It matters little to the overall shape of things in the world that I know barnacles stand on their heads and eat with their feet. But I can tell you that it makes a great difference to me when I stoop at ocean’s edge and see them feed. What a delightful moment. Pleasure is immediate when I watch their fern-like feet search the shallow water for food. I feel like God has let me in on a private joke. I am glad I learned about barnacles.
Arketa stood her ground. For the first time in hours she was out of the lorry, her feet firmly planted on muddy ground somewhere between the villages of Zamou and Bangasu. Before her was a wide, swift river and at its edge was a raft—of sorts—a rattle of logs bound together and barely wider than the lorry itself. The attached motor hummed like helicopter blades sputtering under water. Raft workers raced around yelling to one another, hoisting and hauling ropes thick as their bare thighs and heavy as sin. Arketa studied the situation as she was told to climb back into the lorry.
A few years ago, as I was finishing up my seminary degree, I served on a ministerial search committee. One evening over dinner, the committee interviewed a fine man. True, his opinions about women’s service to the church differed drastically from mine, but heck, I was idealistic and optimistic. I had seen many people, including pastors, move from narrow ideas about women to adopt kinder, more tolerant views. Surely, it could be done again.
What should she do? It had never entered Arketa’s mind that she might leave M’boki—except to return to Sudan. But a return was clearly out of the question since for ten years, life in M’boki had become only more settled as news from home was only news of violence and unsettledness. Consequently, when a United Nations representative posted in M’boki first suggested that Arketa’s family emigrate, she dismissed the idea.
Why is it so hard to listen to others? What is it we are doing while others speak? We are talking to ourselves, practicing signals. I call it, “self-checking.” Self-checking is a preoccupation by which we assure ourselves that we are who we thought we were when we last checked. Children are great at it, till they grow aware of observers. Their open fascination with reflected images of themselves delights us all. Adults are nothing short of comedic in their discreet attempts of self-checking.
I did some minor manuscript editing for a friend. She writes of a young couple that anticipated adoption of a foster child they cared for since its birth. By a cruel twist of judiciary processes, they lost the child and any hope of adoption. Their sorrow was beyond consolation. Consolation was poor. My friend asked the woman, “How do you wish people had responded to you in this crisis?
AAAIIIIEE! Arketa straightened up and waddled from the field of slender cassava trees. She hung the hoe, collected bundles of cassava root and leaves the local citizen paid her for garden work, and headed home. The pain struck again. Arketa pressed one hand against her hardened belly, and with the other she steadied the precious bundle of food on her head. Cassava root is rich in starch, vitamin C and calcium, and the leaves provide protein. But who knew? Neither root nor leaf store well but no one in M’boki had the luxury of storing food. Pain or not, Arketa would not leave the cassava behind.
This is a true story and fitting, though perhaps not genteel. It began, “Charles Ray, are you listening to me?!”
That was my mother’s voice in the kitchen speaking harshly to my eleven-year-old big brother who was in some sort of trouble. His answer was “No, I’m listening to Granny.”
Arketa and Teresa yielded to pain, thirst, and diminishing light by slumping against a nearby tree that shielded them somewhat from the rain. Without children along, they “slept good.” Shorty before morning light, birdcalls woke Arketa. She winced as she rose onto swollen feet, slipping into the forest to relieve her self then, along with her sister, resuming the walk to M’boki.
One very warm April day, shortly before Easter, Arketa sat crouched in the small tree-hollowed pirogue for the crossing of the massive Mbomou River. As refugee women did, she wore bark cloth over her genitals and “leaves to cover dah butt.” Upon reaching the Democratic Republic of Congo shore, the forward oarsman jumped out and settled the boat. A cover of clouds complicated Arketa’s swift search for concealed crocodiles but did nothing to hamper the oppressive heat. Now visibly pregnant, she ran on bare feet toward the jungle’s edge and thanked God that she survived her third river crossing. Borrowed machete and digging tool in hand, she slashed a path forward, looking up for the winding yam vines that could twist sixty feet or more along tree trunks, through thick brush and clung to anything overhead. She and the two women she worked shouted out frequently to maintain proximity to one another and, they hoped, distance from wild animals.
Somewhere in the 153 miles between Arketa’s hometown, Yambio, and Bomboti, Arketa lost track of things which included the remaining fragments of her flip-flops. Miles, like the names of days, the passage of weeks, phases of the moon, condition of hair, smell of bodies or wounds were unmeasured, unmarked, and unimportant. Calendars, pens, telephones, work schedules, sacks of seed, church clothes, cooking pots, paychecks, laughter, lightheartedness and her eldest child—gone. Organized consciousness—gone; blown away by bombs. Arketa moved along first by the gestures of border police then by instinct, fear, and when she could see it, the setting sun.
Being real in the modern era requires living in but against technology. Saying that, I acknowledge the influence of French thinker, Jacques Ellul. In the small book, Perspectives on Our Age ,he shows that technology is more than a phenomenon; it is a point of view. The undergirding of this strong assertion is this? Technology, he says, suppresses the subject. Right. That is, people are subjects. Things created by technology are objects. Imagine the surprise then, when we realize that objects meant to free us from dreaded or difficult tasks have, in fact, become the merciless managers of people and their purposes.
“You are on dah boat?” Arketa asked over the phone.
“I am. We are docked at a harbor in British Columbia,” I said.
“In Canada? Ummm, up from dah water in Seattle but now dah boat is parked?”
When it comes to valuing others, surely it was more easily done when people lived in isolated villages, knew a small community well, and worried only to the edges of a square mile or two. That was enough.
How happy Arketa had been between March 1983 and March 1984. As a boss’s wife, she lived in a brick house rather than a tukul. As was common in her culture, she spent little time with her husband. Sudanese men lived mostly in an exclusively male world. Even Arketa’s house provided a room to which Joseph retreated to escape women’s activities.
To function well in our crowded world we need to know things about people. But we have little time, thank you, for discovery questions. So what a relief to learn that lingering is unnecessary to the process of collecting pertinent information. Efficiency rescues us. We have labels. Labels reproduce faster than rabbits or house cats, they insinuate content and they clarify such tings as duty, power, authority or lack of, income brackets, skills, limitations, intelligence, talents, or education. They swiftly provide pertinent information.
The menace of Sudan’s war remained intermittent during Arketa’s childhood. She wasn’t dead from bullets or from a fall in the forest of Bazia, no. Bruised and subdued, yes, but she had survived. Her siblings continued to shake their heads at her playful spirit while her mother worked to corrall it.
Sometimes my journal is kept well, sometimes poorly. In it I frequently note my setting, like noticing the antics of a cocky blue jay I see outside now as I write. How well I describe him is less important than what the activity of description requires. It demands that I pause to pay attention, and paying attention is tricky.
