Recognition

Saturday I went to a fundraiser with Suzi, my Kenyan-raised, South Sudanese-born friend. The event, run by my friend Dale, helps provide washable pads for girls in Kenya who miss days of school each month because they have to. This is a GREAT project. I will tell you more about it later. Meanwhile, I was sitting with Suzi, and her goodwill and gorgeous accent just cheered me. I don’t really know Suzi very well, yet. But somehow I feel connected--she’s had her own tornadoes. And there is something else.

A few years ago I was riding a bus along the southern coast of Mexico, and a woman got on. Though I didn’t know her, I recognized her, the way she shifted her weight, her hand gestures, the way she glanced at the Hispanic driver. I knew instantly she was Garifuna, one of this group that lives on the Guerrero coast in Mexico. The Garifunas are a mix of African slave and American Carib Indian, mixed when slave owners dumped rebel slaves on the coast of Belize. I knew about Garifunas because I had lived with them before, in Honduras, for one whole summer, probably the best summer of my whole life

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Some thirty years ago, when I was working in refugee camps in Honduras, a friend lent me a book, a great big fat book called, rather intimidatingly, Perspectives on the World Christian Movement.  There weren’t many libraries in our makeshift refugee camps, and I devoured whatever I could find. This book said there are many cultures around the world not yet aware of God’s love. “Unreached,” the book called them. I did not know this. Apparently in the 80’s no one did. I did my homework and found that Honduras had precisely one unreached culture: the Garifuna. So I went. As a teacher in a bilingual school, I had my summer free, so I packed a backpack and took a bus to San Antonio, a day’s travel up the coast. I got off the bus and headed to the part of town where the Garifunas lived. I walked around. I told the first women I saw (the Garifuna were bilingual) that I was looking for a place to stay. She pointed to the bright blue adobe home behind her and said, “Try here.”

The home belonged to an elderly man, a Catholic catechist, who I’m sure wondered what in the world this 25 year old white girl was doing wandering around a black Carib neighborhood, asking for lodging. But he let me stay, and his teenage granddaughter took me home to her mother in a village farther up the coast that weekend, where I spent my summer. Today I would not do this. But then I was filled with idealistic naiveté. Looking back, I realize they put up with me because I was a stupid Gringa and harmless. But there I was. And this culture turned me inside out. I wanted to live there, marry there, paint my skin black, and stay there for the rest of my life. I wanted to be Garifuna. I mean, just watch them dance. When you ask a woman, how are you? she snugs that white apron just a big tighter around that wide waist and starts to rotate, slow and rhythmic, just to answer your question: “See, I am well. I can dance.” In the mornings, as the women filed out to their fields to plant yucca tubers in the ground, they would call right through the walls, “Anuuu,” (my name called out in Garifuna) and I answered invisibly, right through the walls, “Idajaña, Numada,” and dressed quickly to join them. I mean, who talks right through walls as if they aren’t there?

And every morning I learned three new sentences and practiced them besides the waves of the Caribbean, which applauded my efforts, and every afternoon I trekked from one side of the long, narrow village to the other, entering every home, greeting every woman. Ana was known everywhere in the region, and the children loved me. My hostess Tia Tella was gentle. She sang songs in the afternoons and took out plates of food to the mentally handicapped, speechless man who roved the village, hunting and gathering. When my language lessons progressed enough to talk about Jesus, how he came back from the dead in flesh and blood, she was one of the very few not to laugh out loud, “You believe this? Don’t you see it was a ghost?” (Because, boy do they believe in ghosts). They told me exactly what they thought, straight up, like it or not, my Garifuna friends. I was drunk on their transparency. And as I went on to live in other cultures, I never found one that stole my heart like they did. So when I talk to Suzy now, she does not know it, but there is this leap of impossible recognition. Like Elizabeth’s baby recognizing a voice he’d never heard.

At the women’s retreat two weeks ago, a woman came up to me. When she saw me, her eyes brightened, and she hugged me. For a few seconds, I was startled. I hardly knew this woman. But I had seen the leap of recognition in her eyes, and I welcomed her. She had gone through this thing I face now. She knew. And I got this letter, too: “you don’t know me…don’t feel like you have to respond…” (Are you kidding? Not respond? I live in Oz where we always respond.)

Recognition. Oz moments. We are far, far more connected than we think.