The Pursuit of Happ(i)ness

Someone once said that love is blind. That someone must have known something very honest about love. I think he knew that love pulls a fast one on us, making us believe one thing but not cluing us into the fact that we may be the only one to see it that way. Maybe it's a little more like a pair of tinted glasses no one else has worn, this thing called love.

Why the focus on love? I am thinking about this because the last 11 or 12 weeks of my life have been colored with a lot of interesting things; things that sometimes makes me forget that I'm a white girl in Africa.

Notice, I seem to be forgetting myself more than anything. Frankly, it’s not very easy to forget you are living in the middle of nowhere in Africa. I wake up to an actual tambourine ringing at an ungodly hour, watch the electricity go off about 20 times a day and feel an unholy abhorrence in my tummy towards ugali and other African specialties. I can scientifically prove that there are more ants in Tanzania than there are stars in the sky and I am CONVINCED that Mt. Kilimanjaro is really just a cosmic science experiment gone bad. Seriously, who would mount a sno-cone in an open-faced sauna? Signs of Africa are everywhere around me. But somewhere between all the signs of life and the constant noises of kids and talking, I forget that I am in a hard place, that Tanzania struggles under a lot of pain, and that most of the kids in Africa will always think that Norway is next to Canada and the US, if they don't think Norway is a village, that is. But most of all, I forget that I am at an orphanage.

Like a lot of people who come to a far-off place, I had a vision in my head of what an orphanage looked like and what working there would entail. And in none of those pictures did I see myself or kids having nearly so much fun, so many laughs, so much tickling or play so many games as I have here. I’m willing to admit that some of the…uh…mayhem...could be my fault. Simultaneously a pupil and a victim of my older brother’s torturing methods, I became quite a skilled instigator/actress in what you might call the art of provoking squealish, squirming delight.

But what I have sat down to write regarding Nyumba ya Furaha, The Joyful Home’s fitting KiSwahili name, is when that inner crust shakes every now and again you stop and really look at each child’s heart. You remember that they are not glowing with life because life happened naturally for them. They are here at Nyumba ya Furaha because life happened unnaturally, and they are learning to live and grow up despite the glitch in the universal system of family. Most of the time, though, you just don’t see this sort of sadness or anything to pity about these nine kids, and it isn’t because they have everything in the world. Quite the contrary, they have few things and eat few delicacies. New clothes aren’t new; they are just new to them now that they have been handed off from someone else who bought new clothes for themselves. They don’t go out for pizza on the weekends or have family trips to the movie theatre. On birthdays, they don’t get many gifts or cards with money from distant relatives. On Christmas, sometimes they don’t even go home or have a home to go to.

These are the moments where the thin veneer over happiness becomes a little more transparent, the moments where you feel how from one second to the next an entire one or two or three months of laughter vaporizes. This is when the tinted lenses come off and you see a very different world than the one you’ve lived in. But then, something amazing happens…a few minutes later, you can make them laugh again. You don’t have to put your rose-colored glasses on to tell that they are really happy children with true happiness lighting up their soul just then. But you do have to stop and take some serious stock of what you think about happiness if an orphan in Africa can be happier than you and the kids you know.

Strange though this may seem, I have nothing depressing to tell you about Africa or about the orphanage. Remember when I began, I was talking about love, not pain. So it is 500 words later, when I have let some of my day’s travels pour out onto an electronic page. You see, it isn’t depressing because, despite the unnatural outplay of one of the early scenes of their lives, these kids are not sad, not in the least. These few months here at Nyumba ya Furaha have been some of the most joyful, silly and ebullient months of my life( although in all fairness I haven’t a single memory before the age of three so those first few years could have been quite silly as well. No one was never crowned graceful for the methods they used to take their first few steps). So it is with these kids, some of them who were abandoned as early as age three/four. Against all odds, these kids have really mastered the pursuit of happiness that Thomas Jefferson penned into immortality even if TJ didn't really outline what happiness is.

All happiness may be at the end of the day is a memory. It is remembering that no matter what tints your shades at the moment, life still has value. And of all things happiness never forgets, it's the concept of value.

Take that, TJ.

