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.

Learning to read at 60

I first met Shirley in 2009, while working with an adult literacy program in DC. Shirley was sixty, a mother and grandmother, a heart attack survivor, a lifelong DC resident. She was friendly, spirited, close with the other students. And she couldn't read.

I started tutoring her that fall, and over the next three years, we met most weeks in the library or at the building where she took her classes.

At first, we read lists of simple words, and short stories about school or work or family. After a story, sometimes she would pause and tell me about her experiences.

Shirley told me she’d had trouble in school from the time she started. All her brothers and sisters did okay, but she struggled to read. Likely, she had learning disability that was never diagnosed. The teachers passed her along each year. She dropped out in the seventh grade.

As I worked with Shirley, she made small steps forward, and we progressed to reading her mail and managing her bank account and bills. She told me that this was important to her, because ever since her mother died, Shirley’s siblings had been taking advantage of her. They charged her twenty or thirty bucks anytime she needed a favor, like writing out a money order, withdrawing money from the bank, reading a piece of mail. She wanted to learn to do it herself.

Photo by Dvortygirl

She told me that she had loved and cared for her mother dearly as she aged. She had moved in with her mother as a caretaker because in Shirley’s own words, “That’s what I do. I take care of people.” Some of Shirley’s siblings seemed to busy with their own lives to trouble with their mother, but Shirley loved every moment she spent with this woman, who was her role model, guide, and best friend. Her death changed everything.

Together, Shirley and I tackled the frightening task of writing, too: handwriting, signatures, filling out forms. But it was recipes she really wanted to record. When we finally completed a selection of recipes, she named it “Shirley’s Dream Cookbook.”

She told me her favorite thing to do as a child was to go into the kitchen, sit on the countertop, and watch her mother cook. She loved the smells and colors and found that she had a penchant for cooking herself. At class potlucks, Shirley made a mean crab salad and was renowned for her pork chops. On the other hand, she didn’t bake too much. Baking requires reading recipes and making precise measurements.

*

After a couple years, Shirley asked me if we could start reading the Bible.

It was slow going, because the words were difficult. But she also knew them, from years of churchgoing, and it was empowering for her to learn to read phrases like my enemies have disgraced me, O Lord do not forsake me so that she could read them before bed as a prayer.

Tutoring session became almost like a Bible study, and I’m not sure which one of us was the teacher.

One day we read about the day when God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and she told me about the twin girls she had lost only a few days after she gave birth to them.

Another day, we read a psalm of lament, and she told me how she regretted her son’s slow descent into the wrong crowd. She had seen it happening and hadn’t known how to stop it, and it was that path and that crowd that had landed him in prison a few short months after his son was born. She’s convinced he was set up. Shirley’s son is still in jail, and Shirley misses him every day.

We read about God as a refuge and protector, and she told me her husband had survived after getting mugged one night as he walked from the bus to their apartment. He’d had eye surgery, and he couldn’t work for several months after that, but he was okay now.

We read about God’s great love for us, and she shook her head with that kind of wisdom and joy that only comes from trekking through the storm. She said, “Hallelujah.” She said, “Katie, I don’t even know where I would be without God’s faithfulness.”

*

Over the three years we worked together, Shirley improved her reading skills and increased her vocabulary. She opened a bank account, became comfortable with an ATM, and learned to write her own checks and money orders to pay bills. She learned to text. She learned several Psalms. She got a new apartment through DC public housing, one that has an elevator, which is better for her with her heart condition.

Every step in Shirley’s learning process was small. She still needs a lot of help with everyday tasks that require reading. She hasn’t gotten a GED or found a lawyer who can get her son out of jail or learned to read a novel. But in every small step she opened up a little more, found new independence, confidence, and determination.

Last year, Shirley was ready to share her story. She found her fifteen minutes of fame on the local NPR station, where she spoke about her experience battling illiteracy. A couple weeks later, she went with some fellow students to lobby the DC City Council for adult education funding. From memory, she testified in a packed public hearing about the difference adult literacy programs had made in her life. She absolutely nailed it.

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.

It’s not too late if you’d like to contribute a story--your own or someone else’s. Just email me by March 12 at katiemurchisonross at gmail dot com.

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.

Honoring women's stories

Photo by Erik Soderstrom

In high school I used to long for summer, which was the time when I would get my fill of deep conversation to last me the year. At camp, late at night we would lie in a starry field or huddle onto a couple bunk beds or poke at the embers of a campfire, and girls would share their stories.

I have never stopped cherishing the vulnerable, real-life, honest, messy-beautiful stories of women and their journeys.

March is women’s history month, and it is a good time to tell stories. I have begun to write about a few women whose lives have been compelling, whose stories have stayed with me.

My intentions and hopes for this project are twofold:

First, I just want to honor the stories and the lives of these women—their strength, resilience, inner beauty. Some have faced great challenges. Some have been pillars for their families or communities. All of their stories are important, worth telling.

Second, in some of the stories, I want to draw attention to different issues that women face all over the world. I said in January that I wanted to write more about others, and that I wanted to take this year to revisit the global justice issues that I once actively cared so much about.

But here’s the exciting part: I would love your help. Maybe you know someone who deserves to have her story told. Maybe you can help us share in the wisdom that comes from hearing people’s stories. Maybe you are a woman with your own story to tell. It is more than just catastrophe and dramatic recovery that make our stories matter, so feel free to think outside the box. What story has captured your heart?

If you have something you’d like to share as a part of the project, please send me an email at katiemurchisonross at gmail dot com. I’d like to have your written story by Wed, March 12, but if you think you might want to contribute, send me a message as soon as possible, letting me know you are working on something.

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.