A reunion

This semester, I’ve gotten the incredible opportunity to take the African Biblical Interpretations class, where I am learning how we might read the bible in community across continents, where I am asking tough questions about the bible's connection with colonization and oppression, where I am thinking more deeply what it means to read and teach and proclaim the Christian scriptures. It is also a class that culminates in a funded trip to Uganda, where we will meet with East African church and nonprofit leaders who are working in the area of reconciliation.

This means, among other things, that there will soon be a reunion—between me and Tanzania—me and my Tanzanian friends—me and the me I was eight years ago when I lived in East Africa. I am terrifically terrified.

I loved my time in East Africa in some ways more than I’ve ever loved another time of life. In Tanzania, I fell in love with John, I fell in love with the beauty of the life I’d been given, I fell in love with a million girls singing at night, and with a family who shared with me everything.

And I loved who I became: unconcerned with achievement or measuring up, secure in being valued simply for my presence, full of laughter and music. Tanzania healed me of doubt, made me generous and spontaneous, showed me a new kind of person I could become, dwelling in possibilities.

What frightens me is that I no longer feel like that person. Over the past few years, I feel like I have become a more critical version of me, more concerned with achievement, more needful of control and planning, and laden down by the burden of owning couches and dressers and a 401K (by marriage). It seems worlds away when I was able to live out of a small duffel bag for a year, to live without electricity or internet, to hop on the minibus and crack a joke in Swahili to unsuspecting ears.

In the same time, the memory of Tanzania has become more complex for me. Intellectually, I've learned to interrogate any missionary project. Emotionally, I think as often of the annoyance I felt at cat calls and constant standing out as the utter joy and belonging I was gifted without ever deserving it. And when I talk to my host sister Esther on the phone, she complains I’ve forgotten Swahili. So I don't call much anymore, unless it's about the money she needs. She named her first daughter Katie, which somehow has the effect of making my feel guilty rather than honored, because I have not called often enough, and I have not always said yes to her pleas for help. Many days, I remember the hassle of the phone calls more than I remember the mosquito-net-covered bed we shared for months, the whispered confidences and the side-aching laughter. 

Beyond Esther and her family, I’ve lost touch with the others. I don’t remember how to weave through the complex bus system to their homes, and I’m not even sure I’m laid-back enough anymore to ride those buses. I'm considering forking out $200 for the plane from Tanzania to Uganda rather than the long-distance bus that might give me a panic attack, speeding through the night.

//

It's clear that this reunion will not be simple. But then, what reunion is? They often fail my expectations. The conversations aren’t as deep; the time is not enough; the mutual understanding has shifted or faded. I am forever learning that my rosy spectacles of nostalgia for the past will often be disappointed.

And as much as I may lament the loss of a relationship with my host family or even the loss of some piece of myself, the truth is that I don't want to be my 22-year-old self again. Sure, I was learning to be carefree and independent and full of complicated love. But there was also a lot I was unsure about, a lot I didn't know.

I didn't know, yet, that three or four years later I would begin to explore and confirm a sense of this call to seminary and ministry--a call that has been terrifying and beautiful all at the same time, because it's so real and meaningful and yet so vulnerable to being subverted. I didn't know, yet (though I certainly hoped!) that on my next trip to Africa, I'd be four years into this marriage that is no longer a wade into the stream but a full submersion into this life together, with all its ups and downs. I didn't know yet how much I still needed to be humbled, by all the injustice in the world to which I am a part; I didn't know how much I still needed to be built up, with affirming communities and spiritual practice to unravel harmful self-talk.

I see the Spirit working in who I have become, who I am still a long way from becoming. I do not want to go back, nor can we, ever.

//

Still there are questions. When our plane lands in Tanzania, will there still be deep love and gratitude in my heart when I touch that ground? Will I feel a sense of that giddy, carefree Katie, or is it even fair to wonder? Which do I fear more, that my friends will ask for money, or that they will not, and I will have nothing else to give? How will I re-learn to receive? What will I see differently this time? How can I let Tanzania speak to me not as I was but as I am?

I do not know the answers. I do not know if there are answers.

What I pray for is grace--grace for me, grace in me for others. That I may be slow to judge and quick to listen and full of compassion. And I pray also, I think, for just a glimpse of my 22-year-old self. Perhaps she has something to offer me for today.

Africa slipping away

I was twenty, swimming in questions and doubts and grieving broken friendships and a lost relationship, when I arrived in Tanzania the first time. I woke up early to climb up to the roof, to gaze at palm trees and women wearing colorful clothes and carrying bright red and yellow buckets of water on their heads, to take in this new brightness in the world and in myself. Late at night, I sat on a stool in the tiny, smoky kitchen with my friend Monika, the cook, learning Swahili and empathy through her stories of ambition and heartbreak. In between university classes I read big words in the Bible, words like “there is now no condemnation in Christ” and “there is no fear in love,” and I began to discover the openness of my heart, the vastness of God.

It was two months in before I realized I hadn’t cried in this country, which was remarkable considering that I’d cried nearly every day the year before. Here in Africa, I didn’t have to answer the questions or muddle guiltily through messy relationships or be good. I had only to see, to partake, to love.

I partook, one day, after enduring constant teasing from my friends for the fact that I’d never in my life skipped a class. We left Swahili behind, hopped on a minibus early one Thursday morning, bottled water and inaccurate map in hand, and set out to find a fishing village noted in the guidebook. Smushed into a crowded minibus, the three of us miraculously found our way and two hours later, we were walking out on a reedy beach south of the city, following a young boy to the nearest fries-and-eggs stand for the cheap, greasy local food we were craving. I stretched out my arms as wide as I could and felt the wind on my face and the last drop of tension draining from my bones and I wanted to sing for joy.

A few days before it was time to return to the US, I lay on a red couch with a lump in my throat, because in returning, I would be leaving this place of vast open spaces. I knew that in the US, I would revert back to the self that had to work and fight and say and do the right things, in order to be good enough.

I preemptively mourned the loss of this expansive self.

*

I was a little homesick my second time in Tanzania. But in the evenings, when my English students and I gathered in the cafeteria, their thirteen-year-old hearts and my twenty-two-year-old hearts melded together and we poured out our loneliness until it disappeared. They taught me their songs (“God created us skinny, God created us fat”) and I taught them mine, and we crooned together against the darkness, “We all need someone to be there and someone to be there for.”

Together we were dancing, together we were celebrating the wideness and love of God and community, together we were making it through the nights away from home. When Zawadi couldn’t get through class without crying for homesickness, I longed to make her smile. When Nambayo got healthy enough to concentrate better, I put smiley faces on her quizzes with pride. When Napoki got pregnant and had to leave, I wanted to cry. I loved those girls with as deep an affection as I have known. They were, for a while, home.

When I returned to the US this time (for good?) I wore four beaded bracelets—their gifts to me—until they fell off one by one over the next year. I grieved the loss of a love and a song across cultures, borne out of loneliness and a need to belong, bringing the kind of deep gladness that is usually a long time in coming.

