Читать книгу In This Place - Kim L. Abernethy - Страница 6

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. I Corinthians 13:1

Fat and Sassy

We stepped out of the plane smack dab into the middle of a strange, but intriguing world; the place to which God had asked us to move, to live, to raise our children, while sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to those around us. After respectfully giving us time to greet the waiting missionaries, the African Christians moved in to take a closer look at the new arrivals. Soon I was surrounded by at least a dozen African women pressing in, trying to touch Michelle’s hair. She would have none of that and held on to my neck tightly.

At the same time, I heard some of the Africans praising Jeff, pumping his hand enthusiastically as they kept looking back at me. It was an effort to understand what they were saying even though it was in English. The Liberian English accent was a uniquely rounded, musical sound that took time to pick up. Nevertheless, I thought I heard them rhythmically chanting, “Tank you, teacha, for your fat wife! She’s too fine, she’s too fat! Oh, tank ya teacha for your FAT wife!” (Thank you, teacher, for your fat wife.) It was at that moment I was glad that I had a head cold to blame for my watery eyes.

Our belongings were cursorily loaded into several well-used wheelbarrows as we were invited to walk the fifty yards to our new home. After we had been shown to our mud block house with concrete floors and only screens in the windows, I succumbed to the despair of realizing how far away I was from my mother and that I was stuck in the African jungle ministering to people that enjoyed calling me fat! Jeff had forgotten to warn me about that unusual “perspective“ on body size.

To an African, if you had any meat (and fat) on your bones, you must surely be blessed by God. For you see, that would mean you had the means to buy and eat all the food you wanted. Once I heard the explanation, I felt humbled and somewhat thankful. It still stung my pride a little about the “fat” part, but I tried to submit to the cultural contradictions that were certain to happen frequently.

As much as I loved our house, the layout of the rooms, and the simple quaintness of it, my mind was still on overload with the reality of how far away we were from America. I started fantasizing about how I could get in the one engine plane, return to Monrovia, hop a larger plane headed to Europe, take another plane to NYC, and from there board a plane that would take me to Charlotte. A plane where it would be climate-controlled, where they would speak English in an accent that I could understand, and where they would serve peanuts and Cokes. However, that conjecture did nothing but make the helplessness and despair mount up in my soul even more! I was a panic attack in the making if I didn’t stop.

For weeks, I battled the fantasy of leaving that intriguing, but strange place and never coming back. Though I did not write down the verses God used to assure me that I was in the right place, He reminded me of how I was created...to be an adventurer for this very time! God tenderly revealed to my hurting heart that He knew my frame and exactly what I was supposed to be doing. I was reminded of that repeatedly as I learned the idiosyncrasies of living on a mission compound in the African jungle and little by little acknowledged that He would be sufficient for me and that He would use me in spite of myself.

Pampered American

A couple of days after getting used to our house, I wrote in my journal:

After we started unpacking our container, we realized how much we had as Americans in comparison to the Liberians. Some items that we brought out now seemed silly and frivolous, but yet, there they were, a reflection of the person I had been just a few weeks before. It was an ethereal feeling but yet freeing to think that we could really live without so many things. The American mindset can so often trap us into thinking that we simply cannot do without our things.

Jeff paid some of the Bible school students to help unload our belongings into the house, and I remember feeling a little shiny and pampered. The men were so kind and never made any comments around us about what they were unloading, but their silence did make me wonder what they went back and told their wives about the American missionaries and their things. I have learned over the years of living in West Africa that most Africans expect that we would live differently than them, so perhaps they were not thinking anything negative at all.

Another notion to be accepted was that we were fundamentally, in most every way, somewhat distanced from them because of who we were and where we came from. There was no way that we could understand them on their basic cultural level. The most comforting thing was that we had come to share Christ and when that was accepted, the bond we had in our Savior would cross over many of those physical and cultural barriers. All of that took time. One basic truth that spanned the years that we spent ministering to and with Africans is that even in that tight Christian bond, there was also a fragile liberty of mutual acceptance of each other’s culture and perspective. That acknowledged, anything was possible.