Tales from a Happy Home

The natives here have a saying. They say that Kiswahili was born in Tanzania, got sick in Kenya, died in Uganda and was resurrected in the Congo. Hearing jubilant chatter float up from around the washing area outside Nyumba ya Furaha, you would have no doubt that Swahili was born here in Tanzania. The joyful banter of the nine kids at Joyful Home is a mess of yelps and squeals and the occasional blood-curdling scream when some unfortunate soul is ‘beaten’ by his brothers and sisters. ‘Beating’ is the English equivalent for everything from corporal punishment to rough play. Anyone who gives you a sharp smack on the arm is even accused of beating you. Rarely do the tears and screams last more than a few minutes. Tutayo, a Masai girl from a distant village, says it is because African babies are tough; they do not cry. No offense to Tutayo, but that is not quite right. African kids may rarely cry, but the babies are wailing all the time. But then if we’re honest, most adults are crying all the time, too; they just don’t let it show.

Crying or no crying, Tutayo is right about one thing at the orphanage that I work at. For all the kids and all the ‘beatings’, there is not much crying. Just like its Swahili name, Nyumba ya Furaha, the Joyful Home really is a fountain of joy overflowing on a dry, dusty plain beneath a quiet mountain. It seems there is always laughter there. And like every truly beautiful thing, laughter does not come in a word. It comes in the midst of life, unfolding itself in a single, unsuspecting moment but lasting for eternity in the memories of those who beheld it. The glorious thing about laughter is that it moves not by car or wave or pen, but through the heart, so you can carry it with you everywhere. Let me carry some of our laughter to you, today.

The Joyful Home carries nine kids who together make up one of the oddest families you could ever picture. Just now, the oldest, Neema, is 13; the youngest, Baraka F, might be as young as six. In February we celebrated his seventh birthday but depending on the day you ask him, he may or may not adamantly insist that he is already eight. Between Neema and Baraka F there are seven other kids, two more girls and five astonishingly energetic boys.

I haven’t met all the kids you’ve ever known in your life, but I assure you that you have never met kids who clean as much as these kids do. Every morning they rise with the dawn and make an astonishing raucous with dripping buckets, water squeegies and wet rags as they clean the Joyful Home and themselves. Cleaning subsides into a feast of white bread and sweet tea for breakfast, where they eat all their meals at three wooden tables in one of the bigger rooms in the house. Breakfast is usually uneventful, except for the one day that a visitor joined the morning meal. In the middle of bread crumbs and scalding tea, a scorpion slid out of hiding and into full view. Mad chaos broke out among the table-dwellers save for one kid who was strangely silent. Israeli said nothing, just bolted up from his chair and shot out of the room as a discussion broke out about how to get rid of it. The talkers were far too slow. Before any plan could be plotted, Israeli came barreling back into the room with a machete brandished high and sliced the scorpion in two. He casually tossed the machete aside and sat back down to his bread and chai.

I know, I know, machetes and nine-year-olds and slicing scorpions in two all sounds very exotic, but if you knew Israeli, this would not seem odd at all. His hobby is banging things—walls, dirt, floors, the small doghouse the kids built outside the Joyful Home. When he doesn’t have a hammer in his hands it is usually because someone has taken it away. Israeli’s obsession for hammers and hitting things was strongly comforting while we sat in the immigrations office watching officers talk about our visa papers because we knew that if worst came to worst, we could count on Israeli to come bust us out of prison.

When there are no hammers to play with or people to break out of prison, Israeli plays with normal toys like soccer balls and toy cars and flashlights, or “torchies” as the kids affectionately call them here. And of course, there is one more toy ever-presently at hand for young Israeli, and that is the vast and wild land of Africa. Beyond the unfortunately scorpion there are ants, bugs, beetles, grasshoppers, flies, wiggle worms, centipedes, millipedes, donkeys, and fellow boys to chase around. I once saw Israeli grow tired of even all these toys, though, and watched as he climbed to the top of a slender tree growing just out front of the Joyful home. And when I say slender, I mean this was a gangly sapling. A sloth would have turned its nose up at this tree. But the stone the builders rejected became the capstone of Israeli’s great day as he shinnied up the smooth bark and planted himself right smack on top of the tree. The thin wisp of a wood shuddered back and forth as the willowy boy began full out swaying back and forth as though a huge gust of wind had come up. All that had come up was a burning song in Israeli’s heart. I melted into laughter as I watched one happy kid swinging the treetop back and forth and belting out a loud song at the top of his lungs.

