My Searing Bones Light the Way

“In African language we say ‘a person is a person through other persons.’ I would not know how to be a human being at all except that I learned this from other human beings.”

-Archbishop Desmond Tutu

I think I have been falling in love. And I didn’t even realize it fully. Sometime in the last six months I fell in love with the obnoxious way the fifth graders at Nicholson School would always ask me where I was going; the way they dug through my waste basket and left papers and wrappers scattered on the floor. I fell in love with listening to the teachers in the staff room talk to each other in Malayalam on hot afternoons: incomprehensible, yet comforting. Without knowing it I came to love the hanging lines of school uniforms drying in the sunlight and the broken step near the kitchen where I sometimes trip.

Last week, I had to say a lot of goodbyes. (A foretaste of the grief to come.) The school year in Kerala ends in March, and by last Friday all the students who are not taking government exams (i.e. everyone except grades 10-12) went home. And because classes are over now, most of the teachers who usually stay at the school also went home. Even though the older girls are still here studying for their exams, the school is much quieter, and I miss everyone. The dormitory where I live, which used to be full of laughing children, crumpled paper, and forts made from bed sheets and string, is empty now. It echoes when I walk to my room at night.

I was glad to have the opportunity to see everyone and say goodbye last week. I spent the first week of March in Sri Lanka with the other volunteers getting our visas renewed. We had a fantastic ten-day vacation there. Some of highlights included: swimming in the Indian Ocean where we met two giant sea turtles (see above) visiting some ancient Buddhist temples, and drinking lots of fresh mango juice. But just as good as this brief holiday was my return to Kerala. Coming back to Kerala and to my site at Nicholson School felt like coming home. The way some of the teachers and students faces lit up with smiles when they greeted me filled me with indescribable happiness.

We are people only through other people.

I hadn’t realized how much I loved everyone here until I had to say goodbye to them for the summer. I will see most of them again in June when next year’s school year begins, but seeing them leave was still very sad.




Love Like the Wild Geese

This week I recalled a poem by Temple Cone that is helping me remember how to plunge into my relationships with other people. To fall in love with everyone and everything without hesitation, regardless of the pain it may cause later.

If you do nothing else with your life
you can do this, you can love like the wild geese.
Because they are simple,
they do not even know what calls them
from the snow-clotted fields in spring,
only that their searing bones
light the way. Because they believe
they are immortal,
they rush over mountains, foothills, meadows
in waves of frightening speed,
since no one wants to live alone forever.

Last week I said goodbye to many people who have taught me how to be a person here in this completely different culture, but now I am starting to seek out and create new friendships that will hopefully grow with me during the summer months:

• Last Monday I visited a nearby boy’s orphanage for the first time. Though I was overwhelmed with meeting almost 50 children all at once, I spent a wonderful afternoon just hanging out with the boys. We went up to the roof where they taught me to play cricket. Using a stick for a bat and large plastic caps for balls, we played until evening fell.

• On Wednesday I sang a Malayalam song with a group of old women at an old age home, which specifically caters to the poor and to elderly people abandoned by their impoverished families. I didn’t know all the words to the song, and we sang in six different keys; but through these women, who were strangers a minute before, I am learning more about what it means to be a human being.

No one wants to live alone forever, and we are only human through our relationships with each another. After the sadness of saying goodbye to everyone for the summer, I am trying once again to plunge into new love and friendship. To rush over mountains and meadows. To let my searing bones lead me. To love deeply and all the time. To learn and relearn what it means to be a person through other persons. To try to love like the wild geese.