Travel changes you. That much I knew. I’d read about it, seen it in friends, heard lectures on it. Foreign land, air, and sea reshape what is known of the earth physically. Mud homes, wrinkled faces, calloused hands realign ideals concerning wealth, work, and relationship. I even anticipated the spiritual upset that African churches and practices could stir up. I expected, all this time, to be affected by the place I was travelling to. However, what I did not prepare myself for was the flipside of the human element. I fortified myself for the Tanzanians I would meet and completely overlooked the fact that I would be living and traveling completely and intimately with twenty-one of my peers for three months. I did not anticipate the ways I would be challenged by my fellow students on this study abroad program.
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Footage from the first week. Poem:
It started small An initial trickle of soul-nourish stuff you’d know it if you felt it I’m certain everybody does at least once I felt it first from inside a flying machine stood witness to the proud Swiss Alps and was dumbed by the impressionist’s pallet which colored my mind for the second time that day And all at once I was Other, in a new country feeling the peculiar purity of being just another nameless stranger seeking something equally unnamable It surfaced slowly the feeling that this foreign place might hold everything I’d always looked for in an Elsewhere be the missing essence of my cyclic ebb and flow- pave streets and shoe-d feet My favorite story in “See So That We May See”, a collection of traditional Hayan folktales from Tanzania collected by Peter Seitel, starts with a couple lines that are almost liturgical. The teller says, “I came and I saw for you” and the audience responds, “See so that we may see”. It ends with the words, “When I had seen these things for you I said, ‘Let me go and report them.’” The story, titled “Satisfaction”, is a moralization tale that speaks to the place of hunger, shame, and gender roles in Hayan culture. Some of other aspects of the story are an emphasis on family ties, the repetition of certain important phrases, a minimalist writing style, poetic phrasing and stanza breaks, inclusion of song, and a shrouded moral at the end. After reading and being moved by “Satisfaction” I decided to mimic the style and write my own African folktale which appears below.
... Wide-Eyed One I came and I saw for you Audience: See so that we may see. There was a man And this man was a father and he had a wife who was a mother For she had bore two children, a son and a daughter The man also had a father whom he was born to many years before And all together in one homestead Lived this grandfather, father, boy, mother, and sister. Together they were for meals and speaking and sleeping Apart they were during the day- while each did as was expected of him or her. The sister (who was young) played in the dirt the boy (who was capable) herded the goats the mother (who was faithful) prepared ugali the father (who was strong) farmed the shambas and the grandfather (who had lived) sat with other mzees drinking bamboo beer and telling stories. One day |
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November 2015
AuthorLaura Johnson is a junior writing major at Houghton College. Laura writes for The Houghton Star, Mousailink, and One Mission Society. This virtual space is a journal of things that matter to her; tales, musings, wanderings. |