I wish I could bring you all with me when I go to the mountains, so you could see what I see and hear what I hear. But this time someone joined our group with a photographer’s eye and a camera to channel it. I’ll throw in some of his pictures below, but I wanted to give you some “mental snapshots” to go with them—thoughts and moments I’d always want to remember if I never saw this place or these people again.
Another day of teaching through until dusk blurs the words in our Bibles. I walk slowly back to the room I share with my teammate and pause at the foot of my bed, my mind too numbed from the long day to make a decision quickly. I glance toward the concrete room with the drain where we take our evening bucket baths, and I’m too tired to begin that process at the moment. Instead I just pull off my headscarf since I’ve finished teaching for the day. I walk back outside intending to find a chair to drop into. I hope to enjoy a still and quiet moment, with the rising evening wind cooling my (finally) bare head and neck while I think through the day we’ve almost finished.
I scan the clean-swept yard for a chair near enough a group that no one will assume I’m alone and need company, but at enough distance I can absent myself from the conversation I have no energy for. My eyes land on a perfect spot and I make a bee-line for it, but before I reach my destination one of our friends and workshop participants crosses my path. A smile springs to my face automatically, followed by the traditional greeting and hand-grasp. This friend speaks no English, and I often have a harder time understanding him through his quiet tone and slightly different accent. My selfish desires still have my eyes cutting toward that chair and its promised moment of tranquility as we continue through the socially required greeting process. But then I take a moment to actually look at his face in the gathering dusk. He never smiles, but there it is, unmistakable on his face. And he’s often quiet in groups, yet he chose to initiate this conversation with me.
Something feels different about this interaction, and about him, so I shake myself mentally, check my selfishness, and redirect my mind and heart to genuinely engage with him. He is a respected and capable farmer and herdsman, so I ask about his home and land. As he continues through the small talk that smile lingers, and he seems almost… joyful. For a man usually grim-faced and close-mouthed he is unusually lively. I have never gotten much response from him before when I ask about the Bible stories that make up our days’ work, but his mood is different than I’ve ever seen it before, so maybe it’s worth trying again.
I ask one of my favorite questions: “What is your favorite story we’ve learned?” The answer speaks so much about personality or spiritual state or personal connections to God and his word. But my friend’s answer halts me mid-conversation. “The story of John’s Vision,” he says, referring to a story we’ve worked on from Revelation. Nearly twice the length of most other Bible stories, this one notoriously gives rise to fatigue and complaints from our groups as they struggle to remember all the details correctly. Just two days ago for our morning devotion we heard the story told and then acted it out together to help our bodies and emotions remember the story as well as our brains. As much as amateur drama usually elicits self-conscious or amused giggles, when we do this story the atmosphere is unusually heavy. With Muslims and Christians in the group, reenacting moments like when those who followed Jesus in life are judged differently from those who didn’t, or when Satan and those who didn’t follow God through Jesus are thrown in the lake of fire remind us of eternal stakes.
Shocked that my usually gloomy Muslim friend would tell me with a broad smile that this is his favorite story, I ask him again, wondering if I misunderstood. “You mean the story about the End, with Satan and the lake of fire?” “Yes,” he reassures me. Still confused, I ask him why that’s his favorite, or what he likes about it so much. “Because everyone who follows Jesus will be with God,” he answers smiling, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. And God himself will wipe away our last tears.
Our conversation was interrupted when someone called him away. But I stood there frozen a few moments longer, my solitary chair forgotten as my own smile grew and I began to consider what his answer might mean about his own thoughts about Jesus. A few days later I learned that new liveliness I saw in him was abundant life, springing up in his soul and overflowing because he’d decided to follow Jesus.
On our last day, we leave before the sun is up. Before we all pile in the same truck that has ferried us back and forth for all our local travel, a crowd gathers in a semicircle. The bags are loaded in the bed and we stand in an awkward silence, loath to say goodbyes. A prayer is said for travel, and then we give the deeper greeting since we won’t see each other again for a while. Extend your right arm and place your palm over the friend’s heart opposite you while they do the same to you. Then drop your arm to grasp their right hand in a goodbye, or wrap that right arm around them first to pull them into a hug depending on your relationship. We look into each others’ sleep-swollen eyes in the gloom as we greet each in turn, and I try not to wonder when I’ll see them next or how long it will be or what hard times they might face in the meantime.
I scrunch up over the gearbox again, angling my hips and legs to give the driver as much room to maneuver the gear shift as possible. It’s still warm from its long trip the night before, taking the first load of everyone home. For the first two hours the talk in the cab is quiet and sporadic. We watch the sun rise over these beautiful mountains and I am careful to take in the images—the ground terraced for farming, the ‘desert baobabs’ that burst with brilliant pink flowers, familiar spots where recognizable trees grow or where we’ve made pit stops before on the road.
After we stop two hours in at a town the sun is fully up, and I decide to move to the truck bed. I’m given the spot over the wheel well, and someone insists on giving me the folded up blanket as a cushion for all the bouncing, even after I insist I have more built-in cushion than all of them put together. It would be a cultural sin not to offer (and receive) hospitality in this way. As we start moving, the three young men in the back with me at first seem nervous I won’t have the balance or strength to manage as we drive over the roads that are sometimes just scraggly rocky mountain faces. But I drape my forward arm along the rim of the truck bed and can maintain a light grip as we bounce along for the next hour. The curve of my back fits snugly around the lip of the rim, further helping to hold me in place, and I ride comfortably and enjoy the cool morning air and chance to stretch out my legs.
We drive so slowly over these roads that we have no problem conversing over the road noise. We talk in spurts, shifting between English and Arabic, but I mostly enjoy taking in all the morning sights and sounds as we drive through villages waking up and beginning work. The children always do a double-take when they see the rare white woman in the back of the truck. Some run behind us, nearly all wave. My teammates and I jokingly call me a princess because of all the attention I get, like that folded up blanket currently saving my tailbone from bruising. But right now I feel like a princess in a parade waving back at all the children every few minutes, watching their faces break into massive smiles.
The kids’ excitement at my obvious other-ness would seem to make me feel I don’t belong. The waving little knots of children overflow with an enthusiastic sing-song repetition of the word for foreigner or white person—kawaja—yelled out to announce to others to come and look. Some days being known known and called by this word instead of my own name grates on my patience and feels like a stiff arm keeping me outside the circle of the community. But today in the light of the golden-pink sunrise I feel a contented sense of belonging as we drive through roads and villages that have become curiously familiar through our repeated trips. As the conversation moves in and out of Arabic, for the most part I am able to follow its thread. I’m even able to interject with some of the history of the place, like a local telling newcomers the gossip about what happened at that bend of the road a year ago, because I drove past and saw it firsthand myself.
The contentment grows as the conversation continues in Arabic, and no one pays me special attention or translates for me. I’ll always be in a middle-place in this community—on the fringe, but welcomed in as a familiar friend. Allowed to ride in the bed of the truck, but given the only blanket to help account for my difference. So the next time the children start a chorus of “ka-WAAA-JA!” I smile and raise my eyebrows at the group. “Do you hear them singing my song?”
— By Miss Cellanea 