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            EA  CHAPTER SEVEN How Mapping Can Build Christian-Muslim Relationships The Story of Susan Olulo and Kaltuma Mohammed Willem Jansen During several intensive days in Eastleigh, Susan and Kaltuma form a casual pair, but may end up becoming lifetime friends. They have met for a “mapping” project organized by the Centre for Christian-Muslim Relations in Eastleigh (CCMRE). The “mapping team” of Susan and Kaltuma, which started by finding out each other’s origin and religion, gradually develops into a cautious friendship. Susan Olulu is a theology student at St. Paul’s University in Limuru, Kenya. In her hometown of Kisumu in West-Kenya, she is an active member of God’s Last Appeal Church, an independent African church. Kaltuma Mohammed is a student of Nutrition Sciences at a Technical College in Nairobi. In Moyale, her hometown on the border of Kenya and Ethiopia, Kaltuma often used to go to the mosque. Now that she lives in Eastleigh, she attends prayers less frequently. She belongs to the Borana tribe, one of the 41 tribes of Kenya. Both Kaltuma and Susan live about 700 kilometres away from their homes and they now meet in this intriguing place of Eastleigh. [Photo Left: Newfound Friends: Kaltuma (in Black) and Susan (in White Headscarf). Photo Right: “A Friend in Mapping is a Friend Indeed”: Susan and Kaltuma Join in Constructing a Map of Their Street]81  G@ All photo credits in this chapter and the ‘mapping pictorial’ belong to Willem Jansen.             EB  ‘Little Mogadishu’ Eastleigh is a place bustling with people like Susan and Kaltuma. No one knows the exact number of people that live there: estimates range from 70,000 up to 300,000. Many inhabitants, especially Somalis, look upon Eastleigh as a kind of transit to more prosperous destinations. This is the district where the well-known Somali-Dutch politician, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, together with her family settled down in Eastleigh, before she left for The Hague (from where she re-emigrated to the US). Just like Ali, many others are hoping for a better future somewhere else in the world. Presently, the destination for many Somali immigrants might be Mogadishu once again, since after more than 20 years of civil war, Somalia has begun to regain at least some semblance of peace and order. Eastleigh is known as “Little Mogadishu”, because of its large numbers of Somali traders and travellers. Dotted by its shopping malls, Eastleigh today constitutes one of the largest business hubs of East Africa. Due to its activities and continuous (international and urban) migration, no other district of Nairobi is quite as multicultural as Eastleigh. Here you will come across people from almost all parts of Africa and Asia. Many Kenyans and nonKenyans alike, however, tend to avoid Eastleigh as a no-go area. To many people the district is known as an area where pirate booty is laundered and illegally traded, a place where Somalis buy the scarcely-available goods from the Kenyans and where great danger looms from the al-Qaida-linked, terrorist group al-Shabaab. ‘The tail of this group is in Somalia’, as a Kenyan politician put it recently, ‘but its head is in Eastleigh’. Now that al-Shabaab may have lost the war in Somalia, this terrorist group appears to threaten Eastleigh more frequently. Eastleigh on the Map On Eighth Street, Eastleigh, the Centre of Christian-Muslim Relations was established in 2010 under the umbrella of St. Paul’s University. This is the place where Susan and Kaltuma meet for the first time in November 2012 for the mapping project, in which over 30 Muslim and Christian students and staff are participating. For three continuous days, they work two by two, as religiously mixed pairs, to map the streets of Eastleigh. Eastleigh is a religious town. Every street houses an abundance of religious buildings, as Kaltuma and Susan find out during the mapping project. Susan and Kaltuma are to be concerned with Eighth Street. The remaining eleven streets are to be dealt with by the other ‘mixed pairs’. The workshop leader, Peter, asks students to pay careful attention to everything to be mapped by them: What is striking about Eighth Street? According to Susan and Kaltuma it is the Obama-Shop, which is named after the most wellknown person of Luo-Kenyan descent in the world. There will also be questions like How about safety? And what do you learn about Muslim-Christian relationships in this street? [3.22.249.158] Project MUSE...

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