Welcome to the Joyful Home.

On the Banks of the Nile

There are many ways to get to Jinja, Uganda, and all of them have two things in common: fear and a recurring urge to hurl. Especially if your mode of transportation is a coach bus of which you had slightly misplaced expectations when you stepped aboard back in Boma.

Trust me, you'll have no regrets about the coach from Boma to Arusha and up through the border between Kenya and Tanzania. It's when you find yourself sitting in the window seat when the driver takes a diagonal turn on unfinished dike in a construction zone in Nairobi that you become very Catholic very quickly. As the engine groans and stretches up over the soft pile of dirt on the high edge of the ditch even the most arrogant of people would convert to the school of penitence. And when you get to the top of the hill and start to feel the road giving out, grain by grain, as the unfinished form sinks under the weight of the bus—that's when you outright pee yourself in between the Hail Mary’s and Lord’s Prayers.

All this for a glimpse of the source of the Nile. This is your life on the line for playing dentist in the mouth of the world's mightiest river. This is why you’re on your way to Uganda.

You can tell when you have crossed into Uganda, and not just because you walked through two huge iron gates guarded by soldiers with rifles when you left Kenya. You can tell because the earth was all of a sudden a deep, rich hue of red buttressing a jungle of incandescent green grasses. The air smelled wet, like the keeper of a lighthouse on the Great Lakes, bearing that fresh, soft scent of tropical moisture responsible for the lush foliage enveloping trees and vines. This precursor to the outskirts of Jinja left you salivating for what you would find further down the road, should you survive the rest of the coach ride. After only moments of crossing the border you can taste the earth, taste the air, taste the endless assault of emerald on your retinas.

Shortly after the border evidence of the great river is already upon you. A giant green hill subsides into a sprawling view of a vast waterbed rising up from the equatorial jungle. As is typical of the African bus system, we were left by the side of the road. But this time, the side of the road has its charms, because it was the last hill before you descend into the valley of the Nile's mouth. The river quickly became a part of my life over the next week as I set up camp in this town of 100,000 that became a bookend of conflict during civil unrest decades back. I found myself in the river a number of times, first dipping in on the edge of some waterfalls, then dropping in headfirst when I bungeed in from a platform built on the ridge of a cliff, then swimming over rapids when our raft capsized on the last leg of a whitewater run, and finally crawling out of the river soaked from head to toe and walking through a native people’s backyard on my way up to a waiting, open-air bus that wound through the northern outskirts of the city like a bear walking on a balance beam. This was my third trip into Jinja from yet another bearing, and it is here on this road coming from the north that you begin to question your definition of poverty.

That’s the thing about poverty, is that it is defined. Many a person sitting on that bus has scanned the modest villages left in the bus’s dust, seeing image after image that fits his or her definition of poverty. Straw-roofed huts, ripped white buildings with broken windows, naked kids running around, meat rotting in the open air. People carry goods on foot and clothes are darkened with sweat and dirt, well-worn and hanging on human frames as if stretched one too many times over a wide loom. If you’re not careful, this is all you see when you’re on one of these roads.

You’ll miss the signature posture of an African woman carrying fruit on her head, perfectly balanced with practiced control. You’ll miss the tempo in their movement, the slow-going, in-every-moment type sense that these people aren’t just nonchalantly walking, running, and moving, but they are feeling every moment of their lives. You’ll miss the remnants of a garden so breathtaking in itself you almost lose your need to see inside Eden. You’ll miss the way the kids’ faces light up as they chase after the bus, chase after you, in between make-believe worlds and playing in the grass.

I’m not saying it’s not a hard life. I’m saying think twice about what you think of poverty. Think past the definition, think past the gag-reflex, think past the pity to see what is actually going on there. You just may see things that redefine how you associate money and happiness, comfort and joy, quality and life. For all the poverty this city faces on a daily basis, when you start looking—seeing—you still see an immutable quality in life there.