*

The year I got married was 2012, the year I had promised I would go back to Tanzania to see my students graduate. The wedding conflicted. I didn’t go. I haven’t been now, for six years.

When I think of Tanzania now, I confess I don’t think of the colors or the openness of my heart or the songs. I don’t think of the plates of food I shared with friends like Communion, or of brushing my teeth under the stars, or of the gift of acceptance the people gave to me, or of the adventurous, open person I became in that place.

Instead, I think of the obligations. The need to measure up and be good enough. I think of the phone calls to friends I don’t want to make, because they will tell me my Swahili is slipping, and though it is silly banter to them, it is a reminder to me of a part of myself that is slipping. They will mean well when they ask “When are you coming back?” but I will feel guilty in my inability to answer, my shifted priorities, my complicated living out of some American (un)dream that no longer gives me the freedom to visit them.

And they won’t be objectifying or using me when they most certainly ask for money for the latest education plan for themselves and their children, because to share money means to be a part of a family; yet even though they treated me with nothing but acceptance and an open hand when I lived among them, I will feel now objectified and used for my connections and my relative wealth. My heart will sink as I realize that even were I to offend or insult them, they would stay in touch with me if only for the hope of money, and I will feel angry and resentful maybe most of all at myself for no longer loving them as people.

So I don’t call back, and the relationship rift grows, and the open-hearted Tanzanian inside me drifts further away. I grieve the loss.

Because I didn't know: a few more words on #blacklivesmatter

Hey! I've been gone awhile, sunk underneath papers and theology books and exams. I'm planning to post regularly in December and January, because for some reason writing is what I want to do with my break from school (!?). So stay tuned for awhile if I haven't tired you out yet. For today, I am diving straight in to a topic that may not be fun, but is important, and is what I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

Photo by Fibonacci Blue

I am writing today about Ferguson and Eric Garner and justice. I am writing not because I have great insight; I am writing not to start a war against police officers, most of whom are doing their jobs with great honor and often sacrifice; I am writing not to speak for black people, who I could never speak for. I am writing because to keep silent for me would be to bow out, because we have to be in this all together, because we have to stop throwing stones at each other over fences and we have to break down the fences and we can only do that if we are honest and speak what we believe is true.

Let me start with this: I've never in my life been under the illusion that there was racial equality in this country, or racial harmony.

In seventh grade, my classmates started moving away, across the county line. That was the same year we moved to a majority black middle school; that was around the same time more black people started moving into our neighborhood. By the time I was in high school, my brave father, who was editor of the local paper, decided to do a series of stories about changing demographics and race. People didn't want to talk about it, because race was a thing of the past; this wasn't white flight, it was families in search of better schools. But I could see it, the divisions and the bits of fear and the subtle, creeping lie, unintentional and toxic, that our town was not as good with more of those people.

(I was in seventh grade in 1999. I didn't know that same year, a West-African immigrant would be shot 41 times by police officers in New York, for pulling a wallet out of his pocket. All the officers would return to duty.)

I went to college halfway across the country, and I flew a lot. It was the post-9-11 world and I noticed that I never ever got chosen for a "random" search. To this day, despite having taken probably close to 100 domestic flights, despite having traveled to Israel, Tanzania, and Bangladesh, I have never once gotten stopped by TSA or customs. I look innocent.

(In 2005, the year I packed my bags for Bangladesh and slipped through customs by my innocence with an unlabeled ziploc bag of green tea leaves that could've been anything--that same year an unarmed 25-year-old black man who with his hands up, locked behind his head was shot by police in Oregon. I didn't know).

After college, I taught and coordinated a program for adults to learn to read in DC. Because 20-30% of adults in DC can't read (only slightly higher than the national figure of 14%). We taught two or three hundred students while I was there, and probably two hundred others came through for testing or orientation or workshops who never attended class. And out of all those learners that came through our doors, there was ONE who was white. Many of the students had dyslexia, or other learning disabilities, and a few gotten pregnant or gotten involved with a bad crowd and dropped out. But what about the white kids who had dyslexia or got pregnant or got involved with a bad crowd? Somehow, they still learned to read. Somehow, the system or the community or whatever you want to blame, worked differently for them.

(I didn't know that in 2010, while I was teaching adult literacy, an unarmed, autistic and learning disabled black man would be shot by two police officers in LA for looking suspicious. The officers were ruled justified in shooting him.)

So no, I never thought we lived in a post-racial society. I just didn't know it was this bad.

I didn't know what was going on all those years. I didn't know that within a six-month span in 2014, a 22-year-old man holding an air rifle in Walmart could be shot by police; I didn't know that a 12-year-old boy holding a toy gun in a park could be shot; I didn't know that a 19-year-old could be left in the street for four hours after being shot for being black and 280 pounds. I didn't know that not a single one of these people who killed these young men would be taken to trial, and that juries would say these cops were "justified in their use of force."

Reading these accounts and watching these videos makes me nauseous.

If I were black, I believe it would make me terrified, and outraged.

This was going on the whole time I was growing up, going to school, having enough resources (some passed down from the wealth of my slave-owning heritage) to go to a private college and then volunteer in Africa and in Americorps after college.

I didn't know any of this until August of this year.

And because I didn't know, even though I thought myself sensitive and worldly and well-enough-integrated into black communities to have a clue--I think it's probably time for me to listen.

It is probably not the time for me to debate the ambiguities of legal cases (hundreds of ambiguous cases stop being ambiguous and start being a pattern). It is probably not the time for me to say things about looting (because, as my professor Valerie Cooper points out, don't you see that by talking about looting and vandalism when they are talking about lost lives, it feels to so many that we are equating black lives with property again--and do we really want to go back to that?). It is probably not the time for me to get into the nuances of how difficult it is to be a police officer, and how many police officers are trying so hard (though that human side is important, and there will be a time for that, too).

It is probably time, rather, to listen, to people who know much better than me what it is like to be pulled over for no reason, what is it like to walk down a street at night and have approaching people cross the street for fear of your dark skin, what it is like to wonder if you can figure out a way to keep your black son away from all toy guns everywhere, forever, what it is like to feel so many other things I can't list here because I just don't know.

I'll recommend just a few voices to listen to--black voices, brave voices, voices that are trying to break down walls. I trust you will find them reasonable and helpful and true, if you take a moment to step into their shoes:

• Speaking Fear, Praying Shalom by Osheta Moore- a black mother's honest and thoughtful recounting of what to do when her 11-year-old son steals a pair of sunglasses
• Everything by Austin Channing- her blog is thoughtful, provocative, well-researched, and tirelessly prophetic.
• After Ferguson by Willie Jennings- he's one of our profs at Duke Divinity and I think this is a helpful piece about how the root of all of this is violence.
• The Cross and the Molotov Cocktail by Christena Cleveland- another woman whose work I'd like to be more familiar with. A helpful perspective on how to understand the rage that has led to vandalism and looting.

Well...we've got a long way to go. But listening is a start.

My sister

i.

The loneliness was beginning to press in hard. I was twenty-two; I’d been in Tanzania a few months teaching English, and local friends were hard to come by.