Food, Food, Food of the Jungle

So many Liberians came to our house the first week to welcome us, it almost seemed overwhelming! Many of them remembered Jeff from the year before when he had come out on a survey trip, but it seemed that all the people we met were thrilled that we were there. I was personally thankful that there was no more discussion about my fatness. It was heartwarming to see how much they cared that we had come to live among them. One of the most endearing things about an African is that they never visited without bringing something meaningful. Our pantry floor was quickly scattered with bowls and bags of exceptional West African country rice, fresh vegetables and fruits, and some cooked dishes that took a little courage to sniff and taste. It meant so much because they, who had so little, wanted to share with us.

This is a good place to describe some of the rice dishes that the Liberians cherished as their “bread of life”. They call their dishes “rice and soup” even though the soup is much more like a thick stew that is put on top of the rice. Liberian soup is prepared by first cooking meat and onion in a good amount of oil (mostly palm oil) until very tender. They would then add whatever vegetable they had on hand: eggplant, okra, bitterball (a small round eggplant-like food that was indeed very bitter tasting), potato greens (much like the tops of a sweet potato here in the States), cassava greens (which was much like collard greens in texture but had a much more pungent flavor). Cassava green soup or potato green soup became one of my family’s favorites; however, after all the years of living in West Africa, I just could not acquire a taste for either of those green soups though I did eat them when they were offered.

African cooks would add the vegetable of choice and then some bouillon cubes usually as the only seasoning, unless they were a Liberian tribe that cooked all their soups with hot peppers. After simmering the soup for a while, they would serve this flavorful concoction over their delectable country rice. My two particular favorites were peanut soup (chicken and ground peanuts in a tomato-based broth) and okra soup. When available, which wasn’t very often, we would also enjoy green bean or collard green soup.

One of their poor man’s meals when they didn’t have rice would be something that the Gio people in our area called “dumboy.” They would prepare the cassava root into a starchy eatable dish that was served with any kind of very slippery type soup such as okra. They would boil the cassava, pound it in a mortar until it became sticky and then would be shaped into a ball. Pinching off small amounts of the dumboy, they would roll it into a ball and then dip it into the “slippery” soup. Because the dumboy was of a chewy substance, the key would be to dip the ball into the soup and then swallow the ball without chewing. I, for one, enjoyed chewing my food too much, so I never really got into making an entire meal of that dish. It was a true favorite of most missionary kids there in Liberia.

Palm butter soup is perhaps the icon of Liberian food, though it is the hardest to describe. It deserves its own paragraph and its own place in the annals of unique and exotically delicious international dishes. Indigenous to the West African region (as far as I know), palm butter is a taste that rivals any of the foods I have ever experienced. There’s nothing, however, in our American fare that compares to it, and we’ve been told that describing how it tastes is no where near like actually taking a bite of its fibrous golden texture. In a nutshell, palm butter soup is made entirely from the red, ripe palm nuts. They are boiled until the hard, outer shell and the fibrous covering disintegrate. Using a strainer, they remove everything except the butter. Boiling the butter until thickened–much like broccoli cheese soup–they then added chicken and onion. Though it is one of the most popular meals among the Liberians, the cooking process was also very tedious.

Little Help From My Friends

Friends are special, holding important places in our lives no matter who they are, where we meet them, and how often we see them. I had learned back in high school that friends did not have to be the same color as me or even have the same cultural background to bring depth and joy to my life. It was no different in Liberia. From the very beginning of our Liberian ministry, Mary Kwiah was such a friend.

From the beginning, there was a special connection even though she lived in a dirt floor hut and had delivered ten children with only seven having survived. There were some things that I could not understand about her life and vice versa, but we knew that we both loved God, both loved our husbands and children, and we both loved to laugh. Laughter protrudes delightfully beyond cultural and language barriers, and it was definitely so for Mary and me. Seeming to understand some of my struggles of adapting to her culture, she would show up at just the right time, teaching me so much about living in Liberia. And though she laughed at some of my perceptions of her birthplace, she gently explained some of the unfamiliar nuances as best she could. Months later, she was instrumental in encouraging me to learn her tribal dialect that I studied for the first two years while we lived in Liberia.

Liberian “Chocolates”

From day one in our new home in the West African jungle, Jeff, Michelle and I were initiated into the world of Liberian “chocolates.” It is not a pleasant thing to talk about, but was so much a part of the new missionary experience that it must be told. Bodies that have been pampered with consistently clean drinking water do not passively accept having to ingest water teeming with hoards of deadly microscopic parasites. Have you guessed what “Liberian chocolates” are? Foreign bacteria in water, oily and unfamiliar foods and meats: all those things are very hard on a virgin American digestive system. My journal reads:

Let me go back to our bathroom episodes. Whether it was the water or something we ate, Michelle and I both got the Liberian “chocolates” as Jeff affectionately called this. Shell didn’t know what was happening to her. I found the “chocolates” everywhere. Bless her heart, she would try to go to the potty, but it never came like that. Today Jeff has the problem. Michelle is better but has a bad rash and I think I’m pretty cleaned out for now. It was the total detox program, but one that you would not want to experience very often!

