Women and the church - an interview with Nambura Njoroge

You can read an interview with the brilliant and irrepressible Nyambura Njoroge
Here's an extract:
As the Project Coordinator for Ecumenical HIV and Aids Initiative in Africa
of the Geneva-based World Council of Churches, Nyambura offers "life-affirming words, words that speak healing and wholeness to all who are afflicted and condemned to death."
Gradually, the church is realising that HIV is more than a medical issue that cannot be ignored and that it is wrong to stigmatise those it afflicts.
Nyambura says theological reflection helps in Biblical care and counselling of those infected and affected.
"It helps us take action in a different way and be more creative. My journey of theological reflection has shaped me and helped me grow in life. It is now helping me deal with Aids positively and with hope," she says.
First woman ordained
It is a journey that began in earnest on September 5, 1982, when she became the first woman to be ordained by the Presbyterian Church of East Africa (PCEA). As a pioneer, she had to work hard to discover the many dedicated, but un-ordained women to mentor and also to be mentored by. She also quickly learnt that when you are a pioneer, others look out for mistakes. She recalls the sneers she received in Harare,
Zimbabwe, at the 1992 All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC) Assembly, when
she used the case of Pia Njoki, the woman blinded by her husband in a fit of rage so she wouldn’t see other men. She was accused of washing dirty linen in public.
"We had all cried for Pia. When I wrote my doctoral dissertation, the
issue of domestic violence had come up. So what was the dirty linen that I was washing at the Assembly?" she asks.