Esther was nineteen, and living with her brother. The second time we met, I spent the weekend at her house. We hauled well-water and cooked on charcoal and cleaned the floor and slept under the same mosquito net. On Saturday afternoon when the chores were done, she connected the cassette player to an old car battery—the only electricity in the tiny concrete house—and cranked up the volume on the Tanzanian gospel music. Neighboring children heard the call and came running onto the newly mopped floor. We shoved the chairs and table aside and turned the living room/dining room/kitchen/guest room into a dance studio. I watched her and moved my hips, my arms, my head.

In the middle of the third song, I stepped back to take a breath and wipe away the sweat. I was laughing harder than I had in months. As I sipped my water bottle and watched, what I saw was a friend; what I saw an invitation to belong.

ii.

A week later, I haltingly told her, “I need a new place to stay next month. Can I live with you?”

I was lucky for the code Tanzanian hospitality, which I think consists of one rule: never say no.

In exchange, I said I would pay for her to go back to school, which was her dream.

What was hard was that she (along with her brother, sister-in-law, sister, niece, and nephew) shared with me everything she had, and I couldn’t give back in proportion. I could buy flour at the market, bring home a treat of fruit every day, even help with school fees and business capital when it seemed appropriate. But even then I was always holding something back: something of myself and the stories that had shaped me, which she couldn’t understand, something of my resources and education and social capital, which were infinitely greater than she could imagine.

What was lovely were the trips to the market together, the pilgrimage to her village home, the way she took care of me when I got malaria, the sisterhood. We told stories by kerosene lantern at night, brushed our teeth under the stars, woke at six a.m. for the womanly duty of making the morning chai.

I lived there four months, and I loved her.

iii.

The first time I felt cheated was not her fault. In my American naiveté, I had paid the whole years’ worth tuition for Esther’s school, and we soon discovered they had no teachers, just someone who came in the morning to write some notes on the board for the students to copy. It was a money-making scheme and the headmaster refused to refund my money. “We are getting more teachers,” he assured me. Months later when the school year ended and I was gone, it turned out that since Esther had already failed the ninth-grade national exam twice, she couldn’t sit for it again.

The second time I felt cheated was near the end of my stay. I can hardly remember the details, filtered as the story was through the animated Swahili of Esther’s sister and sister-in-law, who sat me down one afternoon and told me that Esther had been two-timing all of us. In addition to her fiancé John, she was dating another man who had been giving her money and jewelry and nice things, paying for lunches I thought I had been paying for.

I confronted Esther and she assured me it was not as they said. She had an explanation for all of it, which I didn’t fully understand or believe. But she was like a sister to me. I forgave her.

iv.

The last few days, before I was to leave for America, Esther and I took nostalgic walks. We walked to the store, to the well, to the market, if only for a place to stand in the late-afternoon sun and look at each other and realize there was no way to put into words our sentiments.

I had mixed feelings, of course. I was ready for sandwiches and close friends and my own space, ready to be free of the constant trapped feeling, ready for some distance from a sister I loved so much but couldn’t fully trust.

On those walks, she gave me the kindest farewell I have ever received. She wished me the best in every dream I had ever told her. She gave me specific greetings and messages for every friend and family member I had ever mentioned. She shared what she loved about me and said that we should pray for each other always.

v.

I left Tanzania five years ago now. My Swahili got rustier, and my phone calls with Esther sparser. I promised to help her get licensed as a nursery school teacher, and for a while our calls were mostly at the beginning of the school year, regarding Western Union transfers.

She married John, and according to the Tanzanian tradition I sent money to help with the cost of the wedding, only to hear from her brother later that there was no wedding. Maybe they got married but hosted no fancy wedding. It is never clear. They are certainly married now.

vi.

A few months ago, John lost his job. The calls for help started coming more frequently then. I found out Esther is pregnant. She is due this week, and lately the texts say they are three months behind on their rent and about to be evicted. The dollar amount she claims she needs to cover the rent is almost certainly a lie.

I could give her the exaggerated figure, which is less than $200. But I can’t keep paying her rent forever. I don’t want to be her social safety net, though in Tanzania that is maybe not so different than to be her sister.

I sent her a message saying that I can’t help, mainly because I didn't think a few months’ rent is going to solve her problems, and I want her and John to find their own way out. Regardless of her past manipulations, could it be right to deny rent to a nine-months-pregnant Tanzanian woman whose husband is out of work? So a few days later, we reverse course and send more than they asked for, hopefully for a down payment to build a house, or start a business.

vii.

This is what it means to me to say Esther. To say Tanzania. The love and freedom so deep and the greatest sense of welcome I've ever known. The hazy confusion of stories filtered through a half-known language and culture. The desperate sense that I am never quite doing the right thing, or maybe that there is no right thing.

I would not trade my Tanzanian experience, my Tanzanian family, for a million nights of guiltless sleep. It is right that I should wrestle with the inequality and sorrow of the world. It is right that this wrestling should be with real, broken people whom I dearly love and forgive. It is right that because of them, I can never be complacent. It is right that I can’t find a way to end this story, because it is not simple, and it is not resolved, and love is never tidy in this wild world.

Letting Awa in

Today I am delighted to share a heart-wrenching story written by a friend of mine who was a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa and has continued to live and work in West Africa since 2009. The names of both women have been changed to protect their privacy.

Possible trigger warning: mentions of rape and abuse.

She was supposed to be my (host) mother in the West African village, but she was only a few years older than me, so from the beginning I called her Awa.

Awa welcomed me warmly to the place I would live for two years. She introduced me to relatives; she patiently taught me the local language; she explained the village politics; she told me how to eat and what to wear and how much money to give during special ceremonies; and, making use of one of the few English phrases she knew, she often exclaimed, “You have a big butt!”

No matter how much time we spent together, though, there was a certain level of distance between us.  Most of the time I attributed it to language and cultural differences. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t put myself in her shoes. But I also – intentionally and unintentionally – maintained walls. I didn’t want to get too close, be too vulnerable, give too much.

After two years in the village, I got ready to move a few hours away to continue my work in the capital. The night before I was to leave, Awa lay distraught on my bed, crying her eyes out.  How could I be leaving her? I told her I’d visit and call.  I knew I would miss my village, but I was excited to have my own apartment, running water and a fridge, a 9-5 job, and an internet connection. I was ready to separate from her a little more, and especially from her abusive husband.

Over the next couple years, I called and visited and even sent money to cover school fees and supplies for her two boys, or to pay for medicine when someone was sick. Then Awa started calling regularly for money to see the doctor or buy medicine.  After a little probing, I found out she was having reproductive health problems. I did some research, then called Awa and invited her to come to the capital to see a recommended doctor here. I’ll cover all the expenses, I said.

She got approval from her husband and told me she’d call me when she arrived in the city to get directions to my house.

Directions to my house? Wait, you’re going to stay with me?

I was not prepared for this. This was crossing the line. I would go with her to see the doctor, give money, make phone calls – but not let her stay with me, not open my life completely to her.