We had only been in Tappi for about three days when I was forced to acquaint myself with one of the ways clothes would have to be dealt with if they became soiled between wash days (mainly on Saturdays). We inherited large metal washing tubs from a previous missionary, so I carried them outside and attempted to wash clothes much like my great-grandmothers must have. I put the soiled “chocolate” clothes in a tub with mild Clorox water, letting them soak for an hour or so, and later rinsed them in the large sink located in our wash kitchen. What an initiation! The only thing that seemed to be missing was a scrub board. Probably just as well as my knuckles would not have appreciated the work out!

Inspired By a White Gio Man

For years, our mission compound had been host to one of the largest Christian conferences held in northern Liberia. The annual Mano/Gio Conference attendees were people from the surrounding region consisting of two cousin tribes (in that many of the words translated close enough so that a Gio could understand a Mano and vice versa). The conference was always held around the first of the year and brought a bustling to our compound that I never imagined could happen in our remote area. In perspective, Tappeta was a rather large town compared to many of the small villages where some of the attendees lived

We had only been in Tappeta for one month when the 1986 conference began, and so it was with great excitement that we planned to attend much of the festivities. The highlight for me during that conference was when Missionary Tom Jackson, an American man, who had felt led to translate the entire Bible into Gio, stood up to speak. A man short in stature and closing in on his 70th year, he bellowed out his greetings in both Mano and Gio—and then continued to preach for almost an hour totally in the Gio language! I was mesmerized. It was so obvious that those attending had the upmost respect for Tom and his wife June. When I asked a Gio woman later about how well she thought Teacher Tom did with her language, she said, “Huh! The man wrote our language! He know it too fine!”

Tom was esteemed as a true white African Gio man. I heard that from several pastors during the conference and it touched the linguistic side of me like nothing else. Always having a love and natural affinity with language, it evoked in me the realization that I, too, could possibly speak to those precious people in their native tongue. Tom was a great encouragement to me over the next couple of years, and even visited on several occasions (they lived in a village about 30 miles from us), passing on his burden for translating the Old Testament in Gio. He was concerned that he would perhaps not live long enough to finish the task and saw in me, the continuance of his dream. I was both honored and petrified! Taking it as a challenge, I offered God my willingness to do that kind of work down the road if it was what He would want me to do.

My first practice site became the weekly market there in Tappi. Each town of any significant size hosted a weekly market day where those living in the area could bring their food or wares to sell. It was a little bit carnival, little bit farmer’s market, and a little bit family reunion kind of thing. When I first visited the Wednesday market in Tappi, I realized that the majority of women who were selling at their individual booths only spoke one of the two local dialects. They did not understand English at all. That was a frustration for me who loved nothing more than to be able to communicate with everyone around me. That realization aroused the need in me to learn the local dialect even more.

The reality was that without me learning Gio, I would never be able to communicate with some of the market ladies, so with a little convincing from my friend Mary and others like Tom Jackson, my attempt to learn the Gio dialect was launched. Loving a challenge and having a great desire to communicate effectively with the town women, I stuck with it.

After about six months of studying and practicing short, simple phrases, I went into the Wednesday market. A little timidly, I meandered around and started greeting the women in their own language, carrying on limited conversations with some of them. The fervor grew when the news that the white woman was speaking their language, and within minutes, some of the market women had put the “fat” white missionary lady on their shoulders and began to dance around the market. The celebratory dance was their way of showing gratitude for my efforts in learning to talk with them in their own dialect. That day remains a highlight of my entire African ministry!

At the following annual Mano/Gio conference in January 1987, I was slated to teach a Bible class to the older women. The first day I surprised the ladies by reading all my scriptures from my very own Gio New Testament, giving all my scripture references in Gio. So thankful was I that God had allowed me to learn some of the language of those around us! I prayed, too, for the ability to love them just as He loved them. Speaking their language without loving them deeply in my heart....well, surely that would be way too brassy!