On what we give each other.

I was in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire's capital, a few weeks ago, and I saw men with suits and ties. Cars sped home, their headlights whizzing by, one after the other under street lamps. These things I don't see in Daloa, the city I live in. I watched all this and pretended I was in Marseille and DC and Bryn Mawr, just to feel something familiar. And I felt relieved. I told myself, “Ahh, this is good. Abidjan is the biggest city and the capital of Cote d’Ivoire, and it always happens that things begin in one place and spread out. In time, Daloa will have these same things.”

Then I stopped myself. Is modernization what we should be striving for? Does living in what we call “a developed world” make us happy? I know this is a theme that’s been running through my blogs. I’m not saying that the answer to the world’s problems is to live in a village in Africa without electricity or running water. But I’m also saying the answer is not what we call “development” either – bringing the Third World out of “poverty”. I’m currently reading Sidney Poitier’s Measure of a Man, and he speaks beautifully of his childhood living in “poverty” in the “Third World” on an island in the Bahamas:

“Our cultural ‘authenticity’ extended to having neither plumbing nor electricity, and we didn’t have much in the way of schooling or jobs, either. In a word, we were poor, but poverty there was very different from poverty in a modern place characterized by concrete. … In the kind of place where I grew up, what’s coming at you is the sound of the sea and the smell of the wind and your mama’s voice and the voice of our dad and the craziness of your brothers and sisters – and that’s it … You’re watching the behavior of your siblings and of your mom and dad, noting how they behave and how they attend to your feedings and how they care for you when you have pain or when the wasp stings you around your eye. What occurs when something goes wrong is that someone reaches out, someone soothes, someone protects.”

Isn’t that beauty? Isn’t that richness?

I’m not saying modernization is terrible. Technology has bourne phenomenal movies like Schindler’s List, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Philadelphia, which have helped us to question our own prejudices and make an effort to move past them. The drug that put my Dad’s cancer in remission was created just a few years before he got sick. Thanks to Skype, I can call my sister from Africa to find out about her adventures in Puerto Rico- and Bryn Mawr. Through planes, trains, and automobiles we can discover beautiful places – and also meet people from all over and thus find the common humanity in all of us.

I guess what I want to say is that Poitier shows how people give other people what they need. Care from others and love from others is food – we need it, just like we need to eat everyday. And when we don’t get it, we are hungry – perhaps starved. A month after St Lucia happened, on Thanksgiving night in 2006, I found myself sobbing in my basement. And I mean sobbing – I was coughing because I was crying so hard. And it lasted for almost an hour. I thought I would never stop, except that my mom came downstairs and simply put her arm around me. And suddenly the pain and trauma melted away, and the jarring that was within felt soothed. That’s when I realized how much we need each other, how much we need someone “to reach out, to soothe, to protect” as Poitier puts it. This is the other food we need. And if we expect it from others, we must give it to others as well.

In the developed world, we have love, we have compassion, we have family, we have laughter. I guess I just want everyone to see that Africa is not a continent only of civil war, corruption, and sickness. It is a land of people who do indeed “reach out, soothe, and protect.” For example, I was terribly sick on Christmas Day – spent the whole day in bed at my colleague’s with a pounding headache, pain in my joints, and a fever. My colleague took amazing care of me – let me stay at his house, made sure I had all I needed. The next day, my colleague told me this person and that person asked about me and wished me a “bon guerison” (basically the French “get well soon.”) My neighbor saw me and immediately asked with sincere worry in his face if I was feeling better. I asked how they even knew I was sick, and it was because one 13 year old girl I knew saw me before I got really sick and I told her I had a headache. Word spreads quickly – people are concerned. My neighbor made me a soup with ingredients known to heal. And while she may have helped me to heal physically, it was her thought, her kindness, and her care that brought a deeper healing – It was nourishing for the spirit.