But didn’t I just open up my house and bed to you a few weeks ago when you were here in the village, she reminded me. And so I gave in.

When she arrived late in the evening, I showed her how to flush my toilet, turn the hot water heater on, take a shower, and light the stove. I was worried more about her breaking something in my apartment then about her exhaustion and sickness.

We saw the doctor the next day, and he ordered several tests to check for STIs. He told us we would have to wait 3-5 days for the results and in the meantime she was not to have sex with her husband, who also happened to be in the city, or she might contract another STI.

Maybe you should just go to your relatives’ house for a few days? I suggested to Awa.

If I go to their house, my husband will go there and want to see me, to be with me, she said. 

But doesn’t he know why you’re here? That if he is with you, it could wreck your treatment? I said, appalled.

Yes, but you know him.

I did. I knew his temper and his ability to manipulate people and his tendency to beat Awa and force her to be with him even if she didn’t want it. So she stayed. A couple days turned into several days. Several days turned into two weeks.

I felt sick and confused and helpless. Every moment I spent with her was a reminder of this painful, disgusting, unsolvable situation.

Every night we had pillow talk. Only instead of silly gossip, she told me about all the pain she had experienced because of her husband. How she had been barely 13 years old when her father had arranged her marriage, how she had cried and begged her mom to not let her go. How her first night with her husband was like a semi-truck barging through the door to a hut. How she had been sick for weeks afterward, couldn’t even eat, had to go to the hospital. How, during the years that he was a senator and had money, he would sleep with prostitutes in nearby villages and then return home late, expecting her to sleep with him, too. 

Finally one night, she couldn’t hold it in anymore.  She sobbed and sobbed and sobbed.  My heart hurts, Ndeye, she cried to me. Ndeye, my heart hurts so badly.

All I could do was plead desperately with God. I prayed and I prayed as I rubbed her back, her shoulders shaking with sob after sob. Lord, do something for her!  Give her a way out.  I can’t handle this anymore.  LORD, do something!

A couple days later, I sat down with Awa and her husband and explained that Awa had an STI, so both of them needed to take medicine. I also brought up the issues of mistreatment, both with Awa and with their kids. I was cautious, but when he said that the problems always stem from Awa, I had to be firm. This was my opportunity to stand up for Awa, but I was also afraid for her. What would happen when they both returned to the village?

Later that evening, Awa left to return to the village. Her husband is still in the capital for political meetings. I’m hopeful that she’s healing physically. But I’m still unsure about her emotionally and psychologically.  She is suffering.

Somewhat reluctantly, I let her in close, and now I feel a portion of her pain.  I have never felt such pain before; I want it to stop. I want to pull back, to stop calling, to stop sending money, to forget all of it. But I can’t. I made a choice to let her in, and I’m not going back no matter how much it hurts. It’s a process, but I’m learning to open myself up, to love, and to be loved.

This post is a the final installment of my Women’s History Month project, “Honoring Women’s Stories.” You can read more about the project and see other women’s stories here.

Pressed but not crushed, part 2

Read part 1 of Paulina's story here.

I went to see Paulina in the spring, at the family compound where she was staying with her mother. She still swung her hips and insisted on a feast of coconut fish for her guest. Edwiggy crawled around with a little doll. The Tanzanian pop radio and children’s shouts were a more pleasant background than the busy road where Moses lived in the city.

Here in Moshi is where she had first met Moses. He had grown up here, worked at a shop selling rice and sugar and soap. Her mother would send her to the shop for tea leaves. Sometimes Moses bought her a Coke and induced her to linger a few minutes at the store.

“He was charming,” she told me. “Different than he is now.”

“Has he tried to call you?”

“He calls, but I will not go back,” she said as though it was that easy, as though she could simply toss him aside, like the chaff she was sorting out from the rice. “Once he pulled his gun on me.”

*

She was working at a hotel in here Moshi when he asked her to come live with him. She weighed the options—a meager job cleaning at a tourist hotel, better than most of her schoolmates, but long hours for low pay—or keeping house for charming Moses-from-the-shop. As soon as she arrived in Dar es Salaam, she knew he was different—drinking, drugs, sleeping with other women. The police job and his co-workers were pushing him in a direction she didn’t know how to handle. He came home angry and didn’t have much to say other than to ask about dinner.

When she was pregnant with Edwiggy, that’s when he first started beating her. In her seventh month, scared for Edwiggy’s health, she went home to Moshi. Her mother trekked to different markets every day to buy and sell sweaters and coats, thrift-store throwaways from the U.S.  Paulina could only sell coconuts from home and help with the laundry and cooking. She didn’t know if her mother and siblings silently resented her as another giant belly to feed. After all, she’d gotten fat in the big city.

She delivered the baby in Moshi. Moses pursued her. She convinced herself he had beaten her because of the pregnancy. He’d be better now that the baby was born. She returned to Dar.

The beatings resumed after a few weeks. She started to get scared when she found messages from other lovers on his phone. She was terrified of AIDS; the Tanzanian public health campaign had been in successful in getting the word out about condoms and HIV testing. The marketers, the government, the newscasters could talk about it. You just couldn’t talk about it in real life, with your lover; no real man would consider wearing condoms. All Paulina could do was question him. “Why do you have messages from other women on the phone?”

Every question meant a beating.

One night, when Edwiggy was only a few months old, Moses came home wasted, complaining about the food she’d prepared. She snatched his phone in suspicion or retaliation. He pulled out his gun.

Paulina talked him down. She lived with him for several months after that. She slept with him, cooked for him, and raised their child. He never apologized.

*

After a day of coconut fish and storytelling, and watching Edwiggy try to stand, it was time for me to go. I stood to leave. That’s when she brought it up again. “Do you have the money to help me start a business?”

She had a vague plan about going to Nairobi to buy secondhand clothes, to sell them at markets like her mother did.

I had dangled money in front of her eagerly once, in hopes it would make her leave an abusive relationship. Now, after more thought and other experiences of being ill-used for cash, I balked a little. I feared she didn’t have a good business plan, might become dependent on me for help. She and Edwiggy were safe now. Did I need to help beyond that?

But she still needed to provide for her daughter. And I had offered her help. I gave her $100. “Use it for business,” I said. “Be careful with it.” Another woman I knew had begun raising goats, sheep, and chickens on the same initial amount.

When I came back to see Paulina one last time before my departure from Tanzania, she asked me again for money. “I haven’t started business yet, and I had to use $25 to take Edwiggy to get her shots,” she said.

I swallowed and told her I didn’t have any more to give.

In retrospect, I was wrong. She had used the money to provide needed health care for her daughter. I could have encouraged this. I could have helped more. I could have done research on micro-lending groups, tried to refer her to someone to help. I could have found more seed money, sat with her to make a business plan, stayed an extra day and gone with her to invest in inventory. But it was so complicated, and I needed boundaries, and I was tired of being asked to be a savior, tired of these murky situations, and I was going back to America, and I knew nothing of business, and what more could I do?

I gave her a big hug and promised I’d come back one day.

