Tangled roots

One recent Sunday afternoon I spent bent over, digging in the dirt of our front flower bed, transplanting marigolds and shaking my head at the copious amount of white tile and debris mixed in with the dirt. As I straightened up, trowel in hand, I saw one of my tall daughter’s friends standing in our driveway. “Hello, Auntie,” she said shyly, “you look nice today.” I glanced down at my muddy skirt and blouse, dirty from gardening and an overly warm welcome from a friend’s small puppy, and in amazement I said, “Oh, thanks!” I was struck by the maturity of this young girl, who dared not only to venture into the adult world of compliments, but did so kindly and gently.

As I mused upon this interaction, I thought again of the power of words. I thought of my grandmother, now at peace in the presence of Jesus, her ashes buried in a wooden box under the spring-green grass on a hill far away. I thought about how my grandmother was like a tree in my life, rising bold and strong and true, and how even though that tree is now fallen, the roots remain. And as I have shared long conversations with my parents this week, my beloved parents visiting here with us in Tanzania, I have felt new life and encouragement coursing through my veins. They too are tall and mighty trees, with roots that intertwine with mine, shaping me and binding me and holding me upright.

Yesterday my parents and husband and children and I walked down to the house of our lovely dada, our Tanzanian maid, who lives with her parents and sister and some nieces and nephews in a house just down the dirt road from our neighborhood. We enjoyed the abundant hospitality so intrinsic to life here: hours of lingering conversation, hot food prepared as we sat and waited, and a tour of the garden, where beans and corn, cassava and papaya, coffee and bamboo grow. It was the kind of welcome that says, “Your presence is a gift,” and when we left, the sisters walked us all the way home, carrying our bags on their backs. After the visit, I felt even more connected to our dada—I felt the way her roots and my roots had tangled, our words and lives and limbs brushing and sticking together, our stories altered by the intersection and interaction of this day.

But not all cultural clashes are so gentle. In my reading through the Old Testament, I have been dwelling of late in the book of Joshua, and this week I read of the parsing out of the promised land to the twelve tribes of Israel. On paper it seems so tidy and clean—a handful of cities here, a handful there, and don’t forget a few cities for the Levites. But this wasn’t a vast, uninhabited patch of wilderness that the Israelites were divvying up. To claim this land as their own meant mass slaughter or enslavement. I understand their dedication to the Lord, but I cringe at their methods and the messiness of mingling on a patch of earth. And yet the story is an old, old story, set on repeat, the sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve fighting for land to call their own.

This week I too fell prey to a squabble over a patch of earth. As we have settled into life here, I have slowly taken over caring for our flower and garden beds, weeding and transplanting and buying new annuals to brighten up the place. A handful of Tanzanian women work as gardeners here in our housing complex, but our interactions with them have proved quite frustrating. My husband asked one gardener to water our wilted flowers, and instead she pulled them all up. Several of the gardeners will hack back plants instead of carefully pruning them, preferring to let the tropical weather grow them out again. Then a few days ago, when I politely asked another gardener to clear out a patch of weeds in the back beds, she flat-out refused. Confused and frustrated, I did it myself, yanking up the weeds while she stood by watching. I found out later that she had interpreted my instructions as somehow contradictory to the instructions of her supervisor, and we made amends, but the whole episode left me grumpy, my feathers ruffled. Oh, yes, the garden is just a small bit of earth, but the desire to claim it as my own (even though I am a stranger here) is undeniable. Isn’t this how we are created, with a need to take earth and tend it, to grow food and beauty from the soil around us? “Yes,” I want to say, “I know this land is your land, but couldn’t I rule over this small bit, and do with it what I want to do?”

But like a child playing a grown-up game, I must enter the conversation with more humility. I must tread kindly, lightly, remembering that this Tanzanian sister is more valuable in the sight of God than all the ground we stand upon. If in this tangled garden, I pull too hard, I may break not only my neighbor’s roots, but mine as well. And so I steep in the wise words my grandmother wrote as a farewell to her family and friends: “If, perchance, in God’s grace and mercy, your life and mine have intertwined in some personal or specific way, I acknowledge my own failures to see the light in times of darkness and humbly praise our heavenly Father that all of us were being guided by the Holy Spirit into a greater knowledge of the Light and Love of Jesus, to whom be honor and glory and praise forever.”