promotion is based not on what a vocation promoter does but on what he/she is” (How to Become a Capuchin, 4).