*

When I think of Paulina, I think how it isn’t fair. It isn’t fair that she had such a heavy load, that there was nowhere to turn for sustainable income or assistance, no way for a woman with a primary-school education and an infant to make it in her country, no legal recourse for the wrongs that were done her. It isn’t fair that I couldn’t, or didn’t, help her more.

But I also think of her grin, the gap in teeth when she giggles, her sing-songy voice, her hospitality, her caring father and mother, her great love for her daughter, and how she doesn’t give up.

I have a feeling, or maybe it is a hope, or only a desperate prayer—that she and Edwiggy are doing okay.

This post is a part of my Women’s History Month project, “Honoring Women’s Stories.” You can read more about the project and see other women’s stories here.

Pressed but not crushed, part 1

I visited Paulina my first week back to Tanzania. I hadn’t seen her for a year. She carried her six-month-old daughter on her back as she bent over her kerosene stove to fry potatoes and plantains. She swung her new-mother hips as she walked proudly to the refrigerator to retrieve the orange-papaya juice she had squeezed and blended for me that morning.

Juice in hand, I sat on the red plush sofa in a bare concrete room and stared at badly-translated, hokey photos on the wall (“house is where the heart is”) while I dutifully ate the plantains and meat she brought me. Paulina insisted I relax while she cooked porridge for her daughter Edwiggy, fed her, fretted about her lack of appetite, bathed her, dressed her. “I’ve been so busy rushing around, I ran into the door,” she giggled, touching a bruise on her head.

After a quick afternoon trip to meet her old grandmother and run by the market, we returned with baskets full of onions, tomatoes, papaya and watermelon. Paulina’s boyfriend was watching TV, irked that we’d returned late and dinner wasn’t ready. Paulina cooked dinner, fed Edwiggy again, put her to bed, made more juice. She brought out the food for me and Moses, and served his plate. She turned up the American hip-hop louder and heated bathwater for Moses as we ate. She washed the dishes.

By ten I was exhausted from merely watching her. Paulina flashed me her smile again.

“Katherine, sit,” she commanded in Swahili. “Let’s tell stories.”

She moved her shoulders to the music and sang along in English as I explained the meaning of songs to her. She asked me six times what I thought of her baby daughter.

Beyoncé danced across the screen. “In America, do people walk down the street naked like they do in the music videos?” Paulina asked. She helped me review Swahili words for all the body parts, including the ones seen in the music videos. She giggled. She asked me when I was going to make enough money to buy her a plane ticket to America.

As I was leaving the next morning for Arusha—eight hours away by bus, where I’d be living for the next year—she touched her forehead. “I didn’t really run into a door,” she told me as we arrived at the bus stop. “Moses beats me.”

I shook my head and tried to listen, but the ranting Swahili was too fast for me. My bus pulled up. I hugged her goodbye.

*

Three months later on a Christmastime visit to the city, I sat in her neighbor’s extra bedroom, sweating from the heat, as Paulina made the bed for me. She pulled her khanga up to her hips, exposing her legs. Baseball-sized bruises, blue and green and purple, adorned her thighs. “Moses got drunk,” she said. “He is a horrible person.”

“Leave him!” I exclaimed.

Her reasoning was practical. Moses, in his job with the national police, brought home money for food. He brought home money for Edwiggy. Paulina didn’t love him anymore, but where would she go without income? What kind of work could she do with a nine-month-old baby? Who would take her in? She figured she would endure it until Edwiggy was old enough to walk. Then at least, she wouldn’t be burdening her family too much.

I hesitated, knowing I should think this through, but the words burst from my mouth: “What if I give you some money?”

How many times had she begged me for money for a plane ticket, for a trip to America? She was always asking for help.

Now I tried to meet her deep brown eyes. “If you had a little money, could you leave?”

She refused. Maybe she didn’t want the charity, or maybe she thought I needed the money, or maybe her no was a cultural way of being polite. “You are a student. You are a volunteer. Keep your money.” She turned on the fan, tucked me into my mosquito net, and told me to sleep well. I ached for her. But I was twenty-two and she was twenty-one, and we saw no solutions.

*

Three weeks later, when I had returned to Arusha, Moses came home drunk with another woman.

Paulina walked out with her baby daughter and took with her enough of his money to buy the bus ticket back home to her mother, in a small town close to Arusha.

I read her text message while I lay on the lavish bed in the Kudu Lodge after the second day of safari with my parents, who were visiting from the U.S. It had been a day of elephants, cheetahs, soup and salad and steak. The dissonance made me uncomfortable.

A few minutes later, another text appeared. Will you help me with some money to start a business here?

-- 

The second half of Paulina's story is up here.

This post is a part of my Women’s History Month project, “Honoring Women’s Stories.” You can read more about the project and see other women’s stories here.

Too young to marry

Neema, at 14

Neema (pronounced NAY-ma) means grace in Swahili. Neema’s first language was not Swahili; it was Maasai, the mother language of her tribe. She was her mother’s seventh and last-born. Her father had four wives and several herds of goats and cows. Neema’s mother was the second wife.

Neema’s oldest brother never went to school. Her father didn’t believe in education. But by the time Neema was six, her mother had become an advocate for education and sent her off to primary school, a few miles walk each day.

Neema sat in a classroom with forty or fifty other students and listened to the teacher. She learned to read and write, and tried to memorize the notes the teacher wrote on the board for them to copy each day.

In the evening, Neema walked home with her friends and returned to her mother’s boma. She took the goats out to feed at night, walked to the well half a mile away to draw water, and collected firewood for cooking. She sat in the smoky hut tending a bowl of ugali with greens for dinner. As she got in the bed she shared with her sister each night, she took a candle and stole a glance at her school notebooks. She loved to learn.

Neema always did well in school and the family said she had brains. She finished seventh grade. She, with all her classmates around the country, sat for the national examinations. She was neither confident nor scared; it was a test they all had to take to determine whether they could continue on to secondary school.

Neema failed the test. She would not be allowed to continue in government school. And she did not have the money to pay for private school.

She continued day in and day out with her work around the boma, never complaining. She had more time now so she made the tea in the morning and grazed the goats earlier so she could get back to help with cooking, too. Sometimes her mother was sick.

At night she called her sister and brother in the city, sobbing. “I want to go to school,” she cried. “I am afraid Father is going to find a man for me to marry.”

A few weeks after the notice of her failure on the national exam, Neema came home to find her father speaking with another village man. “You are going to marry his son,” her father said.

The man Neema was to marry was sixteen and had no education beyond the seventh grade. His family brought goats and sheep as a bride price for her father. There were parties at the boma, and all feasted on meat. There was going to be a wedding.

Neema continued to cry, and she called her brother every night pleading for help. She didn’t want to marry a man with no education and no future. A man who wasn’t a man. She didn’t want to marry at all. She was fourteen. She wanted to find a way to go back to school.

The family of the groom brought local alcohol as a gift. The wedding day was getting closer and all the plans were set. Neema’s father had gotten all his bridal gifts. He took his two younger wives and moved to the coastal region, hours away. He returned to finalize the matter.

