A Reason to Believe (9 page)

What happened next was eerie. After the initial clamor to see who was hurt and how badly, silence descended. There were no wailing sirens, no rush of emergency medical teams, no squeal of other cars braking to see what had happened. We were alone in the desert with our calamity. And we would remain so (mostly) for three days.

I had minor bumps and a badly bruised hip, but nothing serious. Other injuries, though not life-threatening, were serious and painful, and those who were hurt were made as comfortable as possible. Strangely, there was a lot of fussing over me. I was the guest in their country, and according to the teachings of Islam and the customs of Sudan, my well-being was a priority. I was given food, water, and comfort and reassured that our plight would soon be over.
“Insha’Allah,”
they said: If Allah wills, all will be well. The understanding smiles increased in number and frequency. We built a fire and a makeshift camp. As the time passed, we began to look each other directly in the eye and communicate as best we could. The men told stories, which Kamal would translate for me, while the women combined beans, water, and oil to make the traditional meal of
foul
. Everything was shared. But when I tried to contribute my dates or nuts or bread, they were politely refused. I was the guest. I was embarrassed by so much attention, and also deeply touched.

No one seemed to be afraid. I took my cue from my companions and maintained my composure. When I asked Kamal how we would get out of this, he explained that we
were on a regular trading route and the driver had assured him that other lorries would come soon. He did not seem totally convinced and was even a little contemptuous of the driver, as if he wanted it understood by all that the accommodations were not up to his usual standards. But after that first night, sure enough, another lorry came along heading west and took Kamal and me and the few with broken bones to the next tiny outpost, about two hours beyond. It consisted of two or three mud and grass huts for the herders and a well with drinking water. There were a few families living there or several generations of one large family. They made us as comfortable as they could while we waited for our lorry to be unloaded, righted, and loaded again so we could continue our journey.

My desire to be a citizen of the world had reached an unsettling turning point. I realized that no one at home knew where I was and that we had no plan for getting either back to Khartoum or on to El Fasher. We had the communal cache of food and enough water. And we had each other. As the days passed into nights and into days again, that seemed to be comfort for all of us. We slept and lounged on rude beds of hemp strung across short, rough sticks. We drank tea and told stories, my catching what I could and explaining what I could with my few Arabic phrases, with signs, with acting out, or with Kamal’s help. The family elder was a thin, sturdy man whose wrinkled bronze skin and short gray beard were covered with a layer of sand dust, his bright brown eyes like pools of fresh
water in the desert. He took an interest in me. His stories, comments, and questions were so constant that by the third morning Kamal became exhausted from translating. Limping from my bruised hip, I walked slowly with him to inspect his herd of goats and played little hand-slapping games with his grandchildren. He came to like me enough, apparently, that he offered me one of his daughters as a wife and part of the herd. (It was, I believe, a package deal, but I’m not certain.)

On the third afternoon, our lorry came lurching into the camp, its alignment clearly ajar, the cargo and other passengers piled high again on top. Without much pause, we gathered our bags, bid our farewells, helped the injured into the cab, and climbed back on board. At dusk, several hours out, trying to cross a deep
wadi
(a gully cut through the desert by flash floods), the lorry started to pitch over, and everyone who could leapt off to safety. The driver tried to rock the lorry back and forth by shifting between first gear and reverse, trying to get enough traction to climb up the far side of the
wadi
. Then the engine died. We spent another night in a makeshift camp, waiting for help.

By now we were a band of brothers and sisters. All were frustrated, but all saw the absurdity and some even the humor in our plight. Everyone realized that we were victims of events beyond our control but chose to cope not with panic or recrimination but with kindness and mutual support. The care shown the people with the most serious
injuries was beautiful, the women simply stroking the hands of the injured and singing softly. It was so natural and so positive that it was not until long afterward that the danger of our circumstances settled on me. What emerged most forcefully was not fear but rather the sustained and triumphant grace of my companions. Even Kamal began to let his sense of his own superiority subside.

The next morning a lorry approached, headed east back to Khartoum. Our driver insisted that Kamal and I and those who were hurt should climb on top and ride back, and we reluctantly agreed. We rode much of the trip back in silence. I sensed that at some level Kamal was embarrassed about the experience, about how poorly he thought it reflected on his country and her people. But where he saw Third World disorder, I saw extraordinary generosity of every kind. At one point, we looked back from the horizon at each other at the very same moment and just started shaking our heads and laughing hysterically, releasing the tensions of the days before. Two or three days later, after we had found another lorry and refreshed our supplies, we set out again to El Fasher. After five long but uneventful days, driving by day and sleeping on the sand at night, we reached our destination.

There we found a room in a one-story concrete building that had an outside latrine and a cold-water shower. It was furnished with two of the hemp and wood beds that we had slept on while stranded in the Nubian. Nyala, on the
other side of the Jebel Mara, the mountain that dominates Darfur, was a larger town but much the same. We divided our time between the two towns. We ate
foul
twice a day, sometimes with goat cheese and sometimes with camel’s liver fried in strips and placed on top. Tomatoes and pungent onions in a little salad were a rare pleasure. During the Eid al-Fitr, the feast that marks the end of Ramadan, which was around Thanksgiving that year, we happened on a little camp across the mountain from Nyala and found a group of young men killing and frying whole chickens in a wok of boiling oil over an open wood fire. We sat under a spreading baobab tree for hours savoring the food and telling stories, my Arabic being pretty good by then. I did not know the word for
snake
, however, so I was a little slow to react when a small, deadly black mamba crawled under me and the men were yelling for me to move.

