Those Ladies

Odette tells the story of selling chickens and eggs as a child in order to care for the needs of herself and her friends in the refugee camps of Uganda.  By the time we finished, she likes to say.  We felt like those ladies from the big organizations who lend people money.

I always loved that part of the story--little girls feeling as powerful as grownups who were committed to making a change--but I didn't really know what she meant.  Until Tanzania.

In Tanzania, I met those ladies and immediately fell under their spell.  They are quiet, they are wise.  They are measured in their energy and fierce in their focus.  They are staring down poverty--its ravages, its sources, its brutal effects--and they know what to do.  They are executing their own particular brand of justice--passing over the one they are supposed to favor for that girl in the back with fire in her eyes.  They are placing their bets on that live wire, even as they readjust their enormous handbags and stamp the dust out of their fashionable shoes. 

They are believing the girls they choose can show the rest how to escape the bowels of hell. 

Meet Juliet, the program trainer for BEST.  It is her job to teach the entrepreneurial skills the poorest of the poor need to enter the market.  I watched as she checked in on all the women she serves, questioning them like your favorite aunt--the one who believes in you and at the same time won't mince words if you need to hear the truth.  She is tending them like a garden of possibility, one promising seedling at a time.

I don't always take a good picture, she told me. But I doubted it could possibly be true.  How could the camera not love this radiance?  How could the lens turn away from this bedrock determination that everything is going to be just fine?

Spirit Carries

We are walking on a thin muddy path that borders her rice patty.  This is the land she works with her husband in order to feed her children.  Before she obtained the seed capital from BEST, a locally founded NGO, she barely had enough to survive.  Her house was nothing more than pieces of sheet metal rigged together with scrap wood and rope.  Now she works this land and sleeps in a simple bed in a solid house with the profits of her own labor.

She is the tiniest slip of a woman, but her smile is wide and her steps are strong.  She is proud to show us what she has wrought with her own hands.  Her pleasure in this task radiates off her body, though she keeps her gaze to the ground and hardly says a word.

I try to wrap my mind around what it takes to keep this field, this family, alive and thriving.  I know I should be watching her hopeful eyes and capable hands for a sign, but all I can see is her feet.  How she carefully picks her way through the muddy field, how she knows where to step, how to walk, where to stand.  How the immense strength of her spirit carries her, even as the frailty of her body dares her destiny and expands her hope.

Against the Wall

The ladies of BEST have brought us to a small building, right next to a cell phone tower.  Outside, sewing machines hum as two young women pass pieces of batik under the needle, their chatter a happy staccato.  Inside, two women stand against a wall as a third prepares to grind peanuts into peanut butter.  We are here for a tour of this small but profitable food processing plant inspired by BEST. With funds from this simple endeavor, all three women can feed their children and move themselves further along in their entrepreneurial pursuits.

We stand quietly and watch, trying to give the emerging peanut butter all our awe and attention, but it is these beauties against the wall that capture our imagination.  In Africa, everyone is almost younger than they appear as the everyday difficulties of just getting by add unnecessary years.  This woman, I realize,  must be older, a slip of her scarf revealing a headful of graying hair.   She carefully wraps her scarf back around her head to conceal her secret--her smile bright, her face young with new possibilities.

These women used to farm, Juliet tells us, but decided to enter food processing when their work in the fields left them with a substantial enough profit. 

After a harrowing visit to the unforgiving rice fields, all I can think is smart move.  These women are taking their days back, rewinding the clock to collect their best efforts and turning them into the kind of ease they deserve.  This is by no means an stress-free life, but turning the food grinder sure beats turning the fields, and the laughter in this room convinces me that I'm stumbling on an old and obvious, well-known fact.

We photograph the process in honor of their success, but at the last minute I can't help but turn my camera to the beauty up against the wall.  I hope her progress here will give her back any joy she lost before she had a way forward.  I hope the wall will give way to more opportunities that bring her youthful delight.

The Only Time She Didn't Smile

These are the things that wreck you in Africa:

How the gift of your presence matters more than a thousand hours of "helping" and then some.

How the fact that you came is the real ground for transformation and repair.

How the reality of your imminent departure is registered with such genuine grief, you feel part machine, half human--for your inability to take it in.

We have no cultural equivalent for this level of transparency or kindness.  There is no way to absorb it other than to try to sit still and let it sink in.  To be together makes a difference.  To be close to one another generates a rare kind of hope.  To travel a long distance to see what matters to you here is a particular magic.

Even now after so many years of being with former refugees, political asylees and immigrants from all over the world, I meet all this with a blank stare.

You're sad, because we are leaving?  It matters because we were here?  I thought you'd love or hate me for what I did or didn't do.

Why is it so hard to believe that any of this makes a difference?  Why is it a small form of torture for us to let go of doing, good deeds, projects, so the wave of emotion can wash over us both?

We stand by the van, not sure what to do with our arms as you extend yours from heart to sky as we drive away.  At the last possible second we wave back--the goodness of the grief you model persuading us that presence matters.  This is how we begin to learn that the biggest gift we bring is not our goods or our services or even our ideas but our own selves--no matter how flawed or blind we are to what is most hopeful, to that which is most true.

To Be Greater Than

“The most authentic thing about us is our capacity to create, to overcome, to endure, to transform, to love and to be greater than our suffering.”  --Ben Okri

We didn't have time to hear her story.  We were rushing to stay on the schedule, to make it back in time.  To return to where I do not know, since the most true thing was the green of her fields, the honest determination in her eyes.

This is what a drive-by shooting looks like.  Just a split second with the truth.  Still, while we took what we wanted, she gave.  Willing to show us, though we didn't have time for silence or words, what it looks like to triumph.  Glad for us to know if only for a minute, what she could do with her mind, that green and her hands.