If Uganda is a Pearl, then Jinja is its shining face. There is more to tell about Lake Victoria, Entebbe, Kampala, and the roads that connect them all, but it would be best to see them with your own eyes. When you're choosing your path to Jinja, however, I'd stay away from coaches if you can.

TIA

TIA-This is Africa.

This will not be like my normal posts.

This is Africa. Three little words that write off the horrors of a dark continent in seemingly endless turnover from one power after another. Words that men repeat with a beer and a cheers to find some peace of mind in a world spiraling downward in a whirl of violence. "TIA" is the acronym Blood Diamond coined with a South African colonel and his former soldier now involved in diamond trafficking the illustrious stones from Sierra Leone to Liberia where they could be seamlessly processed into the world market. Call me sentimental, but it is an entirely different thing to watch Blood Diamond when you are sitting in the heart of Africa. You suddenly realize that this happened here. Not some place where you set foot once upon a time. Not a distant land. Here. Where your own two feet are right now. It is an entirely different story when you're that close.

It's also an entirely different story when you watch it with native Africans. This week, Blood Diamond was the entertainment feature of our occasional movie night at the base. Having never seen it, I was initially less focused on who I would be watching it with and more focused on what I was about to see. And, on actually getting there.

By the time I walked into the movie, civil war had erupted in Freetown. I took a chair in the back, amid a crowd of Africans gathered in the back of the room and sitting on tables by the left wall. Some of their young children surreptitiously crept into the room, hugging the legs of chairs on the floor and letting out periodic whimpers. I didn’t know who was out of place—them, their kids, or me—but something felt very odd about watching it among them. It makes you wonder all these things you wouldn't think twice about if you were in your living room.

You wonder how they feel when they watch it, and how they feel when Leonardo di Caprio, a white South African, believes nothing but blood and conflict belong to Africa. You wonder how they feel about the white man's stereotype that “God left Africa long ago.” You wonder if they feel connected to Sierra Leone even though Tanzania is hundreds of miles away. And then you realize how dumb that question is, because Rwanda and Uganda are right next door to Tanzania, and Rwanda and Uganda did not leave their neighbors unscathed through their own bloodbaths in the '70s, '80s, and '90s. You wonder if it would be different to watch Hotel Rwanda by their sides, and after that, you realize you've been wondering away the movie because you're actually there. You're in the place, and you have already seen a lot.

The only hard part of my road to this place was resistance from many family and friends. Some told me I couldn't go because I was white. Some, because I was a girl. Others took a stand because of Blood Diamond and Hotel Rwanda. Their reasons went on. I'm here to say that they had no idea what they were so against, but that their reasons were not so far off.

I don't believe that the Blood Diamond stereotype is Africa. In some ways it's far better than that; in other ways, it's far worse than the most graphic motion picture you can dream. But what becomes more important to you when you're sitting there with these African parents letting their two- and three-year-old children watch this movie is how "TIA" this is to them. You wonder if they buy it, if they too believe “TIA” and go on with life perhaps believing that that same thing hangs by a few threads in their own country. You wonder because you can feel the solidarity of these people through the colors, the villages, the African spirit that engulfs every sense in your body as you step off the plane. These are a people who equally understand the struggle of a single life, feeling every drop of water hauled for hours to a dry village, every kernel of corn hand-shelled from its cob. This is Africa, too.

This sight was first given to me about three weeks ago when I realized that, although I came here to help, I stayed blind to the many deep struggles of this fascinating continent. Some months before I left I’d read of an African woman written up in some magazine talking about how her only work for the day was to get water for her family. At the time, the simplicity of her task overwhelmed me with a convicting finger—you focus too much on doing, Jory; doing too much is as meaningless as doing nothing because after awhile you nearly don’t know who you’re doing what for anymore, or what your motive is. I was touched by this woman’s interview and determined to learn from her simplicity.

Three months later I was sitting in a small house in the African bush, being served cow kidneys and chapatti by a tall Tanzanian who told me that the innermost niches of Tanzania are akin to a lost Atlantis buried deep in the bush. Tribes that once moved with the animals and the rains, but now because of white man’s ways and the concept of owning land had now settled on a dying plot of dusty land 12 hours from the nearest source of water. Every day someone’s whole life is to walk 12 hours on foot to get water for the village. Many a cavalier tourist who climbed Kilimanjaro or surfed the edges of Ngorongoro Crater would blithely tell you that that's not all of Africa. But that was the man's point. His point was that that was Africa, before colonization, and that that was what Africa became because of colonization.