Neema’s brother Meshak came in the middle of the day. He walked up the hill in his shuka while Neema was out hauling water. The family of the groom saw him and ran to the boma on the top of the hill to greet him, to see if there was any trouble.

While they were speaking, Neema returned with water and bowed her head respectfully to her older brother. She greeted him and quickly went to bring chai for her brother and the other guests.

They talked for a few minutes over chai, but then Meshak called Neema aside. “Pack your bag,” he told her.

Happily, she put a few khangas and her old school books in a small knapsack.

The groom’s father saw what was happening. He began to argue with Meshak. “She is bound to my son already. We have eaten meat together.”

Meshak had grown up in the same boma, the second born of their mother. He had passed the National Exam and could have gone on to high school, but his father sent him instead to tend cattle in the Serengeti with his uncle. He had been able to escape to the city finally, to become a car mechanic, and he had joined a Pentecostal church there, which taught that women had dignity. He was not going back to the city today without Neema. “No. She will not marry your son.”

The groom’s father was furious, yelling, calling others in the village to be his witness at the promise that had been made. Neema stayed quietly inside the boma, heart pounding, as the argument grew.

“Come now,” Meshak said to Neema, as a crowd began to gather around the boma. The father of the groom tried to block them, but Meshak pushed him aside and dragged Neema quickly down the hill back to the main road.

They were able to escape, not without giving the father of the groom some money. They boarded the bus for the city and returned to Meshak’s home.

Neema humbly took her place in his house, helping his wife with the cooking and cleaning, and waiting for a chance to go back to school. She shared a bed with Meshak’s young children and went about her daily tasks diligently, faithfully. She was happy to be away from the village and her father’s influence. Happy the next-door neighbors had a TV she was sometimes allowed to watch. But she still wanted to go back to school.

By the miracle of friendship and generous hospitality, I moved into Meshak’s home a few weeks after she arrived. I had met Neema and Meshak’s sister through a friend, and was looking for new housing in the city while I volunteered as an English teacher. The family welcomed me in with open arms.

I slept in the same room with Neema and ate from the same plate of ugali with her for three months.  She laughed at my foreignness and taught me how to properly tend the charcoal stove. We walked together to get fresh milk in the morning. Whenever I left for school, she demanded I give her my dirty clothes so she could wash them. Occasionally in the evening, she asked for help studying her old school books. She never asked me for money, but as I came to know her story more fully, it became clear that I could help her.

In the spring, I drummed up support from some friends to pay for the private school fees Neema needed. Neema returned to school, and we have continued to support her financially, in hopes that her success will eventually enable her to support herself and her family. Four years have gone by, and Neema has been in a boarding school where she is at the top of her class. She is able to focus much better than in primary school, when she was commuting by foot and had no electricity in the village. She took her high school final exams last November. The last I talked with her, she was waiting at Meshak’s house for results to come back. A lot is at stake—the chance to go on to a vocational college, or even university.

Meanwhile, she has learned how to live in the city. Her voice is deeper and her English is better. She is eighteen now, older and wiser, more ready for whatever comes next.

This post is a part of my Women’s History Month project, “Honoring Women’s Stories.” You can read more about the project and see other women’s stories here.

On saving the world

You are seventeen and you hear your godmother talking about her job coordinating aid to refugees, and you hear your parents talking about their new Burundian friend and the problems she faced in her homeland, and you take environmental science at school and you realize the world is bigger than you knew and that you are going to be a part of saving it.

You are nineteen and you are trying to convince your parents that there is nothing to worry about, that these protests they are talking about in Bangladesh are going to be fine, that your month-long study abroad trip is going to be safe and healthy and beautiful, that you are not going to pierce your nose out of solidarity with the Bangladeshi women like the student they read about in the brochure. Deep down, though, you are terrified, and you are terrified as you step off the plane and smell the garbage and feel the hot, thick air and see the beggars outside the gate. You are terrified when you wake up in the hotel room a few days later and read the newspaper slid under your door, which tells you that extremists in the city are bombing tourist hotels. You are terrified as you speed down the road to the village in a bus, amidst taxis and horses and rickshaws and bicycles, passing on the right and narrowly avoiding collisions.

But you reach the village, and the sun is warm and red in the sky in the evening, and the children are tugging at your shalwar kameez and following at your heels as you walk between the huts and past the mustard fields. You hold their hands and let them teach you how to say “beautiful” and “coconut” in their language as you walk, on your way to meet your farmers each day, to ask them questions about their families and fertilizers and crops and toilets.

Each night with your professors, you discuss how to save the world, and then afterwards you and your friends complain about the fact that the teachers are asking you to how to save the world, because how can you, an American student in her first trip abroad, even pretend to know? By the end of the month, though, you sit on the roof of the hostel looking out at the mustard fields, hearing the children laughing and envisioning the tears of the widow whose roof you patched. You feel like you’ve got it, the answer to all of this, which is so refreshingly simple. The answer is love, and your task of saving the world has become so clear: just love each other.

You are twenty-one and you have completely and utterly fallen in love with Africa. You are in love with the way the Swahili words roll of your tongue as you stun the locals in the minibus with your vocabulary; you are in love with your host family’s maid who has taught you the words and poured out her life story; you are in love with the rolling green hills and the familiar feel of the local market and the walking everywhere and living out of a suitcase. You are in love with the stars of the southern hemisphere and with the other American student who sits down to gaze at them with you, who will one day become your husband. You know now that saving the world is complicated and you believe that Africa has given you much more than you have given it, but you are determined to come back after you graduate.

You come back. The ground seems more dusty and your host family’s maid is living with her brother now, where you are feasted on by mosquitoes the night you stay with her, and your bubbly friend is being beaten by her husband. And you are lonely, because while it is not hard to inspire pick-up lines from every man you meet, it is incredibly hard to make friends without a built-in host family or university classes or American compatriots. But you start singing with the Maasai girls in the evenings, and you move in with a new friend, and you share the humdrum, complicated, beautiful life of a regular Tanzanian family, one that doesn’t have a maid, one that makes you share a bed and wake up in the morning to make the chai, and tag along to herd the goats.

The months are passing by and you are still lonely or bored or frustrated at times. But you are also “getting fat,” according to giggling Tanzanian women. As best you can understand it, when they say fat what they really mean is that you are glowing, that you are at home and fitting in and flourishing. Your students are starting to learn English—some of them enough to ask questions about the time zones or about how why Americans have chosen an African as their president—but really you haven’t accomplished much. It’s who you’ve become that matters. The sun is setting and you carefully take the laundry down from the clothesline and go with the children to carry water from the well, and you realize you will never be able to enter this life again, once you have left it. Even if you return, you will be older and maybe married and have a real job, and you will never again be able to blend this closely into their lives. Your heart aches as you say goodbye.

