“The millions you want to buy the vehicle with cannot match the value the church attaches to that car. Such a vehicle cannot be sold according to me.”

 These were the words of retired (Emeritus) Nyahururu Catholic Bishop, Luigi Paiarro, when I joked that I wanted to buy a vintage car parked in the Diocesan Cathedral compound in Nyahururu town.

 The orange colour of the 27-year-old vehicle contrasts conspicuously with the green colour of the well kept lawn.

 Emeritus Luigi, who is fluent in the local Kikuyu dialect after being around since 1960s when he arrived in Kenya from Italy, explains that the car is in very good condition and has been parked there since Sister Tiziana Ferraresso who used to drive it passed away in Italy in 2009.

  So why is the vehicle, a Volkswagen Beatle, so much valued and preserved by the church, that it cannot be sold?

 The vehicle is among two that were the first to be owned by the Nyahururu Parish, which was part of the larger Nyeri Catholic Diocese.

Later the Parish became part of Nyahururu Diocese that was carved off from the Nyeri Diocese in 2003 and Luigi became first Bishop until 2011 when he retired.

 The other vehicle was a Land Rover short chase, which has since been disposed off.

Preserved Volkswagen 

Being among the first vehicles of the Parish is not the reason the Volkswagen car is preserved.

 “That vehicle carried a saint and if we sell it we don’t know how it will be used.

“I can’t imagine the vehicle that carried a saint being used for other purposes. To me it should not be sold.

It should remain in honour of the Saint and Sister Tiziana,” the Emeritus said.

 The saint the Bishop was referring to is Mother Teresa who used the vehicle to travel to Maralal in the then Samburu District, now Samburu County, to visit charity run by her foundation.

 Mother Teresa who was declared a Saint in 2016 also used the vehicle to travel all the way back to Nairobi to fly out of the country, the Bishop said as we walked to where the vehicle is parked, about 200 metres from his house.

 On our way to see the vehicle, we passed a kitchen garden with paddocks of various vegetables being watered with a sprinkler water system.

 Many people who lived in Nyahururu town in the early 1990s were familiar with the Volkswagen since it was among the very few vehicles in the town. Luigi puts the number in the whole of the town then at about five vehicles.

 Emeritus Luigi sourced the vehicle from a showroom in Nakuru in 1994 because he needed a car to be able to move with ease when carrying out his priestly work in the Parish.

 He however did not reveal how much the vehicle cost at that time

 “At that time the Volkswagen was the most utility and most efficient vehicle we had in the region.

It is a good vehicle and I used it to travel to Mombasa on several occasions,” the retired Bishop said.

 The vehicle’s exterior is in very good condition and one cannot tell that it is a 1980s model. It is the dashboard that betrays the good hard body outside looks.

 Its steering wheel is hard unlike that of modern vehicles where the grip area of the steering wheel is soft.

Mother Teresa visit

 Luigi said Mother Teresa passed by the Nyahururu Cathedral where she had tea and signed visitors’ book before being driven to Nairobi to take a flight.

 Efforts to get the visitors’ book that the Saint signed to establish the exact date she used the car proved a daunting task that ended without success, because the Church is yet to have an organised archive.

 When the church built a multi-million shilling secretariat along the Nyahururu-Nakuru highway, all documents were removed from the Cathedral and dumped in one room at the single storey building.

A Nun said it would require hiring a labour team to go through the heaps of documents and books to find the visitors’ book.