The water is just one of many things that has pricked my soul in the last few weeks. The costa passed the Kilimanjaro National Airport on my fifth or sixth trip from Arusha since I’d been here. Just outside the airport there is the semblance of a village, where men carrying boxes of water and snacks lay in wait for buses and tourists passing through. The moment the costas stop they assault the buses with their wares, an odd mixture of persuasion and desperation in their voices. I’d been here nearly a month and passed this stop how many times before the words of a popular Switchfoot song came to my ears while I blocked out the sea of hands shoving maji (water) and pipi (sweets) through the windows. But as I tried to sink back into the familiar lyrics, “This is your life. Are you who you want to be? Is it everything you dreamed that it would be…,” I saw a deep contrast, like the etching from a print held up against its mirror image. Did these men ever want to sell water in the hot sun every day, feeling lucky if they made 500 shillings per bus? 500 shillings is less than 50 cents American money. I wonder how many people reject the water. At 500 shillings per bottle, a case per day adds up to less than six dollars of American currency. What these people labor to earn in a month my sister can earn in two hours as a nurse. This is Africa.

Gunfire illuminated an incandescent jungle in the chest of Sierra Leone like wayward, shapeless fireworks. Smoke curled up from burning villages where bodies lay scattered around. Red soil watered with the blood of its own people. Blood Diamond told only the end of one story of one war in Africa, and these bus rides only tell another part. But they share something in common, I think. They share the truth that this is not the African Dream. That moment on the bus, I realized that although all of us at the bus stop were in Africa, our lives were not at all the same and I was not so African as I thought. No matter how hard I listen, how closely I look, or long I spend here I will never understand this part of what it is to be African.. I could learn the language, live in the bush, walk daily for water…but I have been ruined by a far greater luxury than this world has ever been acquainted with. I have been ruined by the luxury of entitlement. I was brought up entitled to an education, to a home, to heat and warm clothes, to food and, thanks to 15,000 lakes in my state, scandalous amounts of water. I was entitled to walking down a road without fear, playing with actual toys, a driver’s license when I turned 16.

Somehow in all my entitlements, I missed the American Dream. But I think I saw my dream in Blood Diamond the moment it registered that part of film playing out before me matched the reality I was living in once I landed here. This is what I mean when I say it was different to watch it here in Africa. Here, you see a different color in the blood. You see the color of its dying reverie in the reflection on the ground. And something in that color causes you to break and to come alive simultaneously.

I broke the moment Solomon Vandy picked up his shovel and beat the rebel commander to death in the mines near Kona. So long after all the horror begins, I know, but I’ll tell you how it took that long. I lasted until then because that was the moment that ‘good’ broke in the story. Up to that point, Solomon Vandy was a man who could not even tell a small lie to a group of journalists in order to smuggle himself and his partner back into the war zone. Amid ten or so journalists who came across an overturned vehicle and dead and wounded victims scattered around the ground, Vandy was the only one who saw the child survivor in the arms of a dead woman. While 'caring' reporters attacked the mess with flashing cameras, Vandy attacked the mess to bring out a maimed child, the only survivor. In the midst of the rampant evil tearing apart his beloved country, Vandy still lived by rules of right and wrong, honor and deceit, moral and immoral. He was one of few who chose what was right, walked honestly and honorably. Vandy stands in stark contrast to the cynical white South African he is leading to a buried blood diamond in the heart of the war zone.

All through the journey, details reveal the golden heart of Soloman Vandy, who cannot understand the stone cold heart of the white man running beside him. No desire for a wife, or children, no concept of home; looking only for more money, Danny Archer is a greater mystery to Vandy than perhaps even the evil that robbed him of family, security, of peace. Vandy was no more naïve than a weathered soldier, but he was a man driven by more than diamonds, like the rebels, or hatred, like the disillusioned soldier. It was love for a growing son that carried Vandy back into the shambles of a dream, all the while telling Archer how much his son loved to learn English, how he would grow up to be a doctor and, one day, when the fighting was done, his son would live in the paradise of a beloved homeland restored to its former glory. You could say Solomon Vandy saw the world as it could be, as it should be, and he was my hero for it until uncontrolled rage led him to beat the rebel commander to death during the South African airstrike. One hit and the commander was down, blood oozing from the wide gash across his face. One hit was enough. But on and on he went, leaving the dream I saw to drown in the muddy water pooling around the commander.

