We are grateful for our vehicle, this love-gift half donated by the most generous people, and we don’t take it for granted. Climbing the mountain roads, up down around. There’s no pattern. No set swirl of a road that wraps tight round the mountain. It’s high roads that swerve to the right, left, down again, and suddenly gravel. Trees tower high above us, vines draping low, and tin houses firmly tucked into the mountain’s curves and jags. Our world is so vastly different than the worlds of the ones we pass on this road. For a moment in time and a brief location in space our worlds intersect… but our lives.. vastly different. They are tin walls with dirt floors and a tiny little spot with chickens and goats roaming free. Clothes hang on barbed wire wrapped round trees. Another tin house crawling with people- kids, grandparents, parents. They sit in clusters, hiding in the shade. Some in white plastic chairs, others laying on the dirt ground, others squatting beside. And it tugs at me, makes me miss home, and I want to say it’s familiar- I want to say it is how I grew up but it’s not. I didn’t have a tin house or dirt floor and I didn’t live with my extended family but I look closer at these people before whizzing past and it’s their faces that look so familiar. What looks like a dad and a daughter hover over a phone, laughing wildly with each other. A mother and a grandmother sit holding hands, grandmother in the rocker hunched over. A teen is on the ground with her feet crossed, and a toddler is crawling all over her. This is what is so familiar to me, this communal living I’ve longed for .. remember. Their world, so different from mine … but similar… kind of.
I remember these tin houses from my childhood. My sweet Mama and I took a trip with a few adults for a few days, up to the Bolivian mountains and I’m not sure why they let me skip school for this experience but maybe they all knew it would change me, the way most moments do. We sat on her dirt floor, I remember it so clearly. She was elderly. Her grey hair tied tight – braided down her back and her skirt covered the way she squatted next to the fire that kept her tin home warm. And she was weaving. She weaved bags to sell, but I’m sure she sold them for next to nothing and just savoured the friendships that came along with it. That’s how people are here: un-entitled and built for each other. I remember her asking if she could weave me a bag. She told my mother to bring me back at dusk, my bag would be ready, what colours do I want. Write your name in the sand, she added, I will weave your name into the side. Purple and orange, I whispered, and I slowly crafted my name into her dirt floor. Mom took my hand, and after drinking the only tea and eating the only bread she had that week in her home, we parted ways. And that night mom returned, gathered my personalized bag and this woman’s heart, paid her an amount I’ll never know, and left. That’s what I love about my parents. They gave big, but they gave quietly. I’ll never know the extent of what my parents did for others but I could always tell from their faces- as I was tucked behind their legs waiting patiently for the everlasting conversations to end.. I could always see it on their faces- tear stained and gawking. Grateful. Humble. Always humble.
We whiz past more tin houses, dirt floors and toddlers playing catch outside and I can’t help but feel this sense of HOME. This sense of familiarity that these are the families that know where it’s at. They’ve lost members to cancer and covid alike- lost cattle in famine and entire walls of their homes in flashfloods. And these are the families weaving bags to make friends not food, and who spread grace the way we spread butter/ all thick and generous. Variety, I think, is a luxury of the rich. I’m learning this again and again, trying to grasp this entitlement to variety we carry. Variety in regards to the food we buy, the schools we are able to choose from, the shoes we wear today, the church we attend, the friends we have, the events we participate in, the toppings on our ice cream, the flavours of pizza, the shampoo brands + tv shows + smart phones. The less variety we have, the more upset we becomes reflecting innate entitlement. And by “our” I mean mine.
I am learning that variety is a luxury of the rich, and maybe, if I want to learn from this culture, I need to eliminate my innate desire for variety which might lead to gratitude or at best,
Contentment.
Maybe this would lead to contentment.
Is this why she offered me a bag, with no expectation of money in mind? It was contentment in this simplicity – this absence of variety- bent over fire with these white people asking her how to live better and love greater and maybe this was her
Contentment:
Spreading life lessons the way we spread butter: all generous and thick.
The world is spinning around me, and I turn the AC higher, straight to my face, and I push the car sickness down lower, as if that’s a thing. My three year old won’t stop questioning and on a normal day, it my favorite quality about him: his curiosity, his ability to wonder, his constant quizzing. But my stomach pinches, the sweat beads drip and I squeeze my eyes shut.
Hayden. I snap sternly. It’s rest time.
Mom, what’s rest time? You always say rest time, but you never tell me what that means.
It means we are quiet, I reply. And already I am thinking about my words, wondering why and how and what…
he is three and he is absolutely right. To expect him to obey + to understand this concept of rest when he has never explicitly been told what this might look like.. we do it constantly. Expect our toddlers to obey, to understand based on context and vocabulary and commands we’ve never actually ever explained to them.
It means quiet, I whisper, and I wonder if that’s true.
Does rest really mean quiet? Is this why I struggle to rest? What if I remained quiet, in my rest? He obeys, now that he understand this concept I’ve demanded of him,
And I respect him more for all that he is. Maybe this is another part of this culture I’ve so longingly admired. The rest.
There is no better place to be than right here, always. For all of them.
The family in the front of that tin house, all laughs and rest and communal living, maybe this is what I’ve been waiting for. This lady, with my mother, weaving by her fire, nowhere different to be. No events to attend or meeting to run to.. she was just here. Present.
We make it to the top of the mountain, stop to watch the view. We stand there, drink it with our eyes. I attempt a video, but the three dimensional mountain scape does not transfer to a two dimensional phone- the depth perception is lost and I quit trying. We put the kids down, kneel low to the ground and point to the vast valleys and hills that reach to the sky for miles.
This. This is where God asked us to be. This.
And this means we learn to live a little different.
We adopt some values, drop some values, learn some values. We learn and we grow and that means that we begin to shed the entitlement of variety- the luxury of events to attend and time to “own.” It means we learn to rest. Quietly. Right here. And it means that little things, like wearing pants in public or masks outside our home or washing our hands before we eat are habits we continue because we know that it isn’t always for the benefit of ourselves.
It might never be.
And that’s love.
When you have to actually feel the sacrifice, that’s when you know it’s love.
Matt and Lisa Wiebe 