Mr. Iditarod

“So, you’re going to Africa. What are you going to do?”
The question seemed simple enough. “Education - I’m going to teach,” I replied. “What are you going to do?” the older man sitting across the table from me questioned again. “I’m going to teach kids in villages,” I responded, hoping this time my explanation would make sense. No such luck. He threw the question at me once more, this time with greater force. “No, what are you going to do?” By this point I was starting to get a little frustrated, as were some of the other residents sitting around the dinner table at Crossroads House. I had joined my friends from the Intervarsity Graduate Group at UNH to serve a meal at Crossroads, a transitional homeless shelter in Portsmouth, NH. As I sat down and chatted with the residents over dinner, Mr. Iditarod (I call him that b/c he was wearing a teal blue Alaska Iditarod t-shirt and he never offered his name) seemed to enjoy questioning and challenging me.

I responded to his question a third time, offering more details, hoping this seemingly educated man would be satisfied with my response: “Education – I’m going to teach in outskirts villages in Tanzania with an organization called Village Schools International.” One of the residents sitting next to him piped in “She’s going to do general education,” trying to help me out by offering Mr. Iditarod her own explanation of my response.

“No. You’re not going to teach,” he asserted with an air of authority, “You’re going to learn.” This brisk, 65 year old, salt and pepper bearded, dogmatic man continued, “Too many people go over to Africa to teach – thinking they know it all...they don’t know anything. You’re going to learn.” I wasn’t sure how to respond. I expressed some words of agreement that didn’t appease his need to expound. Mr. Iditarod proceeded to tell me – and everyone else at the dinner table who cared to listen – that I was young and naive, and an idealist. And he’s right. He’s right about a lot of things.

If 25 is young, Mr. Iditarod is right.
If being a naive idealist means, as my friend Ken says, “believing/doing the impossible in spite of ourselves,” Mr. Iditarod is right.
If teaching in Africa is more about learning (and I would argue that it is), Mr. Iditarod is right.

"If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time,

but if you come because your liberation is bound up with mine,

then let us work together."
- Lilla Watson, Aboriginal Educator and Activist, Brisbane

Jesus Experiments

I'm really enjoying the opportunity to connect with a small group of friends from Common Table in a gathering we have titled "64". This group, loosely based on the Beatle's song, "When I'm 64", is focused on examining our lives through the lens of these questions: "What will my life look like when I'm 64? What will I be known for? In what (or whom) will I have invested my time and resources?"

We kicked things off last month by reading through a gospel of our choosing as we walked through a cemetary. There's something about noting the brevity of human life while reading the words of Jesus... Then we got together to discuss our first experiment.

Mike wrote an excellent summary of our time together:
We had a nice time cooking together and catching up on life, and talking about our impressions from the graveyard walking and gospel-reading we've been doing. As we did so, a theme seemed to emerge: we've all been struck by just how engaged Jesus was with so many people. Sometimes superficially, and sometimes substantially, but seemingly quite intentionally at every turn. Too, we noted that though he certainly spent most of his time with the powerless and the poor, he also hung with some rich and powerful folks, and we spent some time pondering his enigmatic parable of the Shrewd Manager, and trying to see how we fit into this alternately wealthy and poor culture in Northern Virginia.
As we continued to talk, we noted how we tend to notice roles, rather than people. To not know our neighbors, or our co-workers, or the people with whom we interact and live among every day. We talked about our tendency to objectify the people whose job it is to serve us, and to objectify those who we are tasked to serve. To gloss over people, rather than to really connect with them. So our experiment is this: once a day, to pause to see a person, and then to find a way to show them mercy. We plan to write down at least three of these encounters over the next two weeks, so that we can share them when we get together.

I wasn't as regular with my experiments as I should have been, but I found myself surprised by the way some people responded to my humble attempts at "showing mercy". Here's one thing I'm realizing: most people in service-related fields don't expect you to notice them and they rarely expect empathy and mercy. In our consumer oriented culture, many people seem to expect to be treated as a commodity.

For me, much of this first experiment can be summed up in the African concept of ubuntu (a word that has it's origins in the Bantu languages of Southern Africa.) South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu describes the concept of Ubuntu in this way:
"Ubuntu is the essence of being human. And in our language a person is ubuntu and unbuntu is a noun to speak about what it means to be human. In essence, it is something that you find especially in the Old Testament... We say a person is a person through other persons. You can't be human in isolation. You are human only in relationships..." (Vanity Fair, 2007)

Security is Mostly a Superstition

My friend, Steph, has this great quote on her facebook site that I've decided I really like:

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. -- Helen Keller

The other night I opened my door, sat in the entry way and watched a magnificent thunder and lightening storm. Thunder and lighting storms evoke a sense of awe in me; they make me feel pretty small, powerless and somewhat insignificant in the grand scheme of things; they shatter my illusions of control. I think I need this every once in a while.