In the end it is Danny Archer who surprisingly defies the ruling “TIA” for the sake of giving one man back his life, and his dream, through giving Solomon and his son the last seat on the rescue plane that was coming to take Archer to his freedom, and his fortune, somewhere far away from the guilt and fighting he was immersed in. Instead Archer dies in his Africa, just like his mother, just like his father, just like thousands who lost their dream of peace.

The film stirred no fear in my heart, though I am in a place many would fear. No, the dominant emotion was sadness—pain—that that's what we're all up against. In the face of that, who or what can come up against it? What can we do to heal from that? I came to Africa because I had a dream of working with unloved, unprivileged, unnoticed kids who had no right to life when abandoned on their own. Truth be told, this is exactly where I wanted to be, a place with those whose lives begin with abandonment because I wholly believe that their abandonment does not have to be a life sentence. And contrary to so many views about foreign aid, I saw this movement on my part as the one thing I could do to leave a resonating impact in a vast world. Love the unloved. Soften the bitter. Hold what is broken. I came knowing how small I was, but when I left, being small was still something. Next time you're in Africa, watch Blood Diamond and you will go from feeling small to microscopic in a matter of seconds.

A mirror was one thing I forgot to bring to Africa but I feel like I am standing before the looking glass now. The woman holding my gaze faces something greater than the image of her own reflection. She beholds a question, an unsolved mystery that has always been beyond the grasp of man. What does it take for us to care about others before ourselves? What do you have to do to get a man to see the heart of another life, and give his own to save it? To value it like it were his own? And protect it with every fiber and resource he has? Where do we lose that first compassion newly budding hardened hearts, and why do we replace it with compassion only for ourselves? There are some people in the world who believe that we are all worth loving, that a human life has immeasurable value and universal meaning that knits us all together. These men and women fight a great battle.

A battle that we're all in.

"I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do."
Helen Keller

Lost in Translation

“Going to the mattresses” with ancient Hebrew was harder than you think. Or perhaps you shouldn’t expect to learn an entire ancient language and answer the debate of gender roles in the church within an hour of internet research. In the end, I spent hours poring over resource after resource to try and understand the meaning of something long obscured by translation. The word ‘ezer surprisingly came from two root words that individually meant “power” and “strength.” In fact, most of the times ‘ezer occurs in the Old Testament have nothing to do with submissive women baking bread for hungry rabbis. ‘Ezer most often describes God, and in a way that hardly highlights His feminine side. R. David Freedman points out in the IX Biblical Archaelogy Review that the word ‘ezer comes from two roots in the ancient language. One meaning to rescue or save; the other, to be strong. The roots differed only by a small nuance in the pronunciation, a guttural prefix that over time merged together to give us the word that we find in the Hebrew text.

Around 1500 B.C. these two roots began to be represented as one sign, although the original meanings were retained, similar to how the English word “bank” can mean several different things though its spelling does not change in context. Of the eighty-some times different forms of ‘ezer (help, helper, helping) are found in the Old Testament, only 21 of those are nouns. For anyone less dorky than me in high school, this is the difference between saying “I’m going to the bank” (n.) and basketball advice of banking the ball off the backboard on a lay-up (v). i.e., nouns hang together.

Two of the 21 nouns are the debut of women in the creation story. The other 19 noun-sightings refer either to God or to military allies. I didn’t believe it at first, so I used an online generator to search three versions of the Bible for the word help. I’m not kidding, in the King James Version (the first English translation of the Hebrew Bible), about 99.9% of the usages of ‘ezer refer to God, someone using a sword to fight for someone, or providing serious military aid to the Israelites. The other .1% were in the Deuteronomic laws where people are talking about helping pick up each other’s asses (donkeys, not the other kind) when they fell down. There was so much talk about ‘ezers succoring cities, that I have never been more grateful for that .1% in Deuteronomy (or asses) in my life.

