Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Thanksgiving

The pilgrims arriving in America would be like if the Kardashians were dropped off in Africa, they didn’t know what the heck they were doing--- this was Tim F, and this was the start to his Thanksgiving story. The day before the Alexandra Thanksgiving story ended up being a bit of a disaster, somehow resulting in some confusion about whether it should be a British or American holiday, so Tim told his story to clarify the misunderstanding. He continued (though my summary doesn’t really do it justice): Squanto wanted to usurp power over his tribe and was hoping to use the pilgrims for his grand plan….Squanto may have been the only Indian present during the so called Thanksgiving dinner…. and there probably hadn’t been any turkey but just some salted dried fish and corn porridge (what we call here in Mozambique: xima; Malawi: nsima; South Africa: pap; and Italy: polenta…well polenta without milk, cream, cheese, and salt and made with feedcorn not sweet corn). I couldn’t help but try to imagine the picture book that would go alongside the Tim F Thanksgiving Story, it would have a small insert at the end of the book explaining what happened the years following the infamous meal with a watercolor picture of cholera infections, displacement, and starvation. Once during a lecture at UCM a student asked me what our dialects were like in America and I told her that we don’t really have dialects like Moz because the colonists managed to decimate most of the natives so few people were left to speak dialect…. She was horrified.

Regardless of these uncomfortable renditions of the American story, Thanksgiving is one of my top favorite holidays, and I have so many things to be grateful for this year. We showed up to Gorangosa with apple pies, unfortunately arriving after the aptly named turkey had been unsuccessfully intoxicated and then slaughtered. I have to give Jordan and her parents props and then some for putting on a fantastic meal…. All cooked on charcoal because the electricity was out all day long. Truly unbelievable and all their hard work paid off: pies, stuffing, fruit salad, garlic mashed potatoes, gravy, etc. etc. 5 star!!!!

This year I am so thankful for getting to live in Africa and Mozambique, for meeting all the wonderful people I have met, for having such an empowering support base back home, and for being from a culture that values expressions of gratitude and love, even if the national history doesn’t always reflect it.

He is My Hero

He was half a man. I don’t mean this as a philosophical judgment, just pure physical observation. His torso seem shrunken in at the middle, his limbs half formed and twisted, his legs small and eternally folded, his arms pulled and buckled at the elbows and wrists. When I caught a brief look of him around the corner, pulling himself up the stairs with his elbows and dragging his leg stubs, I immediately assumed an awkward situation was soon to follow. He would probably want money, or would get stuck upstairs in the university hall and someone would have to carry him out, or he would cause a scene… this has happened before with other people wandering in: street boys coming into my lecture pedir-ing for candies and monies, a crazy drunk man who claimed to be some father figure of mine, school kids shrieking and running down the hall…oh the thrill of stealing erasers from the university classrooms (!), other school kids sneaking up to sometimes use the bathrooms or more frequently to play and pee on things that are not the urinals (two bathrooms for 1 primary school, 1 secondary school, 1 industrial school, 1 teacher training school, and 1 university… except the bathroom is on university part of the facilities), full grown men asking for any odd jobs…. It really isn’t unusual to see interesting characters, though less so now that we have a guard.

The lady walking up the stairs with me maybe was thinking the same thing, as we passed him, when she asked him nicely, politely: “What are you doing up here?”
“I’m here to matriculate.”
“… At UCM….?”
“Yes, I am here to matriculate at UCM.”
He was articulate, un-offended, professional, and as we came up on him I could see he was holding a document pouch, he was ready, prepared, and just like any other student. It was just a bit harder for him to get upstairs to the offices.

It made me think of an interaction I had a couple weeks ago. An American entrepreneur generously showed me his community health project that he has been developing, it was really interesting to see … I wouldn’t even know where to start if I wanted to start something like that and they have accomplished an incredible amount of work in a short amount of time. When I was there, I went with them to deliver clothes to a man with paralyzed legs living in the bairro. This man lives alone, in a mud hut off the main road. His yard was neatly swept but the inside of his house was humbling.

As we were leaving, I asked something along the lines of does he get out often, or what does he do. My question was answered with surprise/shock: He’s paralyzed, he can’t go anywhere. I felt a bit bad. Oh yeah, of course, how could I ask such an insensitive and thoughtless question.

. .. but wait … maybe my question wasn’t so thoughtless but in more of a subconscious way. I absolutely say this not to demean the challenges facing people in any way (this is an uncomfortable topic but I’m not that insensitive), but every day when I go to work I see people around town, mobile despite predisposition for immobility: scooting on cardboard, or being carried to the spot where they shine and repair shoes, or making a daily journey from downtown to outside Shoprite and back again by crawling, or that man literally pulling himself up a flight of stairs to register for classes at the university.

Certain norms that I might have unconsciously had about capability and resiliency have shifted: a lesson for me in being supportive and sensitive of challenges but not being too presumptuous about limitations.