For months in Darfur, Kamal and I sat in the
souk
, befriending the young men who were the targets of the project, questioning them about what they knew about the employment training opportunities and what would make a difference in their decision to take advantage of them. Most of the time, Kamal asked the questions and I completed the surveys. After a little while, the pitfalls emerged, some so obvious as to make the original design of the project seem ridiculous. Using expensive power lathes in the classroom made little sense when power was
unavailable for much of the day and when no such equipment would ever be seen at a Sudanese construction site. Offering classes during market hours was pointless when those same “unemployed” young men were out hustling, selling cigarettes or newspapers in the
souk
to earn enough to eat that day. Class sites too distant to get to from the
souk …
Well, you get the picture. For the project to work, we concluded, classes would have to be offered in or near the
souk
, after it closed, in skills needed and with tools used on a typical Sudanese construction site. The most effective incentive to bring the young men in was food.

After several months in Darfur, with a mixture of excitement and sadness Kamal and I boarded a retrofitted bus from China for the trip back to Khartoum. Many of the young boys and men I had met in the El Fasher
souk
came to see us off. We bounced along toward Khartoum, the bus packed, hot, and squalid, with my knees banging against the screws in the back of the metal seat in front of me until they bled. But I sensed I had been in the presence of something—in Darfur and across Africa—more meaningful than I could get from any book or class.

After my work in Sudan was finished, I traveled to Cameroon in West Africa, and then hitchhiked from there across Nigeria to Lagos, its capital, befriending strangers and spending the night in the homes of people I met along the way. Before the end of my fellowship year, I had trekked extensively around West Africa, through large cities and tiny villages, verdant bush and dusty desert. Benin,
Togo, Ghana, Mali, Niger were each so different—each with points of great pride, each with its own personality, its own aspirations and grudges.

I had never seen such poverty. It made my own experience growing up in Chicago seem small and insignificant. Most people lived in rudimentary shelters. Even in urban and highly developed Cairo, the poor crowded together as squatters on the roofs of the elegant apartment buildings along the Nile. Everything was put to use, every part of every animal, every part of every crop. And everything was shared. The generosity of material and spirit humbled me and changed me. I surrendered to it. Though I was sometimes painfully lonely as weeks turned into months without contact with home, I was repeatedly touched by the simple kindness of strangers. I met people on jitneys traveling between villages or on a plane, and through them I found a place to eat or lodging for the night. I felt as though I was being handed from one stranger to the next, hardly without interruption.

Even before my year was over, I knew I had stood in places that I could have never conjured on my own, and I had received what I had come for: a deeper understanding of how broken, impoverished, or otherwise challenging surroundings could not defeat the resourcefulness and generosity of people. I also received a daily lesson in compassion, a reminder of the transformative power of grace across all cultures, a template for how to treat those who speak, dress, or pray differently than I.

Those lessons have served me well in the increasingly rich gumbo that is America. In the years since, I have tried to bring those lessons into my practical life, rather than keeping them as just travel souvenirs. It is surprising how contrarian they feel in today’s culture. In our age of high-decibel hate-mongering and attack ads gone viral, grace and generosity are sometimes viewed as quaint relics from a lost era. But that special giving of the spirit, which I first witnessed growing up and which was then so vividly reinforced in remote villages in Africa, sustains us all.

In my second campaign for governor, I was invited to meet with the Islamic American community and I agreed. Many members of the community were sensitive to how they had been shunned, even profiled, in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001, and they were hungry to have their pain acknowledged. Few politicians would accept an invitation to meet publicly, so it became a small sensation when I agreed. On the appointed day, more than a thousand faithful of all ages and stations in life crowded into the sanctuary at the Islamic Center in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. A score or more of the religious leaders sat behind me on the dais. TV cameras and a few nervous campaign staff watched every move. The air conditioner strained to keep us comfortable.

My remarks were limited. Most of the time was devoted to me listening to them, the stories of American citizens with Muslim surnames or foreign accents treated for that reason as suspects or outcasts, stories about their
craving for understanding. I listened, remembering what grace had been shown me over thirty years before, what a difference it made not to be treated as an unwelcome stranger. Another candidate characterized the meeting as “pandering to terrorists.” I viewed it as just the governor meeting with constituents or, even more, as one member of the community talking with others about matters that went far beyond politics. It was living a lesson.

Life is brimming with these opportunities, chances to expand your horizon and discover grace and generosity in unexpected places. Sometimes to see them you just need to try a different perspective.

Reginald Lindsay grew up poor in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, but earned a place at Morehouse College in the 1960s, the first in his family to attend college. As a freshman, he and his classmates were invited to a rather formal dinner to meet the school’s legendary president, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays. T-bone steak was served, a rare if not unheard-of indulgence for Reg, and he ate greedily. When he had eaten as much as he could with his knife and fork, he picked the bone up and, in his words, “commenced to gnaw at it.”

Dr. Mays’s wife, Sadie, was sitting nearby. An elegant, upright, Victorian force in her own right, she did not
correct him outright. Instead, she offered him her own plate and said kindly, “Take mine, son.”