You are almost twenty-eight, and to be honest these days you find yourself forgetting whether you’re twenty-six or seven or eight, because it is all starting to blend together. You are making a difference in America now, educating high-school dropouts and planning to become a pastor. You are getting ready to go to seminary and then afterwards you will get a real full-time job. You have a kitchen full of dishes and pots and pans and closets full of papers and games and gadgets that might be useful one day. You have furniture. You feel the weight of all the stuff, how it means that you will have to rent a moving truck this summer for the first time in your life, how it holds you to the ground sometimes and makes the idea of running off to Africa seem more difficult. You dread calling your friend in Tanzania, because your Swahili has gotten terrible and you can never understand half the things she says, and yet you know every time that the gist is she is asking your for money, and you are tired of taking wads of cash to Western Union for another computer course that won’t really lead her to a job. You want to visit Africa again, most days, but the price of a plane ticket seems so high in terms of rent and grad school savings.

You wonder, sometimes, if you have lost the idealism and the energy that you once had. You wonder if you have become cynical and hardened and lazy and complacent—all those adjectives you once used to describe older people. You wonder if you are still willing to deny yourself and take up your cross and follow Jesus. Some days it is like you are looking at yourself from the perspective of the nineteen-year-old you, and you barely recognize yourself.

*

In the telling of the story, you see it. You have grown, and deepened. You are wiser.

You have learned to love better, not just the beautiful, exotic people whose culture intoxicates you, but also the people who are infuriatingly similar, who frustrate and try your patience and fail to come through sometimes when you need them.  You have learned to wait, to empathize, to listen.

You have seen that there are plenty of people in your own country who are maybe even worse off than some of your friends in Africa—because they are starving not only for food but for families that aren’t so broken, for community.  You have learned that the greatest power you have to help people in Africa may be the power of your dollar, and you are trying to be more careful about the foods you eat and the companies you buy from.

You have found out more about yourself, and you have truly and deeply come to believe that it is through the path of Christian ministry that you can exercise all your gifts. You are planning to pray with people who are grateful and sit quietly with people who are grieving—but also to mobilize more support for Tanzanian girls who are being sold in marriage or Bangladeshi widows who are being conned or simple farmers all over the world who just need more rain.

You are learning how to live into that word you once pronounced as the answer to all the world’s problems; you are learning how to love.

*

Still, looking back, you miss some of the conviction you once had. The way you gave half your things away when you returned from Tanzania. The way you were ready to put everything on hold for a chance to serve abroad. The impulse you had to sacrifice your own desires for the path of service. The freedom you felt living that way.

So in honor to yourself at nineteen, you pledge to think creatively about how to do more for the world than give some pocket change to Kiva and World Vision; to write the stories of others; to keep your ears and eyes open to opportunities to love.

And you pledge to do something radical this year: one act of love that will really require you to give something up. 

A journey, part 5: Jesus in Africa

This is part 5 of a story in five parts. Catch up here:
Part 1: Waiting for a sign
Part 2: A sinking feeling
Part 3: April showers
Part 4: Whispers and campfires

January of my junior year, I boarded a plane with thirteen other students bound for East Africa for five months. On the plane, I sat next to another student, John, who I’d met the day before. He was confident, friendly, attractive.

The first week in Tanzania, we sat through orientations, braved local minibuses, and went to a church together. I learned that his parents had been missionaries in Kenya. He read the Bible on the roof of the hostel in the mornings and spoke naturally about his faith. He took homeless people out to lunch and winced at stories of aggressive missionaries in Africa. He seemed the kind of strong, intelligent, and compassionate believer I needed in my life.

At night in the hostel, while the others watched a movie, John and I sat on the roof to catch the breeze.

We’d known each other less than a week. How did it even come up?

“You’ve been reading the Bible in the mornings?” he asked.

“Yeah. The book of Job.”

“Not the easiest book to get through.”

“I read Jeremiah last summer,” I said. “That was rough.”

“How so?” John had a casual, inviting manner. The sky was clear.

“God is pretty wrathful,” I said. “I wasn’t sure if I believed in him for a while.”

I smacked a mosquito on my leg. God, please don’t let me get malaria. Had I said too much? I barely knew him.

“Me neither,” he said. “My faith really took a beating last year.”

Really? Him too?

We slid easily into the stories: I had to write a paper about Nietzsche. I had to break off a relationship.  I stayed up late talking to my roommate about big questions. Somehow every time we answered each other, “Me too.”

In between classes at the university and volunteering in Dar es Salaam, John and I studied on the roof of the Swahili building. He read me a passage from St. Thomas Aquinas. I asked him more about his doubts. We sat in silence, alternating between Swahili flash cards and prayer journals. Hoping, both, to experience God again.

In the afternoons I went running with another American student, Emily. It was too hot and dusty to last longer than twenty minutes. We stretched afterwards, outside her host mom’s apartment.

“Sometime,” she said, “I want to talk to you and John more about your faith. You guys have something that seems genuine.”

Together, Emily and I read part of the gospel of Mark, the earliest account of Jesus’ life. I discovered again, with her, that Jesus was brilliant. It was refreshing, to hear from someone on the outside that belief could be worthwhile.

This is what it means to say Tanzania. Freedom from college Bible studies where I felt I had to fit a mold. The colors of the fabric they waved in the churches. That John had doubted too. Leaving behind the friends who had unknowingly hurt me by caring not enough, or too much. That Emily saw something real in my faith.

God was coming alive again.

In April, John and I traveled to northwestern Tanzania, and on Easter morning we woke to stand under an acacia tree. The Maasai people trickled in and joined us, their plaid shukas tied across their bodies, white and colored beads dangling from the egg-sized holes in their ears. We gathered to celebrate the victory of Jesus over death.

By 10:30 a.m., they began to sing, nasal and high, and the music encircled me like a wind. The joy of the Lord was in their voices. They sang out under an acacia tree, the rolling highlands of the Maasai steppe all around: “Etupiwuo Yesu!” Jesus has risen from the dead! I watched them jumping and joined in, pushing myself as high as I could, making up my own syllables to the verses I didn’t understand in their tribal language rather than remain silent in this assembly of saints. Gazing at the rolling green hills and blue sky around me, I felt as though joy and earth and God’s spirit building up in me would burst out of me, into the mountains.

This is how we know that he lives in us: we know it by the Spirit he gave us.

During the service, we went down to the river and eleven-year-old Sipironi was baptized. That evening over a plate of roasted goat, I heard Sipironi’s story. A year earlier, crippled by a sudden sickness and unable to eat, he’d been sent from hospital to hospital without diagnosis, a medical mystery. One morning the missionaries left him in the house to run errands. When they came back in the afternoon, he was walking. “Jesus told me to stand up,” he said.

The sky that night was big enough to hold the impossibility of it all. The stars were so many I fell to the ground in awe. Biting ants crawled into my pants and John stood laughing as I wiggled around, yelping and brushing them off my waist and dancing back to the porch for safety.

Etupiwuo Yesu! Jesus is risen.

Losing my voice

After college, I resumed driving the old Taurus station wagon I used to drive in high school. One day when I was cleaning out the car, I found some old cassette tapes and popped one in.

It was a recording of one of my high school voice lessons with Ms. Eden. She was having me warm up my voice and, as usual, I was having trouble with the high notes. She kept trying different approaches, encouraging me to relax, breathe, keep a lighter tone. I kept trying to hit those notes. And then I burst into tears.