Some instances where ‘ezer refers to military allies are the other side of the street, too. It’s both offensive and defensive. Besides noting God’s definitive ‘ezership in Isaiah 41, another passage in I Chronicles really struck me as a little ‘ezer-happy, and not because it’s about women. It is about David’s mighty men. If you have never read about these imposing men of glory, turn your Bible there now and do some preliminary jaw exercises to get ready for all the times it is going to hit the floor. These were the men who, beginning in I Chronicles 11, are described as the greatest warriors in a time with some pretty snazzy ancient civilizations.

The greatest of these were David’s elite chiefs, who supervised not entry-level soldiers, but a whole sub-sect of elite soliders who themselves supervised warriors that made the high cut. Check this. David had eleven chiefs overseeing his army commanders, a total of 30 elite warriors, who in turn oversaw the hundreds of high-end soldiers. These 11 chiefs were from the tribe of Gad, who were lions among men. The loser of the chiefs scored a piddly 100 kills in one battle; the greatest, 1000 (I Cor 12:8b). The Gadites stood mostly in leadership position among David’s mighty men. Take a wild guess at the name of the first-in-command. Shocking…his name was Ezer.

Considering the significance of names in Biblical times and the matchless role Ezer played, the lion of lions, is a pretty lucid cultural clue. Israelite children given birth names based on their meaning, but often Biblical names also represent the place or role of a person in the context of the story they are found in, much the same as people accrue nicknames through their characteristics and adopted roles and then carry those names with them. Ezer’s place in Scripture is not only among David’s men in a time of war and conquering, it is first among the leaders of David’s greatest men. It is also striking to me that, with six other occurrences of the word ‘help’ in Chapter 12 alone, Ezer’s name is the only occurrence not translated from the Hebrew.

I have a theory that this name was not translated because Gutenberg hired a real deadbeat to play copy editor before the original KJ went to press. They didn’t go out for lattes when they got to this chapter, say to heck with it when they got back and just hit ‘print.’ Chief Ezer was a man of unparalleled power and strength in his nation, and relegating his name to “Imahelper” didn’t quite fit the bill.

Based on this theory, I believe it tells us something about the original meaning of the word ‘ezer. I believe it tells us that it really does mean power and strength. So why do we often place a subservial role around women based on the Genesis ‘ezer’s when so many other instances this word is used in the Old Testament it talks about freakin William Wallace? I wondered.

Perhaps a more important question you have at this moment is, What does this have to do with the original question? I mean, nice useless vocabulary lesson, Nagel, but how does this really illumine God’s original intention for women?

Firstly, it puts the beat back into the lyrics “I got the power.” Secondly, however, it distills the acquired connotation of “helpmeet” from the original subtext that is surrounded by implications of power, strength and serious aid being dealt. From a linguistic perspective, we can’t just dismiss the blurb that follows ‘ezer, but we also can’t dismiss the original character simply because it modifies another word. That’s perhaps the source of a lot of confusion. If k’neged modifies ’ezer, then all bets are off for linking it back to the common theme of this noun in its OT career. If ‘ezer modifies k’neged, then its root meaning uniquely signifies something.

What it may signify will be continued in another post....

The Godfather

There are about a bazillion ways to strike up profound conversations, and they all begin with one random question. One such question began one such conversation about a month ago. A light breeze ruffled the branches of the tree overhead as Aaron, an American running The World Race, sat down and asked Monica and me for our opinion on the role of women in the church.I looked down at my mkande (maize and beans) and tried to hide the mischievous gleam that lit across my face. Behind every great man there is a great woman, I thought with an irresistible twinkle escaping through my eyes. I didn’t know Aaron well enough to know if he’d be able to tell I was joking. Well, half-joking. Okay, not joking. It's true. You can argue until you're blue in the face about what women's role is, but in the time it took you to start and finish your theory, incredible women did hundreds of great things.

Monica and I looked at each other. The intensity of our conversation was about to go from 0 to 60 in 0.3 seconds. A memory flashed across my mind of a story I'd heard from a Tanzanian man not that long ago. While giving a sermon one day, he began talking about how his wife left him with his young child to go to a meeting once and he nearly had a stroke, burned down the hut, and ended up eating twigs and grass for dinner. His story prompted uproarious laughter from the congregation as every married woman in the crowd--both foreign and native--nodded her head in understanding. Apparently he wasn't the only man to be lost without his wife in his own hut. And here Aaron's question referred to a long-debated topic of the degree to which women lead, contribute, or forge ahead with or without men.

Monica was the first to jump in. As she spoke, the smirk on my face gave way to a well-known Scripture passage in Isaiah 41 called The Helper of Israel. Many a troubled believer has flipped to this chapter in search of encouragement for the wearying road. In times of great desperation we are greatly desperate for help and strength. In all of Isaiah, this is the only chapter that calls God the helper of Israel. If this Scripture seems at all disconnected to the original question, it’s not. It’s just, you have to go back to the original language of the Old Testament to make the connection. You have to go to the Hebrew. But you also have to go further back than Isaiah.

Let me bring you, my friend, to God’s first words about women.

‘elohym‘amar lo’ towb ‘adam hayah bad ‘asah ‘ezer k’neged’

‘ezer k’neged is the Genesis 2:18 translation for the creature that we have come to know as “woman” in the account of creation. Now, actually, these aren’t God’s very first words about the hott topic. His first words are in Genesis 1:26, a sort of Sparknotes version of the creation history, where God declares that He is going to make “man” in His image and give them authority over all animals, birds and fish. We know “man” does not refer to only the male species because Genesis 1:27 declares that God created male and female of “man” in His image. To all those who thought Eve was merely a creative afterthought, this tells you she was intended from the beginning. Genesis 2 retells the creation history with the focus on the creation of life, specifically the creation of man and woman. Man was formed first out of the dust of the ground and the breath of God, and somewhere in between creating Adam and presenting the animals before their lord, God tells us that creation has one last need. Enter ‘ezer k’neged, the three little words that make up the all-too-popular King James Version term “helpmeet.”

For many people who were exposed to or grew up in more traditional churches, it is no secret that the widely-known misnomer “helpmeet” is one of the reasons that the church structured gender roles the way it did during and post-reformation. Also to the credit of “helpmeet,” few people connect the dots from God to Eve when we read the English translation of Eve as the helper of man and God as the helper of Israel. And yet here we find the first use of ‘ezer busting out early in Genesis; the word that was originally translated into ‘help’ in both cases. I’m not going to pretend to be a Hebrew scholar or anything, but something tells me that I should notice that this is the first time in the Old Testament that we see the word ‘ezer, the word most English Bibles translate into ‘helper’ and the first half of King James’ equation for ‘helpmeet’.

Interestingly, scholars speculate that ‘helpmeet’ arose from Old English, not from the original language of the Old Testament. Many early translators coupled the words ‘ezer k’neged as a single term that indicated God-ordained subservience of women in ideal creation. Translating k’neged or kenegdo as meet, we arrived at the amazingly well-adopted term ‘helpmeet’ so popular for church sermons on Mother’s Day. Fond as I am of Old English, I've got to say that the word clearly carries zero connotation of "the helper of Israel," and is virtually oozing the connotation that women are little more than a Piglet doppleganger from Winnie the Pooh.

In the time it took me to research this and write this blog, women everywhere have done amazing things. I have merely come up with a few resources and tidbits in an attempt to "define" a role that, let's face it, is far bigger than definition. And even if it is define-able, which I am sure smarter, more educated people than I can support, there are certain women who will not be defined. They swing for the fence whether it's in accord with their designated role or not.

Why is this? Hard to say. Depending on the women you know, you may call it stubbornness, or arrogance, or one too many hits from the school of hard knocks. Or is it more than that?

If it's true that a good answers come from good questions, then Aaron may have been asking the wrong question. Perhaps a better question is, "What do women bring to church naturally?" And, "What do we know about what is in female nature to bring?" Given the whole creative design thing, I'm pretty sure God wouldn't take offense to taking a closer look at what He made in answer to what He intended. And that's the point we're digging out, isn't it? What was God's intention?

At this point I have to tell you, I can't answer this in entirety. I have no quips, no smirks dancing across my face, no little glimmer in my eye. So I am going to do what most people do when they are looking for good answers. I'm going to pull a Godfather (to be continued...)