I shut off the tape. It was too hard to listen. The rest of the drive, I zoned out, remembering...

I was looking in the mirror, watching the shape of my mouth and looking for jaw tension. But I was not seeing tension, I was seeing tears in my eyes because here was yet another day I was not singing what I knew I could sing, and I did not know where my voice had gone, or why. After weeks of trying to hold it in during lessons, I cried.

And Ms. Eden sat me down on the couch and let me dry my tears and breathe again, and she said gently, “You seem very upset. Is this bigger than just singing? Do you feel like you’ve lost your voice in other parts of life?”

I shook my head fiercely—my eighteen-year-old identity was surely solid. I just loved singing too much to have it become so hard, so painful, so full of failure.

Photo by Phil

*

Ms. Eden was my third voice teacher.

My first voice teacher was my mother, who taught me to sing at bedtime, in the car, with a piano, while playing a tambourine in the local music class. Before long, I was singing solos at church and in the school talent show. It came naturally. I got nervous playing the piano or giving a speech, but I never got nervous singing in front of others.

In tenth grade, I was singing in the school and church choirs and had started my own a cappella group with a friend to prepare for my future as a choir director and music educator. There was only one thing missing—formal voice lessons.

So that January, I met my second voice teacher, Kelli—a big woman with a big soprano voice and an even bigger personality. Within the first month of voice lessons she had begun dramatically calling me, “EKATERRRRINA” as an encouragement to develop a big, operatic soprano tone. After a few months, I seemed to be making progress. That May, I auditioned for the top school choir and was accepted. My a cappella group was gaining reputation. Junior year was going to be perfect.

Over the summer I went to camp for six weeks and didn’t sing much other than church songs.

On the first day of school, my high school choir director had us sight read a piece of music we were going to sing. On the third page of the music, the sopranos got into the high F and G range. These are high notes for the average person, but not very high for an experienced soprano. I opened my voice to sing the line, and a terribly unnatural cracking noise came out instead.

I laughed nervously and hoped no one noticed. Apparently my voice had some catching up to do, from the summer!

I went home and fished out my voice lesson songs. I plunked out warm-ups on the piano and sang along. But the same thing happened every time I got into a higher range. Croak-scratch-silence.

I pounded my fist onto the piano keys in frustration.

*

Voice lessons became torture. It didn’t matter how many times we stopped and went to a lower key. When we went back up, I couldn’t sing the notes. Or sometimes I could, but only after the croak-scratch preceded the note.

So many people asked me if maybe my range had just changed? I heard it so many times I wanted to burst into tears when someone asked. A singer knows. When you are out of range, you are squeaky and off key and it feels stretched, but you can still sing the note. This was different. I had the range in there still. It did not feel stretched. But it felt like something was blocking my notes from coming out.

And no, it also was not a physiological problem. I went to the doctor. They stuck a giant scope up my nose and down into my vocal box while I tried not to gag. There were no polyps or nodes or scratches on my vocal chords. There was a little bit of excess mucous, the doctor told me as though he only wanted to be able to tell me something. He prescribed an anti-mucous spray and Kelli seized the idea and insisted I drink more water and wear a scarf all the time. Because that’s what singers do—Ekaterrrrina!

By the end of the school year, I was able to fake it enough to make choir manageable. I could sing the Fs and Gs, and maybe only half the time the croak-scratch would come before the note, and if I concentrated really hard and sang it really forcefully, half the time it would just come out, and I would breathe a sigh of relief. Voice lessons were another story. Kelli would smile and babble and have me lie on my back, or squat down as I sang high, or point my finger at the imaginary ribbon of sound I was attempting. And I would try and try and try, and come home and crash on my bed and sob for hours.

*

It was around this time that I dove deeper into my piano studies, playing a couple hours a night, sometimes in the dark, sometimes with tears in my eyes.

It was around this time that I made audition tapes for several college music programs, in both voice and piano, but I started leaning more towards piano.

It was around this time that I took an environmental science class and got excited about the demographic transition and the food crisis and international poverty.

It was around this time that I decided I was not going to major in music to become a music teacher. I wanted something bigger than suburbia and teaching some kids to sing. I was going to study English and Environmental Science and then I was going to save the hungry people of the world.

When I arrived at college, I majored in English and minored in Environmental Studies and traveled to Bangladesh and Tanzania to learn about the hungry people.

Halfway through my first semester, still battling the singing problems, I was halted one day, by the music we were singing in choir. Sigrid Johnson explained to our choir how to sing the Latin “lauda” like a praise, strong and free—and how to sing the same “lauda” like a plea in a sad moment, dark and full of aching. I was full of aching, and full of the music, and I rushed back to my dorm room, thinking, music can save the world too. For twenty-four hours I scoured the course catalog and tried to figure out if I could still switch to a music major.

But no, it was too late. And it wasn’t what I wanted anyway. Right?

*

We still don’t know what happened to my voice that year. I quit taking lessons from Kelli Young and had two amazing voice teachers over the next five years, Lisa Eden and Sigrid Johnson. I returned to doctors and clinicians and tried many techniques. At some point I started explaining it this way: Kelli Young was a big woman with a big voice. I was not. She tried to get me to make a sound like hers, but I had to push and force my voice to do this, and I learned some bad techniques.

And even though Ms. Eden worked through it with me during my senior year of high school, and even though I made the all-state choir that year and sang a high “C” in my recital, and even though three years with Sigrid Johnson in college helped me work on breath and healing and loving singing again, and even though I remained a first soprano—

It was never really fixed. It was never easy and free, as it had been. I don’t sing classically anymore, but if I did it would still be there, at least a little.

Sometimes when I hear a song that touches me, I wish music had become my career. I wish it had become my life. Sometimes the questions come, and they are enough to keep me up at night. Why did croak-scratch-silence come into my life? Why did the high notes never come back, no matter how hard I prayed, no matter how long I practiced? Why did I never sing in the St. Olaf Choir? Why did I finally quit voice lessons and go to Africa instead? Was I expanding my horizons, or giving up? What would have happened if I had never lost my voice? Will I ever have the opportunity to fully express my music again?

For all those years, it was music that would make my heart full. These days, there are many things that can fill it—maybe not quite as full, but still. A conversation with a good friend.  A book that feels like a good friend. Helping a student achieve a goal. An impromptu jam session with my brother when I am home. Praying in silence as the sun peeks out from behind the river and the trees. Writing my life and sharing it with all of you.

Maybe all of these things, in part, have become my voice.

Let me be clear. That still doesn't give me an answer to the whys and what-ifs. This is not an attempt to gloss over or try to tie loose ends together in a nice little happy-face package. A loss is a loss, and that is a real thing.

But there is also what we do have. There is also the way unanswered prayers and detours become their own lovely path.

After college, I returned to Africa to teach English at a boarding school. In the evenings, the lonely girls and I would gather in the classrooms and sing songs together, no high notes, no pressure, no fears, just beautiful music in three languages—me and sixty other aching hearts.